GRACE: Living Your Dreams

As this is my inaugural post, I'm going to give you a little bit of my background.

I'm Louise. I'm 21-year-old college student in the Pacific Northwest. I'm single, I work, I like punk and classic rock, I like good movies, I like my family.

I don't really know the direction that this blog is going to take. What I do know is that James and I are a little obsessed with dissecting the events in our lives and looking at the shared experience of people in general. This includes the good (grace) and the bad (rage!). Yes, we've borrowed the title from an Offspring album. If you don't like the Offspring, fuck off (rage!). But I'm sure you have some redeeming qualities (grace).

So, to start with the positive, I'm writing my first post on grace. Rage is funnier, so I'm guessing I'll probably end up writing more posts under that category.

The last time I was at my parents' house, I was rummaging through some of my old stuff and came across a drawer with all my old journals and poetry notebooks from elementary to high school. This lead me to eventually reading through the Livejournal I kept in my teen years. I spent hours looking through them, and let me just say--

Hi-fuckin'-larious.

Through the laughter/tears, I learned a couple lessons:

1) THINGS ARE RARELY AS BAD AS THEY SEEM

This is absolutely true, and I've been using it as a mantra ever since I found those journals. I had entire pages dedicated to unrequited love for boys I BARELY EVEN REMEMBER. Entire rants about co-workers in my high school grocery store job that seem sympathetic or hilarious now that I don't have to work with them.

Just look at this quote from an entry titled "I've Never Even Been to a Carnival" from January of 2004 (I was a freshman in high school):

God I am tired of school. I just want to drop out and join the traveling carnival. Yes, I would rather be a member of the carnival than go to school. I wouldn't even want to be a part of the show, I'd just sell concessions. Can you envision it? I would never have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning ever again. I'd never have to take another test. I'd never have to be nice to anyone. I would just be able to spend the rest of my days as a tumbleweed in different cities and towns across this great nation telling people to enjoy the show while wearing a silly hat.

I don't even RECALL being tired of school as a high schooler. And now I'm in college, studying to be a teacher so I can be in school for the REST OF MY LIFE. That's nothing short of hilarious to me.

This was an awesome epiphany. Sometimes the day-to-day of life can be so daunting and monotonous. Studying for tests. Papers. Waking up early. Working. Those basic, ingrained human rituals.

But the fact is, those aren't the things you remember when you think back on the montage sequence of your life. I think about my friends and the end result of the knowledge acquired in school and at work.

2) Me from 2002 would be STOKED about Me in 2010

Quote from a May 2002 journal (I was in 7th grade):

I can't wait until I live on my own. I'm gonna go to rock n roll shows every weekend and eat cereal for dinner when I want and write scandalous shit and no one can tell me what I can or can't do.

All I can say to that is,



-Louise