Let me tell ya...

I've been slackin' and lackin' with the posting of these posts, but times have been sort of hard here in this household of mine. It's still good to remember good things, though, so I'm going to write about one of the best things that happened recently!

Saturday morning, I woke up early for no particular reason at all, and read in bed while my sister and mama were in the kitchen filling up the house with the comfy aroma of pancakes, when who texts me saying she's bored and doesn't have any plans, even though living in Austin pretty much means you're never bored and always have plans? Why, my Thoasie poo, of course! She proceeded by remembering that oh, never mind, she does have plans; as a matter of fact, so do I. And then she told me that she and Alexa were in town and were surprising me with a birthday lunch.
........................I'll leave you to your own devices to picture for yourself my excitement here.

We went to La Madeleine for some French goodies and caught up with one another. They bought me only the coolest watch my seeing orifices have ever laid themselves upon, and some awesome blossom stationary, and this wallety-pouch that makes it look like I know a great thing when I see it.

Having best friends like these makes it sort of silly to ever be down in the dumps for too long, because when I think of them (which is very extremely very often), I'm always reminded of how lucky I am.

So maybe, through any and all unfavorable ordeals, the best thing to do is remember all of your blessings and remember that good things are always still around.

Hope everyone's having only wonderful days!

Fantastical Friday at Fort Worth

I wish Fort Worth were Fort Fworth instead, to make that an alliterative title, but alas! such things are not up to me!

This city (also known as "Cowtown") is about 25ish minutes from where I live, and was established in the 1840s on the historic Chisholm Trail, becoming the center of the cattle drives and the ranching industry (yay for history lessons!). Today, alongside its enduring brick roads stand modern shops and boutiques and offices and museums. My fiery redheaded girlfran, Karissa, who is so much more adept at navigating the highways and navigating in general than I am, whisked me away to this old city. These are the things that we did.

The prime reason for our outing was to visit the Fort Worth Museum of History and Science. Since I'm taking the year off, I thought it'd be cool to learn as much as I can outside of school, and Karissa just also happened to want to go museum-ing. So we got there and passed a couple of hours or so learning about space,

dinosaurs,

old generals, energy sources, and other science- and history-related goodies! I plan on revisiting this place mid-October, after I've gotten tickets to the upcoming Titanic exhibit. I read they will have displayed perfume bottles found on the sunken ship with perfume still left in the vials! That fact is flippin' amazing to me!

Afterwards, Karissa and I went driving around the city, stopping at whichever places caught our eye. And let me tell ya... in Fort Worth, there's a bunch of stuff to catch your eye. There are houses that are probably over a hundred years old that still look about as beautiful as they can be, and trains that choo-choo on by, and oh goodness, don't even get me started on the churches! We stopped at a couple of clothing and furniture boutiques (in one, we were met with two of the sweetest dogs, uhh although I'm not sure how they got into the stores), and then, overcome with a desire for Dippin' Dots, decided to head to the nearby mall. The photobooth we wanted to take pictures in pretty much hustled us out of five bucks, the stupid thing didn't work. Anyways, the important thing is, we found our Dippin' Dots and I found a black leather jacket (it ain't real leather, folks!) and my feet are blistered from walking around in new shoes and oh yeah, the weather was like this: chilly, wet, dark, so the awesome weather made an awesome day with an awesome person that much greater!

Now, I'm going to either read The Fault in Our Stars, watch Take Shelter, make and eat a turkey/pepper jack cheese sandwich, or get myself a bowl of chocolate ice cream. Or I might do a crazy combo. With me, who knows what's next! (hahaha...ha.... because I'm sooooo wild and unpredictable)

19 Going On 90

So guess who aged an entire year today, this 12th of September?
Here are a few hints: the person in question is a girl; her name consists of three letters; her name is a palindrome; her name rhymes with papaya. Okay, okay, enough guessing - it's me! I turned 19 today! And now I'm going to tell you precisely how I lived it up on this birthday of mine.

At the stroke of midnight, my very own Alexa and Thoa called to wish me a happy birthday and things of that sort, which made me awwww all over, because though it stinks them being so far away now, hearing their voices helps bridge the gap a little bit. I love them tons. I talked to them and then went to bed (there's a big woop!) and then woke up this morning and opened the front door to find none other than Leonardo DiCaprio, standing outside with a bouquet of roses for me - just kidding. I didn't see my good friend Leo today - I saw two people even better. I'll refer to them from here on out as the Chocolate Mousses, because I don't want any of you obsessed fans of mine going coocoo and stalking the poor gals if I name them (just kidding... again).

