Monday, February 28, 2011

I'm an adult?


           “I’m an adult?” I said to my father as he hands the keys to the car. “Yes, yes you are now” He said with a sad grin on his face. It’s summer time in Myrtle Beach and I’m about to go out for the night. As a graduation present to My cousin Kaitlyn and I, my dad and my uncle rented us this huge 6 bedroom beach house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for us and our friends. This was the first time I realized that I had become an adult.
We arrived at the beach house late in the afternoon that first day. My cousin and uncle had already arrived. It was just me and my cousin there at that point, our friends weren’t due to arrive until the next day. We got out of the car and I could instantly feel beads of sweat dripping down the back of my neck. It was a hot, steamy day with the temperature around 95 degrees, as was the norm around this time of year in the south. We exchanged our greetings and then Kaitlyn and I unloaded the car.
Afterwards we decide to take a walk down the beach to watch the sunset; the sun was so low in the sky, surrounded light wispy clouds. The sky was tinted with shades of orange and pink. After we got back to the house we ordered pizza and then decided to go out for the night. We told our fathers, and they were a bit hesitant at first but then they decided it was okay. We got ready and then as we were leaving I asked my dad for the keys to the car. He said “Son, you’re 18 years old now and I’m trusting you to be responsible and to act like an adult.”  
It was such a simple, little conversation but that’s when it hit me; I’m not a little kid anymore and im not in high school anymore either. It had only been a week since graduation, so I really hadn’t had time to process it yet between all of the graduation parties and getting ready for this vacation. It felt like such a huge rush of energy and excitement, as if I had just received the best news of my life. At the same time though, It felt like I had just lost a piece of myself and who I thought I was. I was mourning the loss of my childhood. I just stood there stunned for a moment, until Kaitlyn comes up to me and says “Come on, let’s go!” So we got in the car, and on the ride there I was thinking, and wondering why Kaitlyn hadn’t come to a realization like I had. Then I realized that she had figured it out long before I had.
                She had been living on her own since she had just turned 17. A few years ago my uncle got a job in city that was almost 3 hours away so he got himself an apartment out there to stay during the week, leaving my aunt and cousin back at home. Then on New Year’s Day 2009 my aunt passed away suddenly. After this my cousin had to live on her own in that house, until my uncle sold it, and then she got her own apartment. My grandmother went and stayed with her for 6 months right after it happened but after that she was on her own.
                The rest of the vacation was awesome. I had never been able to experience freedom like that before. We partied all night at the clubs in the city and recovered during the days by lying on the beach just to do it all again the next night. It really made me become more grown up and more responsible than I had been before. It was a really good experience about being on my own before heading off to college.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

#1 Party School

                This week I listened to and episode of This American Life called #1 Party School. It talked about the number one party school in the country ranked by the Princeton Review, Penn State. There were many stories of party experiences by locals, law enforcement, and students. This made me start to think about my own school, Plymouth State University. This year we were ranked number nine on Playboy’s Top Ten Party Schools. A lot of students may think that this is a good thing and think it is awesome but is it really?
                When I first was looking into PSU I had no idea about its “party school” reputation. I actually didn’t know about it until much later, after I had made the decision to come here. I found out through people, who asked the ever popular question,” Where are you going to school next year?”  When I answer this question people always had a slightly grim look on their faces and said something like, “You that it’s a big party school right?” I never got a single positive response to my choice and it made me wonder if I had made the right decision.
                I decided to give it a chance, I thought “I’m sure everyone was just exaggerating, It can’t be that crazy.” So in the fall I packed up my stuff and moved in to my new home Plymouth State. I wasn’t a newbie to drinking before I came up to school, so I wasn’t worried about looking like the little kid who can’t handle their liquor and makes an ass of themselves.  The first week I went out with my roommate and his friends and partied, A LOT, so much so that I had already started falling behind in classes. Finally I smartened up and realized that I couldn’t keep doing this.
                One night soon after, I finally met the girl who lives across the hall from me. Soon I became good friends with her and her group of friends. They didn’t party too much so I finally thought that I had found a good place to fit in. But then I realized, they all went home every weekend. This became a problem because then all weekend I would sit in my room all by myself, bored out of my mind. I couldn’t afford the bus fare to go home every weekend. I did go home as much as possible but still I became so miserable that I had a countdown in a notebook to when winter break started.
                Over winter break I realized that this isn’t what I want to do for the next four years. It wasn’t the college experience I was looking for. So I worked very hard over the break and saved up enough money to go home every weekend this semester. I’ve filled out my transfer applications to schools near my house that  I can commute too, where I can live at home and be with my friends and  not have to deal with all of the distractions that come with being at this school. I think that I can’t be the only person who feels this way. I think the school really needs to change something before the reputation and the partying gets worse.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Can people's actions truly affect us over 50 years later?


