The grass is always greener...

When I was in middle school, I (like most kids) couldn't wait for high school and (like most kids) had a skewed perception of what those four years were actually going to be like. I blame the babysitters who let me watch teen movies, and the fact that The WB was one of the few channels that came in clearly on my bedroom's broken cable box. Those two factors alone meant that my expectations were weird and my destiny was to be disappointed.

And disappointed I was.

When I finally got to high school, I spent most of my time bitching and moaning. (At the teachers. At the homework. At my classmates, the cafeteria food, the school song... you name it, I bitched about it.) The adults in my life tried to help by sending cliche words of wisdom my way. Half of them told me to enjoy the experience while I could (translation: this as good as it gets) while the others reassured me that it would be over before I knew it (which just means: grit your teeth and suck it up). 

I've never been good at gritting my teeth. Or sucking it up. Same goes with biting my tongue. I'm more of the "shake your first in the air and scream until something gets better" type. Which in my experience has about a 47% success rate. The downside is that I usually end up giving up and moving on 53% of the time. 

The bottom line is this: I've moved twenty times. A list of my past addresses would trail across four states and countless towns. I've put in brief appearances at four different high schools and a lot has gotten lost in translation. Which means I took Physical Education of Freshman during my senior year, three different sections of Economics, and yet somehow never made it to Driver's Ed. To this day, I'm a twenty-year old college student who has no idea how to drive. Or ride a bike. 

I've never been camping. Or played a musical instrument. Or seen any of the Star Wars movies.

When experiences like these come up in conversation, I usually explain them away with a shrug and a "yeah, I never really got around to it." It wasn't until recently that I realized I might be missing out on something. So when this project was assigned, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to make a list of these experiences and to check them off one by one. 

So here's to hoping for no broken bones?