Pic a Day - 9/19 to 9/25

Mon. Sep 19, sweet venue for the ASL club

Tues. Sep 20, dinner at the Ross Commons House with the Commons faculty heads

This next picture exists in tandem with a Google Photos flashback notification I got, reminding me of this date four years ago (September 21, 2012). I'm including it here not as my picture for Wednesday of this week, but because you won't get the connection-slash-inside joke if I don't include it, and I'd like for you all to be in on it. So here is the collage Google Photos made for me:

... and Wednesday's photo was a four-year-anniversary commemoration/response to it:

Wed. Sep 21, as a freshman in high school (above) versus as a freshman in college

Thurs. Sep 22, that one tree on the first day of fall

Fri. Sep 23, (my) tapestry in the common room

Sat. Sep 24, biking into and exploring town

Sun. Sep 25, "like a bridge over troubled water..."

Pic a Day - 6/13 to 6/19

Mon. June 13, trying on sandals at REI (these are not the ones I bought)

Tues. June 14, summers are for hammocks

Wed. June 15, smoke rolling in

Thurs. June 16, second selfie of the week because: haircut

Fri. June 17, kicking myself in the pants to beat writer's block

Sat. June 18, extras on set

Sun. June 19, father's day checking out cars and test-driving

Pic a Day - 5/16 to 5/22

Mon. May 16, fraying

Tues. May 17, dappled sky

Wed. May 18, selfie with Peachy the tiny tiny house

Thurs. May 19, the daisy patch

Fri. May 20, Albuquerque Bernie Sanders rally

Sat. May 21, Dad and I visited a "tiny house" for sale in Santa Fe

Sun. May 22, inscriptions

Farewell Moments

Dear me;
Don't worry about how many yearbook signatures you get. If you get a hundred, fantastic. If you get zero, wonderful. If you get anything in between, that's perfectly fine, too. But, really, it's not about lines that someone scribbles on a page in a book you'll forget about in ten years. What matters are the moments that someone shapes in your life. These are the things you'll carry with you. So instead of immortalizing signatures, I want to imprint on you these moments. I don't want your feeble memory to lose its grasp, and I can't trust it to hold on indefinitely.

One;
A friend of mine recently suffered an injury at the hands of a machine, in which her hair got sucked into a fan and caused hair loss, damage to her scalp, and a minor concussion. This accident occurred on a Friday, and she was out of school for a few days, returning on Wednesday afternoon and easing herself into the schedule of presentations. We got a fifteen-minute break to go outside, walk around, get some fresh air, and I was initially going to go with another friend to adventure to the xeriscaped courtyard-garden behind the science building, but my injured friend couldn't walk very far distances or very quickly due to the minor concussion. So she and I meandered around the grass, searching for the owlets and otherwise leisurely walking around across from the library. It was quietly memorable because it seemed so normal and natural, but tender at the same time. Also, the dynamic was very different than when someone had run up to her and given her a hug when she saw her and others chattered away about what had happened while she was gone. My relationship with her is a lot different. Initially I was upset with myself for being aloof when she arrived, but our short perambulation reminded me that this is where the value in our friendship lies.

Two;
At the all-school awards ceremony on Thursday, the headmaster listed the several teachers that would be retiring after the completion of the current academic year, and I was surprised to hear the name of my United States history teacher from junior year. Once we were dismissed and everyone was leaving the gym, I saw my former teacher sitting a few rows behind where I had been seated. I approached him, and he smiled his crooked smile and stood up. We shook hands and I congratulated him on his retirement, admitting how sad I was that he would be leaving, but he assured me that he would still be involved with the school as the football coach. We seemed to shake hands for a lot longer than was typical before releasing our grasp. He asked me where I had decided to go to college, and after remarking on Middlebury's academic reputation, he mused about my going to "the wilds of New England." He congratulated me, and I congratulated him again before I continued on my way. I was glad to have had the opportunity to talk to him, because he was my favorite teacher from junior year, and in asking him to write a recommendation for me, he has been more involved in my college search than any other professor of mine. Also, I had bade farewell to a retiring former teacher at the end of junior year, and it was nice to be able to do that again, especially since I'm moving on to new journeys in my life as well.