The Chocolate Mousses are only the greatest friends you could ever think up, in twin form. They know me so well that they got me my favorite things for lunch - a chicken strip sandwich from Sonic and, better yet, a root beer float. Those closest to me know that root beer floats, in my humble opinion, are like little army men of pure bliss for one's taste buds. After we finished grubbing on those goodies, we cozied up in their game room upstairs, in which sits only the most comfortable sofa known to mankind, and watched Inglorious Basterds. After this commenced hours of talking, laughing, eating their mama's bona fide Arabic dinner, and more talking and laughing. They gave me two of the best gifts today: the gift of joy, and... the gift of JOHNNY DEPP.

Perhaps he's only in poster form, but this is still good enough for me. You gotta start somewhere, right? For all I know, he might have a poster of me hanging up in his room.

All jokes aside, I've really had quite a wonderful day. I got to hang out with my two girls, and got to hear from all of my favorite people and then some, and got to eat red velvet cake with my family (who sang great off-key songs to me in different languages), and got the opportunity to decide that I'm always going to choose to be happy because having amazing things in my life is worth being happy about all of the time.

I'm excited in so many ways to see what 19 has in store for me!  :)

My MOOOO-nday

(the title is meant to be read as Monday, but with a long moooooo at the beginning, like a cow's mooing!)

I woke up quite reluctantly this morning, as my night had been filled with fitful sleeping. I was exhausted - I think I'd been up on-and-off since about 4 AM, which ain't good news when you have to work from 10:00 AM til 4:00 PM! Fortunately, I didn't have to wait too long after I got home for things to take a turn for the better.

First, I'll tell you about my booboo Emily. I've known this gal since I was 8 years old, and until two months ago, we lived in the same neighborhood. Naturally, we saw a lot of each other over the course of ten years. She's the wildest person I know (and will ever know), so it took me by surprise when I found out that she was moving with her family to the peaceful and quaint countryside about half an hour away from where I live (and where she used to live). They've got about four-ish acres of land, on which sits a cute country house, and neighbors that have ACTUAL FARM ANIMALS on their own lot.

Well... guess who got to head out to the aforementioned countryside for the first time and see ACTUAL FARM ANIMALS and get moo'd at by a cow?!?!?!? (oh yeah, this free-roaming cow was bred, along with its other cow buddies, to be aggressive fighters - didn't find this out til later)

ME. THAT'S WHO.

The place was so quiet, literally all you could hear was the chirping of crickets or the soft conversations the animals were having amongst themselves. When I stepped outside, I saw a sky sprinkled and dappled with stars, which I don't get to see much living in a city. The air smelled like clean and like fresh and like a cause for celebration, according to my happy lungs.

Emily gave me a tour of their new house, and her mom gave me a tour of her china cabinet (and collection of little antique ceramic dogs), and her dad gave me a tour of the big shed in their backyard and talked about how he and his wife planned to paint together and work on their Harley Davidsons together in this large new space.
The whole experience felt like a big hug. :)
The whole bunch of them are on my list of Favorite Families Ever.

When Emily was driving me back home, we tried to take one of their neighbors' farm cats along with us in the car, but Walter jumped out of the open window before we even left the driveway. She showed me the little town around their new place, and introduced me to some of her new friends. As we drove back on the highway, we sang along to songs like Blue and Yellow and Fidelity and Your Heart is an Empty Room.

I think today was a wonderful day!

(and this is us getting our grub on at Freebirds)

Some kind of wonderful

It's been hotter than Brad Pitt's arm pits here in the grand state of Texas, but today, something is different - the highs are in the high 80s, the lows in the high 60s. For those of you that have never visited the Lone Star State, what we're used to is fabulous heatstroke weather, where temperatures reach the 100s even in the shade. Naturally, you can imagine my overwhelming joy at going outside and feeling this difference in the air (unfortunately, this change won't be long-lasting, I've been told - it's going to get hot again later this week). Now imagine my overwhelming disappointment when I remember that I won't be spending this wonderful day outdoors. Nope, I'll be spending it at work. :(

I did go outside earlier this morning, but now I'm enjoying the breeze and sunlight by opening the window beside my bed and bloggin' it up while my sister sits on her own bed blasting Britney Spears's Toxic. A day in the life of Aya.
Later, I'll probably read some more of Dracula. I don't know if it's because I fell asleep reading the thing last night, but I had quite the night of dreams! One after another, my mind was putting on these spectacular shows for me, free of charge. I recall four different dreams, at the least! I awoke once in the middle of the night breathing very hard and very fast because of a frightening one, in which I was running through some woods, evading capture from some frightening person that I could not see.

So now Toxic is over, and my sister is instead playing the Great Lake Swimmers' Your Rocky Spine, which always gets me feeling melancholic and nostalgic all over.

Anywhooooo, my birthday's in less than a week, and I figured it'd be sort of nice if I had something new to dress up for fun in. However, in all my scouring of the intergalactic interweb, I can't find a single dress I want to doll up in! I suppose I'll just have to delve deeper.

