Bonjour mes amis!
Hopefully all is well with each and every one of you. Man, life has just been…crazy, to say the least! While I do have other articles I’ve written (and will post shortly) about the reverse culture shock I felt at coming back to American, I thought it would be nice to write one of my usual updates on what has been going on in my life during the past month:
1) Although I’m back “home” in Florida, I am still traveling. I am still sleeping on a pull out couch and living out of a suitcase (although my dad will agree that most of my clothes are all over my room and not actually in any sort of packed state…but I digress).
2) I am moving to Paris in just a few days. PARIS! More updates on that later!
3) My scholarship applications are going. They are due in just under two weeks, and I can’t wait. I have been working on them for just over six months, and I am ready to spell check one last time and hope that the scholarship committees can feel my passion for life in 1000 words or less. Keep your fingers crossed, folks! I’m going to need all of the luck I can get 
4) The Ladybug Project, which is the non-profit I have set up to benefit Equatorial Guinea and Madagascar, is doing great! I’ve got a fantastic board of directors now and I’ve submitted a HUGE stack of IRS paperwork, and now…we can begin to kick major fund raising butt!
5) I am practicing my French in my head all the time. Whenever I am going somewhere new, I think about how I would say it in French…usually I think it sounds awful, but I’m getting there.
So…that’s really about it folks. I do have a few take home messsages for all of you…if you like me enough to listen to the crap that I write here:
1) If you’ve been waiting to accomplish one of your dreams…don’t wait any longer. Do it. It’s so scary, but you will be so proud of yourself when you are successful. The photography exhibit I did for The Ladybug Project was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. Harder than living in Africa. Why? Because it involved putting myself out into the unknown artistically and mentally; was it scary? Yes. I wass sweating so much, I am just glad I was wearing a dark colored cardigan. I kept wanting to hold someone’s hand or run out of the room, but I didn’t. And now I can say I had a photography exhibition of my very own work. That’s an amazing feeling.
2) When I admired people for doing ssomething cool like learning a new skill or language, I used to watch them and think that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come close to being that cool. Well, I woke up and smelled the cafe au lait and now I know that I can be! I learned a new languague. At 22. I moved to a foreign city, where I couldn’t talk to anyone. Twice. When people told me I was too young to succeed, I did it anyway. Motto? You can too!
3) Aging. I have watched myself age in the past nine months. Many more gray hairs and the first semi-permanent wrinkles. I turn 23 in less than a month. I’m not have a mid-twenties crisis, I guess I’m just fascinated by the fact that I can take a bird’s eye view of my life and see how I am becoming an adult. I know the word adult is such a subjective thing, and I finally feel that I am molding myself into that definition. In the words of a very good friend, “(I) filled out freaking IRS forms.” Sadly, I enjoyed it too.
If that’s not adult, I don’t know what is.
