I've got me some new rocks in my rockbox! What is a rockbox? Well, listen and learn. When I and my brother were younger, we used to have these two boxes (I think mine had a glittery jaguar on the top) that we kept what were, in our vast little-kid knowledge banks, extremely priceless rocks. Cool shapes, multi-colored, sparkly, our rocks ran the gamut of beauty. Some kids collected Pokemon cards. Some collected movie ticket stubs. We collected rocks. Not a very taxing job to find a cool rock. I suppose they meant a lot to me, though, in retrospect. Having something that you had gone out and collected yourself that no one else had...now that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The other version of putting rocks into your rockbox, which also applies to my still-mysterious initial exclamation, comes from one of my friends from home, who is still near and dear to my heart, though we hardly talk. Her idea, though I think it came from a book, was to have two mason jars and fill them with 10 rocks each. Every time something made her really happy, she would take a rock out of the sad jar and put it into the happy jar - the concept being that the jars are a physical representation of your happiness level. I wonder if people who study happiness use things like that?
Now that you know my two versions of a rockbox, you can guess that I have found some really cool rocks in the streets of New York and put them in a Sparkly Jaguar box, or taken rocks out of a sad mason jar and put them into a happy mason jar, or that all this is really just figurative and I'm really speaking in a metaphorical way as I am wont to do. I'd go for the last option, although it is informed by the other two choices. So what's going in and out of your mason jars?
In my life, a few things. I've started a book club. We're reading a book I've already read once before, Atlas of the Human Heart, but I love it so much I wanted to share it with my book-clubbers. It is such a joy to be able to have some time to sit down with these friends and talk about stuff that I feel never gets brought up in day-to-day crazed New York life. We can relax, chat about hypothetical trips to China, eat WaWa (wait, I do that like every day), and laugh about how things would be different if we had lots of money. If I ever wrote a book, it would be those kinds of conversations that I would want to characterize my twenties. Why is that banter relaxing and comforting? Maybe because it's the heart and soul of my feelings, I don't know. Simplicity doesn't employ me full time, but it's a nice temp job while I'm staving off insanity.
The end of my junior year beckons, and with it comes the realization that I have one measly little year left of my entire schooling process. Shit. That's preposterous. However, I stand here at the edge of the world with open arms, embracing the million-mile fall I know is coming. I bathe in the fear of the unknown. And, besides, I still have three papers to write, a final to struggle through that I know nothing about, fall auditions, and final juries to go through. To that effect, I'm still in Junior Year's sinister clutches. But the worst of it is over, so I'll persevere for the rest of week. There's no real reason to whine, right? I'm living life, and that's the only thing we can try for every day. Good or bad, rich or poor, living is better than not trying.
