I’ve been MIA for the past little over a week. I literally haven’t had time to touch the blog as I’ve moved back to Boston and started RA training. I’ll pop in here when I can, but no promises for the next week or so. Until next time!
Author: allisontraylor
Guilty Pleasures
I basically stopped watching TV when I went to college. I never feel like I have the time to sit and binge watch Netflix, and I’ve never had a TV to watch anything regularly. But this summer, I’ve gotten hooked on watching Big Brother with my family.
Prior to this summer, I was pretty sure I could declare my lowest point of life if I started watching Big Brother, but I misjudged the show completely. It’s undoubtedly my favorite reality TV show. Much more entertaining/less annoying than The Bachelor, and a super light show to get into. Definitely a new guilty pleasure.
I need to start finding more guilty pleasures that I let myself indulge in during the school year. I’m trying to rework my approach to being in classes so that I have time to actually RELAX and not feel guilty even though I’m not studying. What are your guilty pleasures? More importantly, how do you de-stress?
Two Must-Have Apps Before Heading Off to College
Hi guys! I just have a quick post for you today. I was originally thinking I might have more to add to this list, but I really don’t keep a lot of apps on my phone. Honestly, my 16GB iPhone only holds so much data and I take far too many Instagram photos for it to contain anything but the bare necessities. I’ve found these two apps to be my most used since collge started.
Uber and Lyft // These apps would be nearly useless if I went to school in the middle of nowhere, but since I’m in Boston it’s almost necessary. Public transportation shuts down at something like 2AM (and during the winter–ha!) and taxi drivers almost always take advantage of college students, so these are great alternatives. Uber and Lyft send a car at the touch of a button. I use them pretty much interchangeably, but I check Uber first because although it’s slightly more expensive, I think their drivers are a little more thoroughly screened. However, you’ll find that a lot of drivers drive for both companies and I trust both.
Venmo // Apparently my friends from other schools haven’t heard of the glory of this app, but John introduced me a while back and it’s pretty popular in Boston. It’s the most useful app I have on my phone. You can hook it up to your bank account/debit card in the same manner as you would PayPal and send friends money at the touch of a button. I always forget who owes who money for what, and Venmo eliminates that problem by allowing me to send cash to my friends immediately after a purchase is made!
I hope this was helpful! Let me know if there are any apps you love having on your phone!
Pie!
I rarely choose favorites, but I’m like 95% certain pie is my favorite dessert. Or maybe not because I also love ice cream. And crumbles. And cobbler. And I would never pass up a good cupcake. Stop it, Allison. Clear your mind. Anyway….
My sister Lauren and I trekked to the fruit market to grab some rhubarb (that stuff is huge and heavy) so I could make a couple of strawberry rhubarb pies. To be quite honest, I mostly wanted to take pictures of my pretty pies. I’ve always been equally interested in pretty food as I am in tasty food. I remember being six or seven and reading an article in a magazine about food artists and truly believing it was my calling.
Making food beautiful isn’t always as easy as this looks, and the perfectly latticed and braided pies I’ve been dreaming of all summer didn’t turn out quite like I wanted them to, but fortunately half of my food score is based on taste and I got that one on lock. Here’s the recipe I used. Pro tip: don’t get impatient waiting on your dough to chill. In fact, make the dough the night before. I made two pies and the second crust was much easier to work with because I let it refrigerate longer.
Farewell 612
We sold our house this weekend. 44 hours between when we posted it to signing the forms with the realtor. Yeah. It happened that quickly. To, you know, the house we lived in for literally my entire childhood (the past 16 years) and that I sort of thought we’d be living in for a few more years until my parents actually got around to listing it.
It’s a little weird–first, because I’m actually in town for the event. Because I’ve pretty much missed every other major event in our family since I started college. I was in town for my grandma’s funeral last November, but other than that nada.
Second, our new house is not really ever going to be home for me. Like I will feel comfortable in it and being home is mostly about being around my family and not where our physical location is, but the new house will have a lot different kind of memories in it.
It’s sad when you leave a house to know that you probably won’t ever see the inside of it again. It’s captured in pictures and engrained in my mind through memories, but I won’t be able to show my future friends or children where I grew up.
Anyway, if it’s not obvious by my sentimentality, I’m a little bit too exhausted from the weekend and overwhelmed by what’s ahead to be writing this post up. Until next time!
Happy Friday!
Happy Friday! I keep seeing New York Times articles pop up in my news feed on Facebook, and I’ve really enjoyed these in particular:
The Real Skinny on Freshman Year // A mother’s funny and true take on freshman year. Don’t stop reading at the first paragraph warning, even if you’re not a freshman.
A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing // An insightful take on dating in our generation.
I hope you all have a great weekend!