I'll leave you all with this new Stars song I've been jamming out to recently. They're coming to Dallas in October, and I really want to go see them!

Discussion of a disturbing topic

Let me preface this post by clarifying that I am no longer so straight up creepy as I apparently was as a littler girl.

Earlier today, my older sister was looking through papers she found under her bed (again - the unders of our beds hold fascinating treasures!) and came upon the ancient documents that I will be displaying here. Okay, maybe they're not old enough to be called "ancient" or official enough to be called "documents," but before explaining precisely what they are, I will warn that we will be delving head-first into the darkest, most disturbing period of my history - my Obsessed With Fairies phase that manifested itself into me and my sister's creation of an alternate fairy universe called Haradum.

The first I recall of this obsession is the purchasing of a book about good fairies and bad fairies, written by a man who was probably as deranged as we were. The two of us pored over its pages for hours, and I became truly convinced that whenever I "lost" something, it was actually because a mischievous fairy wanted to play a game and hid the something from me. We got so into it that we created Haradum and spent weeks putting together rules and customs and traditions and spells and making up words and even a fictional alphabet that, I regret to admit, I actually became quite adept at writing with.

Messy sheets of paper were transcribed into a little black spiral notebook with black sheets, in which we wrote with colored jel pens. I remember the unmatched, unparalleled excitement of adding new ideas into this book. I got really into it (oh yeah, I was around 6ish to 9ish years old at the time, my sister 4 years older). This phase lasted a good few months, and eventually these pages were left to gather dust, figuratively speaking. Until now.

Without further ado, I introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen, a glimpse into the mind of the troubled and obsessed. You have been warned about its frightening, cultish nature.

Short history of Haradum (and a list of fairies, ranked by their importance):

 
Rules and punishments:

A spell to cast away evil spirits (check out the different styles of exclamation points I use for emphasis):

I don't know what you think of this confession, but whatever's on your mind, I apologize 'cause I know it ain't good.

Blistful

I apologize for the awful attempt at a blissful-with-the-word-List-in-the-middle pun. But anyways, here is what I've been up to recently, put into list form for your convenience:

• making lists (this has gotten infinitely funner)
• starting and finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray in a day
• watching the movie adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray the same night I finished the book and, upon shutting down my laptop, realizing that in the darkness of the living room I was in, I was the only one still up at 3 AM, and then continuing, with disturbing imagery in my head from the ending of the book and movie, by running to my room faster than usual (although I won't admit I was afraid.........) (I was SCARED, Y'ALL)
• going to work and checking myself in the mirror at a red light to find out something ghastly... the Tang I drank before I left had given me a faint orange mustache! 
• risking my life as I know it and chasing down a mosquito that was plaguing the inhabitants of My Room (me and my sister) - I AIN'T GETTIN' NO WEST NILE, Y'ALL
• dreaming a dream that had the most beautiful melody in it, briefly waking up and humming it to myself so I wouldn't forget it when I woke up in the morning
• waking up this morning and completely forgetting how the melody went... :(

Throughout all that, what's been most prevalent is my happiness and joy at the long-awaited arrival of September. For those of you that don't know this important fact, here is a brief history lesson: on the second Sunday of the ninth month of the year, falling on the 12th in the year 1993, was born a most magical creature... the Aya.
Besides my birthday being only a week and a half away (it's going to be weird being on the other side of 18 this year!), I'm excited for September because it means cooler temperatures; I live my life by the idea that Sweater Weather is Better Weather. Yay! I won't turn into a baked potato when I walk outside anymore!
It all makes me want to plan picnics under orange-and-red-and-brown trees and take trips to the museum and belt out Regina Spektor songs at the top of hills. I really do get tingly and electric-feely just thinking about it!

Toosdee

"I arose in the morning to the sweet sound of my alarm clock" is how no good novel, story, or other piece of literature has ever started. But waking up to precisely that (minus the sweet sound) was what I did today, to get an early start on my Toosdee (Tuesday, for those who need a translation).

The most fulfilling accomplishment was my attack on my room, and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way - it was thoroughly gratifying. I kid thee not, I ended up recycling 13 and a half pounds of paper from under my bed! Yes, I weighed it all. What a tremendous help I've done the environment! Trees, it's the least I can do for the oxygen you provide me with!

The other great thing that happened was that I became a firm believer in a divine truth - the unders of our beds are homes to the most fantastic treasures. I uncovered a box of my old writing and another box of my collection of Founds (drawings, pictures, written jewels, etc. I sometimes find laying around in public places and then keep - I should display them here one day!).

I also unearthed a folder that spilled forth torn envelopes and folded sheets of paper and other paper-goody things people have given me. In this folder was every letter that anyone's ever sent me, every card I've ever been given (well, since I can remember), every note that's ever been passed to me in class (well, since junior high). This got the wheels in my noggin a-turning, and now I really want to put together a Nostalgia Box! Project for tomorrow or Thursday, I think!

