Tag: Boston

Wicked Pissah, or Unoriginal Title that’s Secretly Actually Clever to Me, I Swear

I’m in Boston! I’m busy! I’m wearing scarves!

Things are very exciting, but I’m also very occupied with the everything of it all that has been the past few months, and it’s eating up a lot of time. I’m getting settled and caught up enough to start getting some extracurriculars taken care of. However, one of those is National Novel Writing Month (in which I’m participating for the first time this year but am definitely not hitting the intended word count–goal of 20,000, woooo!), and so most/all of the time I’m assigning to “writing” has been going to that.

Once again, I keep starting to write something for here, then get frustrated with not focusing and so I don’t end up posting anything at all. I would really like to start updating this more regularly, though, so I’m just going to post this so there’s something for me to keep building on.

Here look, I gave myself a challenge and did it!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Checking out all of these places was pretty fun, despite losing my gloves and parts of it turning into a bittersweet tour of places I went to first with people who don’t talk to me anymore. It’s not a particularly extensive list of sites, but as a relatively geographically-challenged individual, I feel slightly better about my knowledge of where things are in the city. I also felt pretty good about all the walking, because did I mention I pretty much walked to all of of these places? I did, I walked to basically all of them from downtown.

I’ll start writing more focused posts soon, I promise! However, my sister just asked me to help keep her on task, which reminds me that I am also not on task. Until next time, here are the things I’ve checked off my bucket list since my last post:

  • Live in Boston
  • Learn what my vocal range/type/whatever is for singing
  • Chug a Frappucino

And here’s what I’ve added:

  • Jump a subway turnstile in NYC
  • Participate in NaNoWriMo >>> Participate in NaNoWriMo correctly

What the Bucket

Oh my ugh, this is a busy summer.

I received one challenge, from my grandmother, for my trip home with my sister:

I challenge you to go to the Casa Bonita restaurant in Denver on your return trip. See if it looks at all familiar!

The restaurant of Eric Cartman acclaim has been a semi-regular point of interest for my family on trips out west over the past four decades, and I hadn’t been there since I was about eleven. I think I found all the parts of the restaurant that I do remember, but there was a lot that apparently didn’t stick the first time for me. We were pretty underwhelmed with the food (fortunately a friend warned me that it’s “the worst food ever,” so I was prepared), but otherwise I could see it being pretty fun if you were there with kids. The sopaipillas did not disappoint, and no matter what, it would have been worth it for the joy that these two Google reviews bring me:

Screenshots copy
I  know it’s longish, but seriously, I encourage you to read this surreal nonsense

Holy crap. Such spectacular melodrama.

Anyway, I have about three thousand things on my to-do list this summer before I move to Boston. Even though “get rid of things” is patently on the list, I’ll be honest, I did not pick up the “get rid of things” challenge when I got home like I was supposed to-do, as per my promise in my last post.

What I did do is find the bucket list I organized and then lost a few months ago–I’ve been working on a lot of lists lately. I wanna post some of that one because I can get a little negative here sometimes, I like having hopes and dreams, and at least it’s content–I’ve even finito-ed some of the items 🙂 Maybe making it public will give me more accountability or something, too:

  • Learn to juggle
  • Get really good at building fires
  • Be a barista
  • Be a waitress
  • Hug a tiger >>> Hug an adult tiger
  • Live in Boston *pen hovers above item*
  • Learn what my vocal range/type/whatever is for singing
  • Get married
  • Have kids
  • Do a 5k
  • Write a short story >>> Finish a short story
  • Touch a London pigeon with my foot
  • Visit all 50 states
  • Learn to drive stick
  • Learn to drive a motorcycle
  • Get professional headshots
  • Pinup photoshoot
  • Kiss the Blarney Stone
  • See Stonehenge in the early morning
  • Learn a valuable zombie survival skill
  • Start a retirement fund
  • March in a televised parade
  • Own a “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” t-shirt (just learned that this was apparently a thing with Ross on Friends when I was looking up a picture to link to here; he was definitely not the inspiration for this item)
  • Drive from the right side of a car
  • Ride as a front-seat passenger on the left side of a car
  • See Breaking Benjamin in concert
  • Learn all the words to “One Week” and “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
  • Eat poutine
  • Eat haggis
  • Make my own perfume
  • Blow glass
  • Go down and then back up the really scary huge dune they say not to go down right off of Lake Michigan at the Sleeping Bear Dune park
  • Be able to do the splits
  • Be able to hold a handstand
  • Bake a rhubarb custard pie
  • Bake perfect cookies
  • Bake rum cake with pie cherries
  • Go to a wine tasting
  • Drive someone else’s car because they got too drunk
  • Get stitches >>> Get stitches from an interesting injury
  • Have a pleasant reading/speaking voice
  • Do a backbend from a handstand
  • Make a quilt
  • Knit a blanket
  • Learn how to use a gun
  • Get waxed
  • Be able to identify specific penalties in hockey
  • Have a work husband
  • Meet a Pittsburgh Penguin
  • Read Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  • Read The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
  • Go to a casino
  • Make sourdough bread like my mom’s
  • Bake with yeast successfully >>> Bake with yeast more successfully
  • Smash a light bulb
  • Weave a basket
  • Organize my license plate pictures
  • Skinny dip >>> Skinny dip in a river
  • Use a claw foot tub
  • Chug a Frappucino
  • See Mt. Fuji
  • Be in a movie or TV show
  • Wear fake eyelashes >>> Wear fake eyelashes sometime that isn’t Halloween
  • Take my youngest sister to see Chicago on Broadway

