Things that I have been enjoying lately:
1.) Summer weather!
I can just see all of you right now. Rolling your eyes at me. Look at this girl, desperate for a topic to talk about. The weather! C’mon. To you I say, try living in Michigan. The temperature was averaging in the forties about two weeks ago and then – bam! – we hit 70s/80s all at once. What happened to the temperatures in between?
Anyway, because of this, I’ve now begun to do all those fun summery things. Like plant flowers (and unfortunately, pull a ton of weeds). And bike rides. And go to the beach (my sister and I plan on doing this tomorrow).
2.) Commencement Speeches
Okay, I can see those eye rolls again. But seriously, there have been some seriously good commencement speeches this year. Here are my two favorites:
a.) John Green’s Learn to Listen:
“You are about to be a nobody. And that’s important, because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody, you won’t be a jerk.”
b.) Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Speech:
“The simple truth is this: Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative…This act of choosing—the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out—will reverberate across the rest of your life.”
3.) Books
I’ve slowly been trying to get back into reading. After being forced to read particular books every day for eight months for school, I wanted to take a break. (Although, to be fair, half the time they weren’t all that bad.) I had a stack of ten books sitting on my dresser that I’ve collected since last October (not to mention the three free books on my Kindle). I managed to plow through three of those books, so my pile is finally shrinking…but I’m also anticipating a new book in the mail to arrive sometime this week.
So many books, so little time.
And in case you were curious, I’m currently in the middle of UNBOUND by Neal Shusterman. Gotta love the creepiness of the Unwind world. I’m enjoying the various short stories that go into the backstories of various characters.
Also! I am super pumped for Veronica Roth’s new book that will be published in January (ugh, why so far away?).
4.) Music
During the end of April, my laptop surprised me and went through a mandatory update to Windows 10. In doing so, it downloaded all these songs that I had hidden away and forgotten about on iTunes and reappeared on my computer music file. So now I’ve been listening to all these songs that I had previously brushed aside and it has given me something new to listen to.
Also, I was pretty excited when Skillet released their two new songs last week in order to promote their next album being released in August. I’ve been listening to “Feel Invincible” and “Stars” on repeat since then.
So, yeah, that’s basically what I’ve been up to this past month. (Okay, not really. I do somewhat have a life. Sort of.)