Three;
I did a lot of gazing out the window during presentations on Thursday, and a patch of daisies underneath a cottonwood caught my eye. I didn't have my camera, and we had to go to the awards ceremony, so I reminded myself to head back down to the library after school to take pictures. As I walked across the football field and the track, I snapped some photos of the sky, the clouds, and the trees, and when I ducked around to the side of the library, something in me ached. I felt some reflexive expression from this quotation: "I hurt.... It's a good hurt, though, the wonderful, beautiful hurt called love where your heart breaks in a second and is mended a million times over in the next, where an internal flame scalds you thoroughly from the inside out and then washes you clean of the burns instantly." I walked through the thick grass littered with tree debris and weeds, marveling at the tall flowers as they stretched up proudly and drank in the sun. This was a corner of the library I had walked by a few times but wasn't particularly familiar with. It felt secluded, yet the simple, natural beauty emanating from it overwhelmed me. I identified with that quotation because, all of a sudden, a nostalgia had come over me. Even though I hadn't visited the niche before, a yearning filled me, a yearning to not leave yet because I still had more to see, to discover, to explore, to cherish. I recognized and embraced my whole-bodied connection to nature and the Earth in those moments.

Tomorrow I Declare Myself Vegan

Tomorrow, January 19, 2016, I "officially" become vegan. I say this because I pretty much decided at the beginning of 2016 to make the full transition to veganism, but I still had non-vegan food products in my pantry and freezer that I had just bought. Once I had finished the last of those, I would be able to say that I actually am a vegan.

I have been vegetarian since July 2, 2012, so I have just passed the three-and-a-half-year marker for being meat-free. With every year, I came to a new realization of what really is and isn't veg-friendly. Since you may be curious, here's a rough timeline:

March-April 2011: going vegetarian for the first time
July 2012: going vegetarian anew
January-December 2013: eating vegan two days a week
~2013: finding out cheese has rennet
~2014: learning about lard, gelatin, carmine, shellac, and other animal by-products (I think this period of discovery probably started sometime in 2013 and continued into the following year)
October 2015: finding out refined sugar isn't vegetarian/vegan (learning about bone char)
January 2016: making the switch

In hindsight, it seems that I was always heading toward veganism (or, at least, toward something beyond basic lacto-ovo vegetarianism), and recently, I must admit that I questioned myself a lot about my dietary habits. "Wouldn't it be easier to just go fully vegan," I wondered, "instead of being super-strict vegetarian and having dozens of animal by-products to avoid while holding onto the few that you find 'ethical'?" The other day, one of my teachers curiously asked me why veganism was better than vegetarianism, and I had to stop and think for a moment, but I finally answered, "I didn't think vegetarianism was enough, ethically."

Since my first attempt at veganism flopped and I felt miserable all the time, I am making more of an effort to research on my second go at it. (E.g. I put flax oil in morning smoothies for the omega-3s and just picked up a canister of nutritional yeast to add B12s to my diet. Also, I'll be drinking more almond milk for the calcium and vitamin D, but I'm taking some pills to supplement it.) In one of my Pic a Day posts a few months ago, I said that to be vegan, one has to be good at food alchemy. So I guess I can think of it, from this point forward, as becoming an apprentice in food alchemy.

P.S. When I see this symbol on food, it makes my life complete! And if I ever get a tattoo, I swear that this will be it. (Kidding. Kind of.)

Bandana-Bandit-Bibs

"Come on: how cute do I look in this bib?" -TiMER

 Yep, my thoughts exactly when I wore this bandana around my neck. But of course I had to put it on Sunny and she won; she looked freaking adorable in this "bib."