Hairpin turn

         Hairpin Turn is a place where I can feel perfectly content with myself no matter what time of day it is. It is a place where I experience something new every time I go, and I love that about this place. I especially love going up there at night when not a single sole is around. The car ride just by itself is something I can always look forward to. One of my favorite things to do is listening to the bass of my car vibrate in the quietness of the night. This specific morning however, I decided to switch things up and watch the sunrise rather than the sunset. It is something that I now will continue to do. The crisp air, and hazy colored skies, mixed with the smell of car exhaust created the perfect atmosphere for the start to my day. I love coming to this place when I need to study, if I ever need a break from reviewing my notes I can just look up and see the mountains overlapping each other for miles and miles ahead of me.  I can always rely on this place when I'm having a bad day and need an escape from reality. When I'm up here I can let any thoughts or emotions spill out of my head and it always helps to know that I have this place to go to whenever I need it. Whether the sky is shedding droplets onto my car, or the sun is blinding my eyes, Hairpin Turn is a place I can always feel content.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWY3jfsM250

Coming of Age

When it comes to thinking about my transition from childhood to adulthood, there is one specific event in my life that stands out to me the most. This event occurred five years ago, and thinking about how much has changed since then is crazy to me. When I was around 13 years old and only a couple months into 7th grade, my mom had told me that we would be moving to New York, approximately 1,300 miles away from where I had been living. This news was a lot to take in, but since I was only 13, I was excited for what New York had to offer. When I thought of New York, I immediately thought of the "big apple" and how millions of people dreamt of visiting this place that I would soon be living near. Celebrities, lights, and Broadway Shows are what came to my mind, and for a while it kept me from thinking about moving away from my life and into a completely new one. Although I was excited, the realization of what was about to be happening in a couple of months started to sink in.

Not only did I realize I would be leaving all of my old friends, but I would have to be making all new ones. Although this wasn't the first time I was going to be the new kid, it starts to become a lot harder to fit in the older you are. Our moving date was set in November which was a bit of a scare to me because that had meant school was already in session for a couple of months. I thought that if I arrived it would be even more difficult to fit in because I would't be coming the same time all the other new kids were coming. These worries began piling up, and I wasn't as excited for the move than I had been initially. My mom would reassure me that New York would offer so many more opportunities and that it would be a great thing to be living so close to my older sister. I trusted her and within a couple weeks of finding out about the move, we had our moving truck packed and hit the road for the 21 hour drive. 

I would have thought that leaving behind my old life would be the most difficult part, but looking back at it now it wasn't. The hardest part for me was dealing with the responsibilities that  I had to take on after the move. My mom being a single mom needed my help a lot of the time because she couldn't possibly juggle so many things at once. Between a new home, new job, enrolling me in school, unpacking, and doing the daily duties that a mom does, she was quickly becoming overwhelmed and stressed out. I had to really step up my game during this time in my life because I needed to start doing things I had never had the responsibility of doing before. Things like doing my own laundry, making my own food for myself, and helping more than I ever had with household chores was difficult for me at my young age. The only thing I had been focusing on as a 13 year old was getting people to like me. Trying to fit into a grade that was three times the size of my old grade was quite the challenge, but I am so grateful that making new friends wasn't as difficult as I expected. 

Looking back, the difficulties I went through when moving across the country only helped me tremendously when growing as a person. I had gone from living on a dairy farm in a town of 3,000 people to living only an hour and a half away from one of the biggest cities in the world. Not only was the culture different, but the people were as well. I found that people in New York are open minded to change, and willing to express their creativity without being afraid of what others think. This inspired me and  essentially helped me become a more well rounded person than I was before. I was able to express myself in ways I had never had been able to do before and it was such a breath of fresh air. Although the move was one of the hardest things I have done in my lifetime, it was one of the best things that I have done in my lifetime.

