"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia."

If you are a nerdfighter, which many of you reading this blog are, you'll almost certainly recognize the quote - one of John Green's more overused ones (sorry, but it's awesome!) from his novel Looking for Alaska.

I think it's very relevant to what I'm doing right now - looking back at the history of this blog.
As I think about what has changed, I also find myself visualizing what may change in the future.
My excessive commas have turned into excessive em dashes - probably a product of trying to look pretentious in social essays - and maybe this will soon develop into semicolons or parentheses or interrobangs (Seriously; wouldn't that be awkward?!) or punctuation my late-night internet surfing homeschooled brain has yet to uncover.

The point of this is that I try to imagine what I will be like in the future, but just as I didn't see the pretentious em dashes coming, I don't know what this blog, or my writing habits, or to get really philosophical, my life will be like when I go back to read my old posts.
The problem is, just like looking at the past, we can't change our futures, or even understand them correctly. I can look at an old blog post and get a sense of what I was like in 2009, but never go back. We value different things as we grow and age, and our circumstances change too. We gain knowledge and lose innocence, we gain patience but lose that spontaneity we have when we're small. We don't know what we will be like in the future, so it's rather like nostalgia to envision our future, and foolish to assume we know it all already. And maybe that's true maturity - understanding that you don't know it all, that there is so much left to learn.

When I first started this blog, I liked to write short (but comma and cheese joke laden) posts in which the focal point was a picture of some type. These also tended to be the types of posts I preferred to read.
There's nothing wrong with these, but if you've read any of my "recent" (I really don't blog much) posts, I've changed styles quite a lot.
These posts are rambling and full of asides and jokes and metaphors and weird philosophical statements, and that's okay too.

I feel like I've grown, too. I don't care so much about who reads my blog - I just write for myself and if someone reads it and enjoys it, then that's wonderful. Before I know I would worry about making a post someone wouldn't like, or would make them think I was annoying, and maybe that's just a typical 14-year-old girl thing to fuss about, but I'm still happy that I got over it.

So in light of this nostalgia, both past and present, I'm going to try and continue growing in my rambling writings by blogging more. I've updated the layout and the widgets on the side, and while I'm not committing to a particular schedule of posts, I'll make an effort not to neglect this old blog quite so much!

Thanks for coming along for the ride - it's em dash time.

Still alive...

These past couple of months have been full of things I didn't think I could really do.
Most notably, doing nearly 50 hours of diploma preparation classes in about 8 days. I am not the sort of person that has endless mental energy. Put me in a dance intensive and I last pretty well, but a lecture hall and I would have though I'd fade within a couple hours.
But I'm doing well! I have only 4.5 hours left, and I'm feeling good. Prepared, yes, accomplished, maybe, and definitely tired, but still alive!
The night I left for my first class I made a little log of how many hours I would be there because I was weepy and teenage girl-ey and terrified of the diploma and I wanted  to try and encourage myself and somehow make it look less intimidating. It didn't look much less intimidating, but damn, it felt good to cross each hour off like a battle won. Just that little thing made me feel more in control.

I think I've learned a lot from doing English and Social in general, but also the prep classes for them, and I really hope I'll learn something from the diploma too. I think I mentioned this in a previous post, but I've kind of learned more about learning than about these subjects in some ways.
I know now that excessive espresso is not a good learning aid, that stairwells are a beautiful, beautiful thing that for some reason make me giddy and foolish, and that exploring and getting lost in a random engineering building can really cheer me up.

What do you do when your brain is sabotaging you after long hours of sitting at a desk? Derp up and down stairs like me, or do you have another method?