My AUSS-ome adventures

“Adrift in the shallows, a modest repose//adorn with coral, your bright colors show” - Marathon

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Haha, I’m gonna make this blog really cheesy by putting up bucketloads of pictures with accompanying song lyrics!! Deal wit it. 

So yeah, I’m studying abroad in Australia next semester so cue mandatory self-indulgent blog where I’m gonna spend a lot of time talking about myself and pretend to be worldly and inevitably post up instagram pictures of me clinking cocktail glasses with my hip new Australian best friends (read: random people I meet in the street). 

I’ve never been this excited and nervous before in my life. One minute I can’t wait to get the hell out of Texas (that’s actually a common feeling for anyone who lives in Texas) and go meet every single sea turtle in Australia and the next minute, I just wanna throw up and crawl into bed and watch old episodes of Arrested Development and never talk to anyone or go outside ever again and lots and lots of cats. 

It’s weird.

I’m excited because for the first time in my life, I’m doing something I want, completely of my own accord influenced by nobody else except me (aaand maybe Men at Work, but that’s another story). It kind of started over the summer when I was rummaging through a box of memories I found - more like, a box full of stuff indistinguishable from a trash can at Hobby Lobby. I found a small notecard with my wimpy little girl handwriting on it of a “List of Things I Want to Be When I Grow Up”. On that list were some pipe dreams including president and astronaut (can’t find Iowa on a map and I’m afraid of heights) but buried within a list of unrealistic expectations I saw the words “marine biology” written in small, earnest letters. 

Get ready for a cheesefest now, guys. I immediately remembered the book that CMU sent us the summer before our freshman year: Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”. That part about following your childhood dreams. I remembered hours I spent researching dolphins, watching NatGeo specials on the ocean, reading books on maritime law (yeah I was a nerd, let’s just get that out of the way now), and even once attempting to create a realistic model of a humpback whale using nothing but blue pipe cleaners (needless to say, that ended really well). Here was a genuine interest I had as a kid, something I didn’t have the means to pursue then but I have the chance to pursue now. So what was I waiting for?

Aand here we are now folks. 

As for the nervous part? Well I’m nervous because I’m going to a place I’ve never been before, where I know nobody, completely by myself, where I haven’t yet found a place to live, taking classes in a subject I might suck at and/or might not really like after all, and thus have my childhood dreams crushed faster than that sea monster from Pirates of the Caribbean crushed that guy’s ship that one time. 

So for now I’m going to stave off that feeling of stomach churning nervousness by eating a lot of my mom’s cooking and shopping for things I don’t need (ya know, usual gurrl stuf guiisee).