A Story That Must be Told

     In the fall of 10th grade, I attended a concert and did something beforehand that I will never forget. Many people know this story and I feel that it needs to be told because it characterizes the type of person I am. I like taking chances in life never fully knowing what the outcome will be, and in this case I definitely was not expecting what actually happened. I attended a concert with a couple of my friends and since we got to the venue early we just kind of relaxed and waited until the concert started, that is until we saw the VIP line for the meet and greet start to form. The concert was a Justin Bieber concert so there were girls everywhere and security  for the most part was pretty strict. When we saw all these girls receive their blue wristbands for the meet and greet, we could just tell how excited they were and I wanted to be able to feel that also. Meet and greets for concerts like this are hundreds of dollars and I was just really happy that I would be going to this concert in the first place. When my friends and I saw the wristbands they looked like something we could make with construction paper and a crayon, this is when a light bulb went off in my head. What if we made our own wristbands and tried blending in with the crowd?
      We took a while trying to figure out what we could use so that it would work, we tried gum wrappers, pamphlets from the venue, and just about everything that was in our site that could be ripped up and put on our wrists. We were just about to give up when I suggested that we should go and see what the drugstore down the street had, we took the 5 minute walk and when we got there we found a blue folder that was identical to the color of the actual wristband. This was it, this was what we were going to use! I bought the 53 cent folder, borrowed scissors, tape, and a marker from the store and wrote "Justin Bieber Meet&Greet" on the little strips of paper. Although it looked terrible and I didn't even know how to correctly make an "&" sign, we decided it would be worth a shot. Now by the time we got back to the venue, all the girls had already been admitted entrance into the room where the meet and greet was going to happen, this wasn't good. We knew the girls had been in there for a while so we had to come up with a story as to why we were late. When we approached the door we put on an act pretending like we were frantic because we thought it was "too late" to be allowed in. My friends and I all started to laugh because we just knew that it wasn't going to work and decided to just walk away. As soon as we walked away this random dad got a security guard and signaled for us to come back so that we could talk to them. We told the women that our mom had run home to get something and that we hoped we didn't miss out on the meet and greet. When she asked us if we received our wristbands, a million different thoughts were running through my head. Was this really going to work? Was a 53 cent folder actually going to pay for three people to meet Justin Bieber? We flashed her what was on our wrists and within a few seconds, she opened the door and we were allowed in.
    At this moment in time, I couldn't believe what happened, we had to walk past another five security guards or so and they directed us up some stairs where the meet and greet was going to be held. There was still a long line of people and when we got up there we were brought to the end of the line to wait for what seemed to be forever. I was getting pretty nervous at this point and even googled "can you get arrested for sneeking into a meet and greet". I didn't know what would happen if we got caught, I was not about to have my ticket be taken away if this wasn't successful. I was starting to psych myself out but acted as calm as possible. A different friend of mine had actually won meet and greet tickets and since she had been in line for a while I figured I should send her a text. I asked her if they had cut her wristband off, if they scanned it, or if they thoroughly looked at it when she got to the front. She said I would be fine and that they didn't do anything along those lines, now all I had to do was hope for the best. We then heard a man say that everyone needed to get in groups of six because the concert was going to be starting soon. My two friends and I got in a group of six, but shortly after we heard "we need a group of three". We raised our hands and within seconds we were escorted to the front of the line where another group of 3 was. They were planning on having our two groups mend together into one big group of six. I didn't want to have a large group of people with us so I walked right past the other 3 girls and waited for the curtains to open where Justin Bieber had been standing. I walked in and couldn't believe what was actually happening. I stood right next to him (I eventually got to crop my friends out of the picture) and wished him good luck. It was all so rushed but I was in complete and utter shock. I couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that I had just paid 53 cents, 53 CENTS for three people to meet Justin Bieber. To this day it is one of the craziest things I have done and it reminds me that sometimes in life you have to take chances in order to achieve what you really want.

   Something that I try and do in my everyday lifestyle is eat healthy. It is quite the challenge at times and it can be really frustrating especially when seeing advertisements for food companies like this. Carl's Jr repetitively makes advertisements that show Hollywood socialites in a "sexy" way, while eating one of their food products. I think it is extremely sad, yet true when the media sets out and says "sex sells". These types of advertisements make people wonder why they can't look like that while eating something as unhealthy as a burger. Media deceives people in many ways but within this ad, there is more than just a girl eating a burger. People begin to become brain washed in the idea that if they eat this food, that they too will look like this. One person could look at this and think it is completely fine for this women to be eating this product in a sexual orientation, while on the other hand another person could see this and be completely disgusted. In my opinion, advertisements like these should not be allowed. The picture above is not all that racy compared to many of the other ads this company has advertised in the past. Not only is this ad emphasizing the idea of eating unhealthy fast food items, but it also sending messages to younger kids that all of this is okay. I wish that media didn't do these types of things and would think about the ever lasting impact it has on the society as a whole. Nothing about this ad is delivering a positive message, and long term effects such as cholesterol and a lowered self esteem are about the only thing a person could obtain from this ad.
 http://articles.latimes.com/2005/may/24/business/fi-paris24

             There have been many experiences in my life where I have faced failure. A couple months ago I lied to my mom which eventually back fired and caused her to lose trust in me. My friend decided to throw a party when her parents were out of town and I guess you could say I helped instigate her in making the final decision. We were all pretty excited because I think that the thrill of "breaking the rules" is exhilarating . We re-arranged her furniture and hid most of her embarrassing baby pictures, we had planned everything out so well that we even made a list of things we had to make sure went back so that her parents wouldn't realize. When people started to show up, we didn't have a back up plan in case something bad were to happen. What would we do if cops showed up? What if her parents found out? A million thoughts were running through our minds, but we were still excited. If we are being honest, the party for us wasn't even fun because we were constantly worried about things potentially getting broken, or there being too many cars outside. The party lasted a couple of hours and once everyone left, a group of us girls started cleaning right away so that there wouldn't be much to do in the morning when her parents came home. The house was spotless (even cleaner than before) and we felt good because nothing bad had happened. No cops, no crazy amounts of people, everything had gone off without a hitch...that is until her parents returned home in the morning. I was the only one home with her in the morning by the time her parents got back and we were both so confident with how everything had turned out. Little did we know, her parents had gotten a call from her neighbors and from then on the rest was history. Her dad threatened to call everyone's parents so I decided I should tell my mom before he did. My mom was disappointed that I had lied about what I was doing that night, but c'mon what mama don't know, don't hurt her! Her anger lasted about a day and now everything is fine and in the end I learned my lesson.

http://www.hmtk.com/archives/188-a-few-tips-on-throwing-a-party-when-your-parents-are-away.html