Did you know I'm still alive?
Well, I am. And I think today is actually one of the best days ever.
It's so weird thinking about it, but I just feel so at peace today. It's one of those things where I know exactly what I want and not at all at the same time, that the stress of everything is gone yet I still have things to stress a little over, and yet it all just feels so okay. I hope the rest of the summer is like this.
Yes, that's right, boy-o, it's summer! Even though spring seems to have just barely begun! It's weird having more time for a school break this year than I usually do (well, I guess more like around the same time as the one between 10th and 11th grade, isn't it?), but especially starting it this early. The weather's (mostly) been very kind and paradisaical (wow, I didn't even know how to spell that), and it makes me really excited that this is what I have to look forward to throughout the summer. Feels like this beautiful town is all mine without the worries of schoolwork (though, if all goes well, I won't be abandoning studying completely so I can prepare for my classes in the fall). MINE! I'd thought it was generally a town too small for me, but now I'm like "What are you talking about? It's perfect!"
I know I haven't actually given context, and I haven't actually even attempted to catch up a little on all the stuff that happened throughout the school year- yes, I did actually make notes of everything that happened that I thought was noteworthy- which I've hardly touched because it's such a daunting task to accomplish but I feel like I will be able to tackle it over the summer because I feel like I can just tackle anything I want this summer! But yeah, I... don't think I'm actually gonna do much of that today.
I just wanna talk about how I feel so good. And weird. This is weird.
First of all, yesterday was officially the last day of school. (I dunno, feels kinda ironic that tons of people graduated right around when everyone's thinking "May the Fourth be with you"... and also that reality may just be catching up a little to those graduates when it's "Revenge of the Fifth".) As in, starting today, I am no longer a college freshman. For a while, and just every once in a while after that, it'd just hit me like "Wait a minute, I'm at college? And I'm old enough to be here?!" and so now it's even more alarming that I just made it through my first year here and I don't know what to do with myself...
I can say, luckily, that my grades weren't that bad. I don't remember if I already said how I did in my classes in the fall, but that was all A's besides an A- in my bio lab (which I'm still a little mad over because it's just because I forgot one tINY LITTLE THING). This semester, I ended with A's in calc, bio, chem, and the bio and chem labs, and an A- in U.S. Institutions, which is basically an intro to American government, politics, and economics, and is largely discussion-based (I finally managed to get myself to say something in class during the last couple weeks!!!) but most of the grade is dependent on essays. Man, those stressed the heck out of me, especially once I got a C on my first big paper in there (I will fully admit that, like any other annoying kid used to A's, I cried over it), so I was this close to crying (this time from relief) when I saw that I did really good on my final paper, just enough to bring me out of the B's. I made it over 90% somehow! I know I shouldn't be so stressed over doing amazing in all my classes even with a scholarship GPA to maintain and that good grades don't define me, yadda yadda yadda, but it just feels so nice that my hard work paid off in the end, you know? I can breathe a little easier, and I feel a wee bit more confident for the next semester, even though I never got to stay at a 4.0 GPA.
One of my new friends said that that was probably for the better (that I couldn't keep myself at a 4.0) because it would've made me stress that much more and it would've hurt my soul that much more if I broke the perfect A streak further down the line to my degree, which... is probably true. Apparently, he knows me pretty well now.
