august overwhelms

as the summer wraps up, i have no time but also too much, and i feel like I'm drowning in everything i have dedicated myself to. i will have a full day with no plans, and knowing all the things i could (and have to) do, my mind starts whirring like a dell laptop downloading minecraft and my head blows up and then i do none of my things. not only do i need to do a 1500-word research paper draft, a 650-word personal essay draft, my greek summer homework, and edit a video for my internship,,, but i also have tried so many new things this summer and i want to do all of them all the time too! 

i made this post specifically to talk about all the media i have been meaning to absorb lately because I can't really bring myself to do it for some reason. i think I am just like,,, tired and overwhelmed, and all i can do is mindlessly watch Gossip Girl instead of doing all the things i want. today (aug 18) was especially hard because i awoke to a pounding and unsuspecting headache that distracted me from everything productive I could've done. I mostly just prepared food that didn't require an oven, not because i like cheffing it up but because I like chopping vegetables. the sound of a knife hitting the cutting board feeds me enough. anyways on to the point of this post. with pictures from pinterest so its not just a wall of text.

however as i began to write my lists of media, they sounded more like this:

"Movies:

the only movies I have watched this summer were on the 14 hour flights to and from japan. last summer i would watch like 8 movies a week (i find myself comparing this summer to last summer). some of the movies I want to watch most are..."

notice how idgaf about the movies and more about myself and my own problems! i think part of the problem here is that i am letting my summers lie back to back when they are entirely actually separate entities with their own thoughts and feelings. i think about how last summer i hung out with my best friend at least 3 times a week and this summer have seen that girl twice. i think about how i had enough pictures to fill gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, and this summer i can keep them all in a singular google drive folder. and as the weeks in august dwindle i wonder about how i have used summer this time around. 

ultimately, i am okay with this summer. this year i realized how perfectly placed my birthday is-- right in the middle of summer, the cranny between july and august, allowing me to live half of my summer as a sixteen year old and the other half as a seventeen year old. these halves fell very differently, and as I live through the second half I can't remember what it felt like to be in the first. and although I said i am overwhelmed, i mostly feel at peace. i feel like i am running to myself, and not from myself. i feel this intricately crafted solitude to be helpful, i feel myself being colored in. more on that later. but anyways, being submerged is mostly a good thing. I believe the worst thing that can happen is to be bored. and there are worst things to be overwhelmed with, way worse than writing essays and wanting to read too many books. even as I type this out I think: why didn't I just do that today?

maybe tomorrow. I say that all the time. and I am stuck in this perpetual motion of I have no time (2 weeks) and so much time (2 weeks). not to mention that I have the rest of my life to play with all the hobbies I've picked up, even if the next few months are going to be busy. i might just be typing all of this stuff up because I have not been on the grind the past couple days and I am feeling all crunched up. maybe if i write my schedule on a website I will follow it... here are my plans for tomorrow:

wake up at 9am

read on the subway

volunteer at the food pantry from 1030 to 2

eat lunch in the area

go home 

now we have a little choose-your-own-adventure because these things do not have an order to them

1. write the introduction to my research paper

2. edit the interview footage i took

3. send my portfolio to the organization I'm interviewing for

then finish off the night with a movie, or gossip girl, or i could finally finish one of those WIP songs. maybe even dump my brains out here again. i have more to say about all that media i was gonna talk about. 

so i end this long typing session with this: i love Gravity Falls. i really want to rewatch it in its entirety because of all the book of bill stuff and new lore dropping. that show is summer in a bottle, it reminds me of being thirteen and alone. those characters are like distant cousins and i want the family reunion. i always come back to you, escapism. but I guess that's the point. there's always something to run from.