I never really experienced rites of passage that people typically do throughout childhood and adolescence. I had an unusual upbringing in the sense that I was consistently uprooted due to a number of overseas moves, which led to my general lack of knowledge/interest about these “traditional” rites of passage.

Here are a handful high school rites of passages I never experienced:

• Graduating from primary/middle school in order to enter high school
  I left my first middle school in the US at the end of sixth grade, which meant I missed out on the eighth grade graduation. At my new school in Australia, students graduated from primary school in year six and not year seven. I transferred to my Australian school at the beginning of year seven, so I had just missed out on graduation. The first time I ever graduated from anything was when I completed high school!
• Sweet sixteen birthday party
  My sixteenth birthday was a quiet and lonely affair. I had just moved to Chicago from Australia, and I didn’t know anyone in Chicago besides my immediate family. My sixteenth birthday “party” was comprised of myself, my mother, my brother, and a chocolate cake. It was nice, but definitely not the sweet sixteen bash many kids expect on their sixteenth birthdays.
• Driver’s license at sixteen
  I didn’t get my driver’s license at sixteen. Honestly, I was never bothered by this, I managed just fine without one. Besides, I think sixteen is too young to drive; the thought of the sixteen year olds I know on the roads scares me.
• Getting my first car
  This ties in with the whole driver’s license thing, for obvious reasons. However, I also have zero interest in getting a car of my own. The area I live in has good public transportation, and where I go to for college has excellent public transport. Ideally I’d like to live in a city like London, Paris, or Hong Kong after I graduate from college, all of which have phenomenal public transport and there is no need for a car. I don’t want to deal with car payments, insurance, maintenance, gas… it’s all money I’d rather not spend on something I don’t see as needing.
• Getting my first job
  Unlike most teenagers, I didn’t get my first job in high school. I was on a student visa in Australia so I legally was not allowed to work, and then my final two years of high school took so much time and energy out of me that I didn’t even want to think about a job. (I don’t count babysitting gigs as an “official” job.) I did get a job at college though, it just took me a little longer than most of my classmates to get the ball rolling on the job front.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

These are five questions Clem asked me to answer a very, very long time ago. Even though these replies are late, I figure it’s better late than never, right?

• If you could live anywhere for the rest of your life, where would it be?
  Without a doubt, Hong Kong. It is my absolute favorite place in the world, and the one place I feel 100% comfortable in calling home. I’ve moved around a lot and spent a fair portion of my life growing up overseas, but Hong Kong is where I was born and it’s where home is for me.
• When you were younger, what did you want to be?
  What didn’t I want to be is probably the easier question! When it comes to career aspirations, it’s very much a “you name it, I’ve wanted to be it” type deal. I think the ones I stuck with for the longest was a translator/interpreter and a writer.
• What’s the last nice thing that happened to you?
  A lot of nice things have happened to me recently, which is a huge change from the run of bad experiences I had last month. I think the one that stands out the most is just knowing that I mean a lot to someone special. Ever since there’s been some drama in my circle of friends, it’s nice to know that there’s still someone that values me in their life.
• What was your worst subject in high school?
  Without a doubt, math. I’ve always been a good student, but math was always the class that very nearly killed me. It was always the class that threatened to lower my GPA and was the one I agonized over for hours. It was also the only class I ever needed a tutor for!
• How often do you check your email?
  I check it obsessive compulsively! I use the Gmail Notifier plugin for Firefox, so whenever I get a new email I get a notification and check my inbox immediately. I also have an iPhone, so I have constant access to my email 24/7. Maintaining a constant connection with your email inbox is not always a good thing, though…

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Ever since summer ended and the school year began, I’ve been insanely busy. I have a full course load, a part-time job, a web editor position, and a new job I start in roughly two weeks. This is just everything I have going on in my academic and work life – not that I have a lot going on in my personal and social life save for one major development, but it’s still a lot to handle!

I’ve decided that now is as good a time as any to start cutting down on my responsibilities in life and to begin prioritizing, both online and offline. I’ve always been fairly good at prioritizing, and now I have to look at everything I am currently involved in and try and put them in some sort of priority-oriented list so I can figure out what can stay and what has to go. I want to try and “trim the fat,” so to speak, because if I don’t I’ll be stretched too thin and that’ll only lead to disaster. I like being busy, but I dislike being overly stressed. I already don’t have the time to write¹ or read books of my own choosing, I really only see my friends during mealtimes², and I am barely finding the right amount of time to focus on the aforementioned major development in my personal life!

I’ve made a few decisions as to what to do offline already, such as only remain active in the organizations/clubs that I truly feel passionate about rather than am merely interested in as well as not commit to anything more than I can handle in the future. In terms of my offline life, I’m looking at cutting down what time I spend on message boards such as VegOpt³ and Snark. I’m also leaning towards quitting the q*bee as it’s just one more commitment that I know I can’t keep up with.

