Throwback Thursday: Journal #9

2011-2012

     "I haven't written in here for awhile. Longer than I like. So much has happened!
     Well, since I didn't get into Coral Reef, and neither did Sarah. I was set to go to Robert Morgan. Sarah and I went to the extremely disorganized orientation and got all excited. Then in the middle of the week my mom got a call... and she called me... and I got into Coral Reef! I'm SO excited! Another one of my friends got in off the waiting list too, but I don't think that Sarah will...
     Nicole and I went to the Coral Reef Orientation today! I met another girl who is also in art! We got our pictures taken for our school I.D.'s then I went to the art room. Mr. McKinley already gave us our summer drawing assignments! Then we went out to the courtyard. I got my class shirt and my uniform shirts. Then I signed up to try out for color guard. 
     There was two days for color guard. One on Tuesday for us to learn what we need to know for the try out, and one on Thursday. Thursday was the actual try out. On Tuesday, I met Amber. She's in my grade too! Plus she is in art! I think we will be great friends. I also met Brittany! She is already on the team and helped me learn everything. Thursday went pretty good! My try-out went well! I didn't drop the flag, not once!
     A little over a week later, I got a call saying that I made it on the team! I'm so excited, I can't wait for next year!"

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     I was blinded by excitement at this point. I was ready to leave Princeton as fast as I could, and enter the exciting world of high school. If only I knew what a miserable four years were to come. It is NOT like it is in the movies, but much MUCH worse. Although, in movies certain aspects were worse than they were in real life. For example, there was not a group of bullies who pinned kids to lockers and stole their lunch money. The bullies of Coral Reef were much more sneaky than that, they were the kind of bullies you didn't see coming until it was to late. On another subject, there aren't very many sweet, caring teachers in the public school system. Most of the ones that I faced truly needed someone to tell them everything they were doing wrong. A lot of them did not seem to realize things, such as that shoving hours of AP homework in my face (due next class of course) would NOT help me learn. I would spend to many hours to the busy work that I rarely had time to actually study. These are just a few examples of the many things wrong with high school these days.

xoxo, tay

Throwback Thursday: Journal #8

2010-2011

     "Today was the Fall Festival at Princeton. I had a great time with my friends! My mom dropped me off and I hung out with Autumn and Amber until the rest of our friends got there. I did the rock climbing wall first, which was really fun! I forgot how much I like rock climbing. I got to the top really fast! Then Autumn and Amber did it. Autumn didn't make it to the top. Amber did, eventually. Later, we met up with Alexis. 
     When Alexis got there, we got in line for henna tattoos. I got a flower on my wrist. Later I went back and got my name on my arm. 
     We went to the dunk tank around noon to dunk Coach Johnny. Amber didn't get it with the ball, but ended up using her hand when he made fun of her "throwing arm."
     I did the rock climbing wall again, and made it up the hardest side!
     One of my friends put me in jail, so I put HIM in jail. 
      After the festival, I had to go to art class with Victoria, and worked on my drawing from last week."

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     Okay, my old journals are really starting to get boring. Also, I am beginning to realize that there are some really embarrassing stories in here that involve people I totally still know... It is getting pretty hard to pick entries to share. I tend to chicken out with the juicy stuff, and end up posting something similar to the entry above: a simple account of what happened that day. This is a time where I started writing about more than just my day. Many people have tried to refer to my journal as a diary, and I tend to correct them quickly. I am not sure why I did so, because according to the definitions of these two words, both a journal and a diary are the same thing. 

Diary: A book in which one keeps a daily record of events and experiences.

Journal: A daily record of news and events of a personal nature; a diary. 

     I have always referred to mine as journals, mostly because that is what my mom called hers. It is the term she used when she introduced the hobby to me, when I was a little girl. I have always taken my journalling pretty seriously, and when people called my journal a diary, I tended to correct them. I suppose that I thought the term diary was taken as being more childish. Only young girls in movies kept diaries of there silly little problems, is what I thought. But now, I can see that the term diary and journal are very much the same thing. People tend to use the term diary to tease me, not a lot of people keep journals anymore, that I know of. However, journaling (or keeping a diary) is a habit I intend to pass down to my children. I hope that they grasp it the way I did. As silly as it sounds, journals like this could be the next version of The Diary of Anne Frank. They could be what provides history to the future generations about what life is like for us here, and now. 