What I have in store for tonight, however, is sip-sip-sippin' on the most delectable thing my taste buds have ever introduced themselves to and re-watching one of my favorite movies, Big Fish. It's strange - throughout the day, I have monumental and life-changing thoughts, then when I sit down here to write them, they just up and run away from me!

Anyways, time to move on now to bigger and better things... come to mama, Ewan McGregor!

Adieu for the time being!

Hey! Where did my days go?

These past blah-blah-however-many-days have consisted of me waking up, me eating breakfast, me showering, me taking half an hour's nap, me eating some sort of quick sandwich, and then me going to work and getting home late in the evening and not even ingesting a proper dinner and having no time at all for the stuff people usually wanna do for fun. I get so delirious and crazy tired that I even begin thinking it's okay to write run-on sentences! (who else thinks that run-on sentence was a big pile of nasty goo?)
So anyways, let me introduce some order and make a list of things I need to squeeze in and get done soon:

• mail Vova's letter to Russia
• make banana nut bread
• get my passport stuff done
• schedule an (overdue) appointment with my dentist and optometrist (all in favor of my eyes not getting worse, say aye!)
• compile the greatest playlists ever made

In the meantime, what I have to offer me comfort is this new artist I chanced upon a few days ago. His name is Oskar Schuster, and his music is like sunburst!

Oh yeah, doing my small part to help fund his project is another thing I need to put on my to-do list!

Tuesday is my free day, and you can bet your sweet, sweet bippy I'll make the most of this freedom!

The rest of you's... continue to have wonderful days, until I see you next. :)

“Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”

-Alphonse de Lamartine

No other statement could so specifically capture my recent emotions. Tomorrow marks the day when two of the most beautiful, intelligent, inspirational, and, in other words, perfect people I have ever met pack up their bags and leave for university. That puts four hours and 200 miles between us.
That's what I'm finding stinks the most about this gap year I've got in my hands; all the people I've gone to school with and befriended and just gushed, gushed, gushed over are leaving to so many different places, while I stay here and look on. It feels an awful lot like those scenes in movies where a character's standing still and everything else around them is this fast, ceaseless motion of blurs. And we ain't even touched on how much I'll be missing these people!
I've cried my eyes all puffy and my nose all red (and runny), and boy, oh boy! will my heart continue to pine for those I've fallen for! However, it is selfish to want to keep your great friends in a strong grip when you know they're practically bursting with potential. But even knowing that, the situation sucks, and the only way it could suck more is if the situation were a vacuum cleaner or a black hole. See? It's even causing me to make bad jokes!

In other news of the day, I've been reading Wuthering Heights and just now I realized that I haven't had any dinner yet. I sound like Debby Downer's cousin, Bummed-Out Betty, but I promise I won't be in this rut forever, you guys and gals!

As a departing note, I wonder if quilting is a hobby an amateur can take up. I really want to make a quilt this year, but I've never picked up a needle and thread in my life, save for fixing buttons back onto jackets and things like that. Oh gosh... I'm already turning into a grandma in a rocking chair!

An Introduction

My first post - and hopefully, the first of many! What better way to start things off with than an introduction of yours truly and why she's undertaking the chronicling of her (perhaps boring and not very adventurous) adventures?

As it stands today, on the 23rd of August, I am 18 years old. Oh yeah, my name is sort of important - it's Aya, as in Aya Papaya. I reside in Texas with my family and a Holland lop rabbit, Mochi. I really want a Russian blue cat and name him/her after a great historical figure, but until then, I guess the fur ball bun-bun will have to do. I tend to like pretty things, and I undergo multiple identity crises within the span of a day.
Here's a crappy webcam-quality visual of the girl on the other side of your screen, for all you visual folks:

"Hey Aya, why start your blog now?" you inquire very curiously. Well, thanks for asking, Inquisitive Ingrid/Ignacio!
Due to a series of neither fortunate nor unfortunate events, I ended up taking a year off from school. Today would be my first day of university if I were attending. Since I'm not going, it marks the beginning of the 365 days I'll have to experience the heck out of. Given my history, I'll probably end up turning into a grandma and taking up knitting projects in a rocking chair, but I'm hoping things will be more exciting.

The original intent of this blog is to chronicle what I make of this year and how I grow as a person. I'm thinkin' I'll be posting music I find, movies that really get me, books that make me go "hoopla!", and bloggin' about the things I do. I feel (mostly) optimistic about it all, so I'm excited to see where the change of the seasons will take me. I look forward to making this a year found, instead of a year lost!

It'll be cool if you wanna hop in my wagon and hitch along for the ride, but if you have funner things to do, then whatever, you can go do them instead! But um, please consider inviting me.