That’s not all of it, but I’ve literally filled out four notebook pages so far, I know there’s stuff I keep forgetting to add to it, and I suspect these goals are more interesting to me than to you 😛 I’ve got a to-do list to work on anyway, so I better go cross “New blog post” off of it.

IMAG5666_1
I have some bucket list work to do, too 😉

Leave me comments about your bucket list!

Divergence

I’ve tried to write an update post for my challenges and Non Finito Spaghetti several times in the past six months. Instead of finishing even one terrible draft, I’ve written two non-NFS posts, created a new personal blog, and worked on basically anything else. My focus is as reliable as ever.

I’m not upset that I didn’t prioritize this more because I’ve actually been fairly busy.

Perhaps my most notable development is getting into grad school 😀 I will be at Emerson College in Boston, so I can actually check something off of my goals from my Slight Edge challenge. I’m excited, and trying not to get too anxious about money.

I’m a published professional writer as an intern for the Outer Banks Voice, which sort of meets the requirements for my employment goals with the Slight Edge in a roundabout, watered-down way.

I’ve done some editing and copyediting, mainly for Dear Uber Rider and Lizzie McGuire Reviewed, which are both excellent and hilarious projects that I highly recommend reading. The time I’ve spent on these has been a refreshing reminder and confirmation of how much I seriously love this kind of work. I’m eager to do more.

The challenge I was working on before depression really started pushing me the wrong way was to get rid of something every day for 30 days (also, wow, if that post’s title doesn’t reflect my mental status at the time). My mom just moved out and we have gotten rid of a LOT of stuff, so if I wanted to be cheap I could call that challenge “done.” However, I am not cheap, and I still have puh-lenty of crap to lose despite the progress we’ve made. Therefore, I’d like to start this challenge over. I have some traveling coming up soon, though, so I’m going to do that after I’m back home. My sister challenged me to read Elizabeth C. Bunce’s A Curse Dark as Gold by the end of May; I’ll do that in the meantime.

I still have lots of challenges left to do from last year, and I know it’s been a year since I’ve really worked on any, but I would tooootally be cool with people submitting more here, because I love reading the ideas you guys have for this.

I moved some stuff I’d originally posted here over to that new blog I mentioned, Jerrika, Wallflower. I posted them on NFS because I didn’t have anywhere else for them and I honestly didn’t think I would do more of that kind of writing right now–I figured one or two pieces unrelated to the project wouldn’t detract too much from it. After the third piece in a row that had absolutely nothing to do with NFS, I decided it was time for their own venue.

Truthfully, I frequently struggle with not knowing what the real “point” of Non Finito Spaghetti is. The challenges give me a superficial purpose about which to write for it, but I haven’t found what gets me as excited about NFS as I was about my own leg hair yet. I’m sure this is why it has taken me six months to write this post, which I intended to be about as simple as “I can brush my teeth with my left hand now, and I also read a book.” I want to care about this blog, so badly, but I often don’t.

Because of this indifference, I am relieved by the fact that having unrelated content here annoyed me. If I see that some things don’t belong here, that means that something definitely does belong here–right? I’m not sure it’s sound logic, but it feels like a step in the right direction of figuring out what the hell I want to do here.