This friend was actually on a study abroad here for the semester. His home country is Armenia (and you can bet he has been very excited and patriotic since he found out about the huuuuuuge protests that successfully got their prime minister to resign, and no one died- even more now that some Russian protesters have taken inspiration from the Armenians today), so I got to learn some stuff about his culture and his perspective on American culture, and just hang out with a super cool dude. One of our things was watching movies (Mr. Nobody, Oculus, The Sixth Sense, A Quiet Place), sometimes with one of my roommates (either Ash or Cali), and his favorite episodes of Black Mirror (plus some Phineas and Ferb since he absolutely loved that show too, I wish we did that again because it was so nostalgic, though yesterday he said it was most definitely better than Adventure Time and I don't know which show would win out in my heart because I love boooooth!). A couple times, we also ended up talking and walking, especially the second time we hung out where we wandered around town and ended up making it to the middle school, temple, and a lookout to the rest of the city below us, part of the time carrying a couple groceries from Smith's that weren't even heavy but became not so fun after a while. Ooh, that second time we ate at the nearby burger place and I had him try sweet potato fries! Things got a little weird after that hangout, though, since there'd been quite a bit of discussion of religion and I knew he wasn't really attacking me for my beliefs but it felt like it, and though he said he didn't think I reacted badly or anything, I still felt like I did and stayed guilty for a long while after that. We just kinda... made up somehow, I guess, and I think we were stronger friends with that out of the way...
I didn't even say how we met yet! It was when Adam Grabowski (awesome comedian, he's now a favorite even though I hardly ever watch comedy) came to perform during my college's Mental Health Week, as his act was part-funny, part-stuff about mental health, mostly his experiences and advice on that. Before entering the auditorium, I had started grabbing food outside, but then I felt kind of weird about just strutting into the auditorium with my plate because it was not allowed but I didn't know if it was allowed this time? And I saw this dude getting water and I just ended up asking if he knew we could bring in food. He looked a bit weirded out by me just coming up to him randomly like that, but then since both of us had come alone, we ended up sitting next to each other because of a now-kinda-familiar face and talking during the show and BOOM, we became friends. He brought me to the school weekly game night after that (where I also hung out a little with a girl that had been in my Fiction Writing class; I liked her a little more in the game room environment than the classroom, I think). We participated in Two Rooms and a Boom (I helped the Red Team win in the last game!), Hive (AKA bug chess, which I did waaay better in than I expected considering my normal chess abilities), and Cards Against Humanity (again, actually did pretty dang good, though apparently I'm not entirely un-innocented since a couple of the cards I didn't know the meaning of and didn't ask for someone to explain them to me).
Our interests didn't entirely match up, but it still worked out pretty good for both of us, I think. We went to game night again another time (bringing Cali along); went to the school's "Dancing with the Stars" together, though we didn't entirely agree on which were indeed the best performances; tried teaching each other a bit of Armenian and Spanish; showed each other songs (his were from Armenian and Russian performers, while I ended up showing him a bit of Vocaloid and Victor Garcia), along with some Youtube videos- his picks were the ones from Conan going to Armenia, some CollegeHumor, and a couple about Creepypastas that he said scared him when he was younger (and I actually knew about most of those, but the Suicide Mouse was new to me and Squidward's Suicide new to both of us), while mine were a couple awesome Doki Doki Literature Club fansongs, and... yeah, I guess the Vocaloid, partly to weird him out and partly because I figured he'd feel like he learned something about a subculture and about me from it; we played video games a little bit on my laptop once, though my laptop definitely isn't the best for games since it's kinda old and slow, so it was just a little bit of him having me play One Chance (apparently, he had no idea one of the endings was that one of the protagonist's coworkers kills the wife and daughter and hangs himself, while protagonist had to go bury them all and then ended up dying at work during his last-ditch attempt to fix things at the lab... so yeah, that happened) and Life is Strange (I desperately need a computer mouse on hand if I want to play this, it's difficult with just a trackpad), and I had us team up for Electric Man 2 just like I used to do with old friends... Also, once, we literally stayed up almost the entire night and we both fell asleep at some point past 3 AM (probably more like 4-ish) and I woke up at 5-ish, which is when he said he'd leave instead of asking if I wanted him to leave... Yeah, I've never done something like that before, and it made me so incredibly guilty while we were up because I knew I should be sleeping and my mom would be upset and I was falling asleep during our conversations but it was also still kinda fun hanging out with a little bit of delirium setting in, so...