The World at Your Fingertips
It can start when you’re wrapping up high school or wrapping up college or when you land your first internship or job. You’ve suddenly entered this weirdly adult phase where the world is at your fingertips. No one is preventing you from walking down the street to grab a pint of ice cream, and no one is preventing you from buying plane tickets across the world.
I felt less freedom in choosing where to live when I went to school because my college decision was limited by finding a university where I would be supported financially by a lot of merit aid, but I knew I wanted to have access to a prominent city and I knew I wanted to leave the South. And I did it. It required drive and persistence, but I made the leap and haven’t looked back.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this freedom, and how the two big leaps I’ve made (Boston for college and going to India last summer) have led to my coolest life experiences thus far, and I’ve already started pondering my next moves. I have a six month co-op in the Spring, next semester, Fall 2016, and my first post-college move to experience wherever I want in the world. It feels like this freedom could stay for many years to come, but I don’t know if I’ll actually feel the freedom once I have a steady job out of college and am starting my career. I need to pounce on every opportunity that comes my way in the next year. Stay tuned, y’all!
Feeling Young
Hypothetically, based on my life’s current truths and the predictions I could draw from them, I could have a steady job, be married, own a house and have a baby within the next five years.
Holy poop.
Five years ago (photographic evidence of me five years ago shown above) I was about to start my sophomore year in high school—a little cooler and a little braver than before. It feels a lot further away than the start of junior or senior year, but still not that far away on my timeline at all.
For the record, there’s almost no chance I will have all of the aforementioned things in my life five years from now. There have been times in the past few years that I’ve desired all of those things within that time frame, but the older I get the more I find myself wanting to take my time and space things out a bit.
In fact, I’ve been having a little bit of a life crisis over it lately. I very suddenly don’t feel old enough to do any of the grown up things that are coming my way in two short years. Which is making me feel and sound like a normal college student instead of the 30-year-old at heart I have been for literally ¾ of my life.
I’m just trying to treat this as a lesson for living in the moment, and my guess is that it’s probably good for me. I’ve been getting a lot better at letting my plans go—a few months ago, I completely changed around my course of study for the rest of college. I’m considering studying abroad next fall, or maybe I won’t. I’d like to go somewhere warm for co-op in the Spring, but maybe I’ll stay in Boston. Who knows! Letting go is bringing the life back into my life!
I have this internal obligation to use everything that I own, and if I find something I’m not using that I should be, I find myself chucking the guilt into the trash can or figuring out a way to use it. As with any trait, there are upsides and downsides. The upside is that I am not wasteful. I WILL NOT let any of those cookies go into the trash. The downside: I waste a lot of time doing things I don’t want to do just for the sake of avoiding tangible wastefulness.
You might remember The Undomestic Goddess from my beach reads post a couple of weeks ago. The author, Sophie Kinsella, wrote the Shopaholic series (most famous book in the series is Confessions of a Shopaholic, if ya didn’t catch that). Based on my go-to beach read qualities, these books should be some of my favorites, but I had forgotten that I don’t actually like them.
Remember Amelia Bedelia from grade school? The maid in all of those children’s books who made mistake after blubbering mistake? I hated those books, and all of Sophie Kinsella’s heroines remind me of Amelia Bedelia. Instead of being intrigued by the catastrophe unfolding in the plot, I’m just annoyed. Watching other people make bad decisions is just painful.
But instead of putting the catastrophe down when it becomes painful, I keep going. I had myself convinced that I wanted to finish the story when in reality I wanted to finish the book. If I wanted to finish the story, I could have found a summary online. Thankfully, for the second time ever in my memory, I made an agreement with myself to drop a pleasure read without finishing it—after the point where pleasure reads or pleasure foods or pleasure classes stop being pleasurable (ugh, I swear there’s no innuendo here), I have to remind myself to drop them.
What Day Is It?
This is approximately the mid-way point between something and something else in my summer. I don’t know what day it is, I couldn’t tell you what I did yesterday, and everything has been blurring together.
My parents are moving for the first time in 16 years and the only time in my memory. I wasn’t as strategic as I was hoping to be in scheduling my time at home this summer because I’ve been here a little too consistently for my liking and I’ve been dragged in to help with the move and have touched approximately none of my summer to-do list.
I feel like I’m repeating myself on the blog and having an identity crisis all at once, and like I haven’t really talked to John in approximately a year, and I feel like I have a load of stuff coming at me for the school year that I just don’t want to touch. Like my email box. I should get on that.
Anyway, my point is, this blog here is about to become very me-focused I think because that’s the only thing I can think to or know to write about when I’m so frazzled. I go back to school in 16 days so bear with me. At that point my life will more consistently be revolving around school and I’ll figure out a better mission statement for this blog thing. That being said, I’ll keep checking in every day, so don’t lose hope on me completely!
Until next time!
two L allison 