            This week on This American Life, the episode was called The Book That Changed My Life. They had people on whose lives were changed by a book that they read. It got me thinking about moments that had changed my life. Some of these moments, I realized, happened decades before I was even born.
A moment years ago that changed my life was when my great-grandfather left my great-grandmother. My great grandparents separated when my grandmother was a teenager. When he left he didn’t help my great-grandmother at all, with raising the kids or monetarily. This it made so that my grandmother couldn’t go to college, she had to work full time to help pay the bills.  
           My grandmother always resented this, even though she forgave him and tried to rebuild the relationship. When he died, a couple of months after I was born, he left my grandmother a ton of money in the form of stocks. My grandmother didn’t want any of it though. She had made it through her entire life without his money and she and my grandfather had done well with their money through hard work. She decided to split the shares of stock and give them to my mother and her siblings.
          This became very useful to my family when my father was out of work for almost two years. Without that money I’m not sure how we would have made it. So although I don’t agree with what my great-grandfather did, it actually really helped me and my family at a difficult point in our lives. It’s interesting to see how one person’s action can affect people  over 50 years after the fact.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

House on Loon Lake

This week I listened to the Podcast This American Life. This week’s episode was a true story called House on Loon Lake. The story was about a man who, as a child, explored this abandoned house on Loon Lake in Freedom, NH.  He spends many years trying to figure out the story of the family, the Mason’s, and why the house was abandoned. This story reminded me of a memory from my childhood.
                Back when I was about 8 or 9, my family and I lived in a small, quiet suburban neighborhood in a town south of Boston. All of the families in the neighborhood were very close and all of the children used to hang out around the street, in each other’s yards.  There was one house however, down at the end of the cul-de-sac that we had all been warned to never go near but they never told us why.
 We, the kids, had known that at one point there was family living there with a boy around our age who always had seemed very nice, but now the house was clearly abandoned. We had always wanted to go down there but our parents had told us not to go down there.
But one day we decided to do down there.  We looked into the windows of RV that’s had been sitting in the driveway for a while.  At the time I didn’t know exactly what the things in the RV were but I knew that it looked disgusting and we didn’t actually go in there. Then we curious what the inside of the house looked like so we decided to try to get inside. It was pretty easy to get in seeing as it looked like somebody else had broken in. We went inside of the house; it was disgusting there was animal poop and needles. We looked in the refrigerator and there was a dead cat. We screamed and ran out of there so fast. None of us ever told our parents about that day.
My mother told me some years later the story behind that house. There was a couple with a little boy that had lived in that house. It turned out that the husband was the leader of a large drug ring in the area. When his wife found out she took the kid and moved to California to live with her parents. After she left the husband started using the drug , testing them on animals and he also started a prostitution ring out of that RV. He was put in jail after a huge police raid at that house. The police had been staked out at one of the neighbor’s house for a while. The husband ended up in and out of jail several times until he ended up getting shot. After he died his wife came back and completely cleaned up and renovated the house and sold it for a lot of money. My best friend to this day moved into that house and when they moved in they still found some of his needles in the yard.