Throwback Thursday: Journal #7

2010

     "I went on a field trip with Princeton today. The whole 7th grade went to Island Dolphin Care. I had a great time! Then again, I like Marine Biology. In the bus on the way to the Keys, I sat next to Priscila. 
     Ms. Debbie wanted to make it an all day field trip, so we stopped in Biscayne National Park to walk a trail. It went to far into the water, there were some parts that we had to jump from rock to rock not to get wet! Priscila and I walked together the whole time.
     When we got there, first, we watched a movie about mollusks. Then we dissected a squid! It was so cool! The squid I dissected was a guy. I could tell because of the color of the insides. I got to skin it and use its ink to draw stuff!
     After dissection, we went to the touch tank. I held several star fish, one brittle star, a sea cucumber, hermit crab, sponge, and a live clam! I kissed the sea cucumber to get seven years of good luck. I even touched a sea slug and a sea anemone!"

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     This is one of my coolest journals to look at on the outside. It has this beautiful wood on it with a lizard cutout. I acquired it from Costa Rica, and the pages on the inside are made from recycled paper. The content of this journal is absolutely, horrendously boring. I don't know what happened here, but I seemed to have gotten into a groove of just recording what I did throughout the day. It is, for the most part, absent of other thoughts. I totally struggled to find a good entry to share with you guys, so I settled on this passage about a field trip I went on with my seventh grade class that I apparently thought was "so cool!"

xoxo, tay

Throwback Thursday: Journal #2

2006-2008

"On Wednesday we went to Chimny Rock. It was so cool! The rock was so high up! On the way back to the parking lot we could hike back or take the elevator. I hiked back. It was cool. 

Hannah and I split our money to buy a box of taffy. On the way to the restaurant I had a piece of taffy and it made my tooth come out! It wasn't even loose! It started to bleed a lot, I hate the taste of blood. I got blood on my new pants! Sad me. I hope it comes out. I put my tooth under my pillow but the tooth fairy didn't come when I check this morning nothing was there. So I will just wait."

Every time I read old journal entries, I cringe at the lack of quality writing and the embarrassing content. Then again, I was in elementary school, so what can we really expect? Please note the run-on sentences, referencing myself in 3rd person, me not sparing the gory details of my tooth coming out, and my lack of ability to find a synonym for "cool." If I remember correctly this was the experience that made me low key realize that the tooth fairy was not real. There was also a  following experience where I lost my tooth at girl scout camp that confirmed my suspicions. 

Keep a look out for next weeks Throwback Thursday, because they are finally back!

xoxo, tay

Throwback Thursday: Journal #1

"This is from my ballet recital! It was an Irish theme. We got tambourines and pretty green and black costumes and wore flowers on my head. I felt like a princess! I was really good and did just ballet and tap. My tap costume is red and silver. That one is kind of embarrassing."

Oh those were the days. I remember always enjoying my dance classes a lot. I love the modesty I had as a child (note my sarcasm). That dance had always been one of my favorites because it seemed to be a bit more unique compared to other ballet classes, plus we had cool tambourines that we got to dance with. That same year was my first year taking tap class. I distinctly remember hating that costume and the theme of the dance. I mean the actual dancing was fun, but I remember not quite being fond of the theme. My other friends all had such cute tap costumes and I was in a red and silver mess of sequins. I figured that was my first year and it could only get better from there. Oh was I wrong. My second year of tap class I was in a dance themed "The Ugly Bug Ball" and of course the costumes were once again pretty bad. Neon green with black and white polka dots. You can imagine the way a costume for a dance with a name like that would look...

Stay tuned for next weeks Throwback Thursday! Expect the entries to become longer and more detailed as I get older. I was so young in these first few so they are pretty short a lot of the time.

xoxo, tay

Throwback Thursday: Journal #0

It's Thursday and that means that this is the first entry to my Throwback Thursday series! Every Thursday I am going to share a journal entry with you all from my journals, starting with the first one and going down the line! For this first journal, I cheated and picked several pages to share due to how short each entry is.

This is the first journal in my collection. I did not know I had it until recently when my mom found it in our garage and showed me. This is why I have it labeled as journal zero, for many years I had another one labeled as my first journal. My handwriting is quite awful in these pages, I was pretty young, so don't judge! Of course, me being the art lover I was I had to include drawings in some. Also, if you look really closely you can see where my mom wrote in corrections. My mom works in the school system and was probably a teacher at the time so having me start a journal was most likely her way of trying to get me to work on my penmanship and spelling skills.

"I went camping with the Girl Scouts. We went to the aquarium."

"Auntie Kristin went to the movies with me. We saw Finding Nemo. Nemo is a clown fish."

"Gramps and I are swimming in the pool. I am squatting Gramps with water."

"This is my dog Baer. He is sleeping with pups. There are 9 pups. He looks cute."

"I am learning how to ice skate. I can ice skate all by myself. I have gone ice skating 4 times."

"This is Trey and I on Rodeo Day. I rode Betty the horse. I also had my face painted."

xoxo, tay