Last couple days of this week were a bit different. He was sweet enough to give me a small box of chocolates he bought in town (which I shared with him, of course, and they were gooooood), and also went along with my suggestion of recording a video of me saying something funny in Armenian for him to show to his mom (and I'm guessing his friends back home, too). He first had me say something like "You are great because you're [his name]'s mom", but then yesterday, right before we parted ways, he was like "Wait a minute, why not something more like in the Conan videos?" Thus, the title of this post. It was so weird seeing him be so giggly and it made me really self-conscious trying to say this stuff, but he insisted he was laughing because of what I was saying, not because I was saying it badly (and assured that I was doing a surprisingly good job, actually, which I'd say is because I was saying the words in a mix of my English and Spanish accents, so more evidence that knowing 2+ languages makes it easier to at least fake it decently in many others!).
In case you're wondering, the phrase is basically "Armenians are very cool", but more literally is "I want to die on Armenians' bodies" because that is one of their classic examples of really weird idioms. (Then again, he could've been lying to me about the meaning, but I think it's more likely he wasn't.)
It's weird, I didn't think I'd end up getting all the stuff about him out of the way in this post, but apparently that's happening.
He's now at the airport (luckily, he got to wander around the city a little bit, and hopefully he liked my suggestions), and I'm sad to see him go because, though I definitely hope to see him again in the future, it's probably the relatively-distant future at best. We did pretty dang good with becoming good friends (and hanging out more than I ever usually hang out with friends, perhaps Beka excluded, without our GPAs absolutely going down the drain by some miracle) considering we first met in March!
Oh yeah, I'd been talking about why today's weird. Though I had to say bye to him, I had to say bye to all my roommates, as well, which hurt a little even though I know I'll at least be seeing all of them again in August (and Ash will just live a few houses down now). I would've liked it more if we could've been able to have one final hurrah and go for ice cream or something, but for each of their disappearances from the apartment we'd been being pretty exhausted from cleaning the place up. That's one of the not-fun things about people having to worry about moving out right when Finals Week ends, bro. I did get to hug Terra, Cali, and Ash, while the last roommate literally just left without saying bye to any of us...
And maybe the last part is that there's still stuff to stress over. Like, I worry that maybe they won't think we did good enough of a job cleaning, or that I have too much stuff because some of it isn't actually mine (hopefully, I can soon talk about my calc friend who's moving in for the summer and left her stuff early!), or that I'm gonna end up not enjoying my internship as much as I hope I do or doing really bad at the work... man, I haven't even talked about that yet! The (paid) internship's my main thing this summer, which is a major reason why I'm so pumped. Even better, I'm gonna get 3 credits for it! I have to present a poster about what I did over the summer in the fall to successfully earn them, but that's a major thing that I'm getting all that undergrad research credit when I just barely got the job as a freshman, and I feel so excited for not just this opportunity, but the doors I'm sure it'll open! I'll talk about it in the next post (which is hopefully within the next couple days), because I want to post this by midnight.
Nonetheless, I just feel at ease, one of the moments where I'm most at ease in a loooooooong time. I hope this feeling doesn't entirely go away.
It was nice to ramble on, even though I don't know how much of this will make sense when I read it later. Oh, speaking of rambling, my Armenian friend and I (he has a very common name, yet I still feel hesitant to make that part public, too) had filmed a couple little videos on his phone, and one of them we just started asking our future selves a couple random questions. I know one I said was, "Are you a cat lady? Because I would be so cool with that." Another I want to ask is, "How many of my friends do I actually get to keep after all this time?" I mean, there's the ones from my childhood, like Beka, high school like Coatrack and Carter, online like Darkrai and The Smiling Crow, and my friends from this year- Ash, Cali, Arm (I guess that's his nickname now?), and a ton of others I haven't even talked about yet because I've barely touched this blog all year. I hope at least a couple make it through to the end. Please tell me they do.
Okay, I'm gonna try to sign out now so I don't ramble that much more. Wish me luck on the internship, and I hope everyone has an amazing summer spent just the way they wanted to and we all find chances to help each other, no matter what that entails. Since I'm feeling nostalgic: K bai!
