Living Life in the Fast Lane

Bluemem#7-Living on the Internet?

The college application process. It’s not a memory that I particularly enjoy looking back on. I applied to 29, yes 29 schools. I think its safe to say that my senior year in high school was one of if not the most stressful year of my life. The only good thing about the whole process was going home to acceptance letters everyday. So why am I choosing to write about college? Well I watched the Social Network for the second time in my english class a few weeks ago and the setting of that movie made me reminisce on my first year in college. 

            During my first year in college I remember how excited and I was to finally be on my own and way from my overprotective family. I also remember how addicted I was to sharing everything that was happening in my life on the internet more specifically Facebook. Whenever I was in class, on my way to work, on my way to a friends dorm or writing an essay, I always had to take 1 to two minutes of my time to document what I was going to do on Facebook. It did not matter what the situation was, if I had a lot of work to do or if I was falling behind on homework in classes, I always felt the need to tell all my “friends” on Facebook what was going on instead of just sitting down and getting my work done.   

During the movie the Social Network the character Sean Parker made the comment that “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet.” After reading this comment and looking back on  my freshman year I realized how true this statement really is. It seems to me that Facebook overtook my life during my freshman year and I really did live on the internet. If someone wanted to reach me or ask me question all they needed to do was sign onto to Facebook and nine times out of ten I would be on ready to talk. It was also the same situation for a lot of my other friends. I could easily walk over to their dorms to talk about how stressed I am or discuss a confusing homework assignment, but we would always just talk over the internet instead. If I wanted an update on someone’s life, instead of just calling them, I would just go on their Facebook page. Yeah Facebook pretty much over took my life freshman year, but thankfully I learned to control my addiction by sophomore year (or at least I think I do).  

The Surreal Life

Bluemem#6-The Blurred line between what is real and what is unreal

So since it is close to Christmas time, I thought that I would reminisce on my experiences with Santa Clause.  Well, I never really had enough time to believe in Santa Clause(my sisters let me know early on in my childhood that Santa was fake. I mean talk about completely ruining a little girls reality. I remember that day like it was yesterday. It was Christmas eve in the year 1999. I was seven years old and even though I didn’t have a fire place, I just assumed that Santa came into my house through the kitchen window(the kitchen window was in the back of my house). I kept on bothering my older sisters and told them that I was going to get a lot of gifts and that they would receive coal because they had been mischievous a lot for that year. Now since I am the youngest in my immediate family, I always felt obligated to provoke and annoy my sisters all day every day (smiling devilishly). Well that day, my sisters had enough of me and decided to let me in on a little secret. They told me SANTA WAS NOT REAL! 

When my sisters first said this to me, I didn’t believe them at first. I figured that that they were just trying to be mean, but then it got worse. They told me that Santa died a long time ago and that my mother was the one that always bought my gifts, wrapped them up, and placed them under the tree every Christmas eve. Santa was dead? My mom was the one that wrapped my gifts? What about the sleigh, the reindeer? I mean christmas songs didn’t just fall out of the sky, who could really make all of this Santa stuff up. I continued to tell my sister that she was wrong and that she was just mad because she was getting coal for Christmas, but then she took in my mothers room and we snuck into the closet where they couldn’t see us. As my mother and aunt removed toys, gift wrap, and boxes out of several bags, my heart dropped. Maybe my sister was right and Santa was in fact dead. I couldn’t or just plain and simply did not want to believe it. Then a thought ran across my mind. What if my mother was secretly one of Santa’s helpers and Santa just dropped off the gifts to my mom because he did not have a chimney to climb down to my apartment. After me and my sister snuck back out of the room and into the hallway, I told her my thoughts. I guess she had had enough of me for the day because she rolled her eyes walk away and screamed one last time “Santa is not real” before she sat in front of the television. But who cares what she thought, at that point in my life, Santa was Real! 

  The fine line between real and surreal is a topic that my english class covered several times during class meetings. During one of our class meetings, we watched the movie The Matrix and in that movie the character Morpheus states that “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” I believe that real however extends far beyond what someone can feel, smell, taste and see though. Reality can’t be limited to the five senses because imagination is what creates the next level of reality. Just think about planes, at some point in the past nobody ever though that it would possible to create a way in which people can travel across vast distances in a relatively short amount of time through some flying device. That was something that was imagined, created on paper, and then became a reality years later. Reality is simply all in the head. 

Empty Halls

BlueMem #5 That overwhelming feeling of disappointment when the light at the end of the tunnel is only a room full of fire

               Okay, so one of the most anticipated occurrences in my life would have to be my transition from junior high into high school. My older sister was three years older me and  was going to be a senior in her high school while I was just entering. Her experience in high school was straight out of a movie. She had great grades, was on the cheerleading team, practically knew the whole school, and had “the life of the party” kind of personality. She wanted me to go to her high school, but I decided not to; I didn’t want to be in her shadow. In New York City, most junior high students have to go though an application process to get into the high school of their choice. We get a huge textbook of all the high schools in the city and in this book is a detailed description of the school what it has to offer as far as clubs and extracurricular activities and where it is located. So....Long story short, I didn’t get into my first choice high school and had to settle on my second choice. I was not familiar at all with what was going to be my new high school, but I was still excited. 

               Before I ever seen what would be my new school, I had already planned out how life was going to be for me in my high school. Like my sister, I was going to be on the cheerleading team, have great grades, be a part of as many clubs as possible, and have lots of friends. Like the social network Second Life (a virtual world that mimics living in the physical world), I had created  a hypothetical life (not in a virtual world but in my head) on how the next fours years of my life would be and it looked promising. 

               When I walked into my high school for the first time my expectations were not met, not in the slightest bit. My fantasy of a high school turned out to be one floor inside the building of another school, there were no lockers and whenever I went from one class to the next the hallways were extremely crowded. Over the next four years after I began to  make new friends and become more involved in extracurricular activities, high school got a little better but not that much. I had such high expectations for my life in high school and when they were not met all I wanted to do was hurry up and graduate. My school did not have that many clubs to join, nor did it have any sports team. I got the good grades that I wanted, but everything else I anticipated turned out to be such a disappointment.