On the plane

I just drank illegally for the last time in my life. Which is to say, soon I will be in a country where I am legally old enough to drink, and when I get back in four months, I will be old enough to drink anywhere. It was just to make myself tired anyway. It pretty much worked.

I guess I figured I should make a blog about studying abroad and I thought I would call it Further Up and Further In, which is actually from a quote about going to heaven or something, but is also about how I am just growing up in different ways at a pretty slow pace. For example, this summer I learned a lot about how to take a subway and navigate a city by yourself. I am 20 and I've lived near a city my whole life. When I was about 16, being young for my age started to really weigh on me and I spent a lot of time making lists of the things I should have accomplished. But because the older you get, the fewer things you are doing for the first time, I'll actually probably catch up in the next five years, if not sooner, and that is exciting to think about.

A funny story about illegal drinking is that the first time I got drunk I was 18, and I basically asked a friend who drank a lot to get me drunk, because I thought it was one of the things I should have accomplished. I try not to think about my life that way anymore. When I was high school, I would try to comfort myself by remembering that I had my own things that other people didn't do, which maybe made up for having the life skills and experience of a 12-year-old, and being mistaken for one.

By the way, I don't actually like drinking that much. And the kind I did today hardly counts (i.e. my mom getting a margarita and letting me drink all of it, because of my dubious hypothesis about how it would make me fall asleep). I get confused so easily and have such intense emotional reactions to things that substance abuse seems like overkill.

This computer is brand new because my old computer stopped working last week. It wasn't actually old, which is why they gave me a new one. I bought it in May and it cost all my money because it's a Mac. The problem is that in theory I know it is so much worse than a PC, etc. etc. and you can't even right-click, and look how it completely shat out on me in such a brief period of time after Macs have been sanctimonously held up by everyone in the vicinity, and John Hodgman is cuter than the Jeepers Creepers kid anyway...but there's just some girly part of me that is completely charmed by this machine. It's white. It's like a big tooth! I can take low-quality pictures of what my face looks like bathed in the light of the display. And everyone at school has one, you guys!

In my defense, I need it for music, and I still respect people more when I find out they have a PC. I mean, I grew up using PCs and my mom and dad met because they both worked for IBM. I'm kind of like a straight person with gay parents.

In seven hours I'll be in another country, and after a week or so, I guess, I will live there, and it won't seem like such a big deal.