All of these ideas as to what fat to trim are still mainly ideas at the moment. I’m still working on sorting what is important, what is extra, and what is necessary in my life. There have been a lot of changes in a short amount of time, some of them unexpected, and now I have to adjust my life accordingly. It’s not going to be easy, but I know it must be done.

1. I have not touched my work-in-progress novel since I left for school in mid-August. [↩]
2. My friends and I are all super busy; we only really have the time to sit down and talk during meals because otherwise we’re too busy doing work. [↩]
3. I am not stepping down from my position as admin there, nor am I abandoning VegOpt altogether. I just won’t be as active there as I have been in the past. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I took an unplanned (but necessary) hiatus from my blog for the month of September. There were a variety of reasons behind my “disappearance”¹ but the point is, things have hopefully settled down enough for me to be able to focus on blogging regularly again.

But for those who are curious, here are some of the things I’ve been busy with in the last month or so I was away:

• Became the Assistant Web Editor of my school’s literary magazine
  I applied to join staff for my school’s literary magazine for the first time this year². Not only did I apply for staff, but I decided to bite the bullet and apply for an editorial position as well. I wound up landing the position of the Assistant Web Editor and am now in charge of all the web stuff for the magazine! I love my position, and the rest of the staff and editorial board of the magazine are absolutely fantastic and I’m so glad I get to work with such an amazing bunch of people.
• Re-evaluated what type of people I want to be important to me
  They say you can never truly know someone… and while I always believed that, I didn’t realize just how powerful that statement can be until something happens to you and you realize that everything you once believed in someone turned out to be false. That made for an exciting time in my life, let me tell you. But I’ve accepted it and moved on, and hopefully all of that is now in the past.
• Was interviewed for a position at one of my favorite museums
  One of my favorite museums in the DC area is running this internship/volunteer-type program, and on a whim, I sent in an application and landed an interview. I think the interview went really well and I should be training for the position sometime later this month. I’m not sure where I’ll find the time for this job, but I’m really excited as not only will I gain fantastic experience but I just love the museum itself!
• Had tons of extra shifts at work
  Every semester, my office³ holds an on-campus job and internship fair for employers to come recruit students/for students to network with future employers. My office wanted to maximize publicity about the fair, so my coworkers and I were sent to promote the fair and be part of the outreach team to my school’s student body. I had a lot of fun talking up the fair with my peers as I passed out brochures and promoted the event, and my bank account definitely appreciated the extra hours!
• Had a childhood friend visit me for a weekend
  One of my childhood friends recently moved to a city near my school, so she came and visited me one weekend. It was great to see her and to spend time with her. We had so much to catch up on and it was just really nice to get a break from everything in my school life to spend a weekend showing her around the city and talking about everything we could possibly talk about.

1. I’m not sure if disappearance is the right word – yes, I wasn’t blogging, but I was still around on LiveJournal and Twitter. [↩]
2. I had wanted to apply last year, but I had a conflict with when the weekly meeting was. [↩]
3. I work in a career advising office on campus. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I definitely got the quiet, relaxing summer I hoped for back in May. I think I may have gotten a little too much of this particular type of summer, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here are some of the few things I accomplished in the last few months:

• Failed my self-assigned summer reading
  To be fair, it was a very ambitious summer reading list, especially as I don’t read as much as I’d like to anymore. I didn’t fail it altogether, though. I did reread all seven of the Harry Potter novels, read three quarters of the complete works of Sarah Dessen, and read two of the books in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. I just didn’t read any of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares or A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.
• Did lots of crafting
  Those of you that followed my blog this summer will know about my various ventures into crafting. Sewing, knitting, cross stitching… I dabbled in lots of it this summer and have a lot of finished products to show for my work. It was definitely a way to increase my summer productivity!
• Actually began writing a novel
  Longtime readers of this blog will remember a few casual mentions of “my novel” here and there. This summer, I finally got around to actually writing it and even launching my online writing portfolio, amandaosborn.com.
• Failed to find a job
  I talked about how it sucked to be unemployed in May, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a job for the summer due to the increasingly poor job market. However, being unemployed this past summer wasn’t all bad. I made conscious efforts to not spend money unless absolutely necessary, and I was able to spend time doing things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to, like crafting and writing.
• Experimented more with cooking
  I’ve always loved cooking, and for a portion of this summer, it was my job to do the cooking and making sure no one in my house starved to death. I had lots of successes, like my seafood paella, red velvet cake, and mac and cheese. I had one disaster where a carrot cake turned into a carrot souffle… but I’d rather not talk about that

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.