For my last and final blog post I decided to focus on ways that I can get creative to fix one of the biggest issues in my life. I am so addicted to coffee and energy drinks that if I do not have like three of them a day I cannot stay awake. This is getting bad because sometimes my heart starts beating out of rhythm so I need to cut back. This sounds easy for most people, but the way I am going to work on this is to replace the drinks with flavored water. For some reason, I cannot drink water and find it so much harder to put down than things that have flavor. I have been like vitamin water recently so I am going to invest in a pack of those as a caffeine replacement. I am going to try drinking water first thing in the morning or eating breakfast to see if it satisfies the craving I have for my morning coffee. Another important step I will be taking is getting more sleep. Lately I have not been able to sleep for more than four hours and I think this is part of the reason I require so much liquid energy to get me threw the day. Sometimes when I am extra tired, I feel like the caffeine actually makes it work rather than waking me up so I am hoping that this helps resolve that. I am also hoping that I will be less anxious in the day if I am not consuming so many drinks that make me nervous and jittery for no reason. Wish me luck!

I loveeee doing my friends’ hair. Most of them have such specific ways they like it so they never let me touch it except for Elizabeth. At one point I was really struggling academically and I thought that it may be a better idea to go to cosmetology school because it comes to me naturally. I decided not to because I like it as more of a hobby and if I was doing it all day everyday I think I may grow to hate it. I’m proud of this picture because I did that hairstyle in less than five minutes and it turned out so beautiful. I also love when my friends like it and they get excited. I feel like I could get creative and make this a side hustle if I wanted to. I really want to do peoples make up, but it is hard to find someone who will let me try. I feel like my mom may let me if I ask her next time I am home. It’s hard because people know their own face so well so when other people do their makeup they don’t feel like themselves sometimes. I think that I would be better working with people I know because I am more familiar with what they do and don’t like.

Today I saw these firetrucks on my walk home from class. They had to knock down the poles that keep cars from driving through campus so I assumed it was serious. I get so scared of accidentally catching my house on fire from leaving the oven on or my curling iron plugged in. The worst experience I had with fire was when I was in the mountains doing fireworks. My brother forgot to put the firework in the launcher so instead of going into the air it just went directly into the side of the mountain. It was so big and the trucks could not get to us because the roads were so windy and narrow. We had to figure out how to put it out fast because it was going up the hill where more people lived. We were beating it with brooms and the guys were filling trashcans up with water from the hot tub to dump. I get so intrigued by the firefighters because I feel like that is a dream a lot of people have when they were younger and I wonder if it was theirs.

Ever since I was young I have always loved dolphins. My dream is to be a dolphin trainer, but unfortunately it is hard to make a living if you do not have multiple jobs. I do not know why, but I have always had this feeling that dolphins are my spirit animal. I also love killer whales. I get frustrated when other people say that their favorite animal is a killer whale and then I have to calm down and remind myself that other people are allowed to like the same things. There is a dolphin centre in Florida that I would love to visit because they use the dolphins to work with patients with autism and ptsd. This is similar to what I did working with horses. This picture was taken in Miami and the orca there is being released back into the ocean. I am interested to see how they accomplish this because the whale has never learned how to hunt its own food and has no pod to spend time with. I feel like they are going to have to come up with unique strategies to prepare it for the foreign environment. This is something that I find so intriguing and I want to look into ways that I could potentially become involved with such efforts.

This is a picture that I had on my GoPro from when I was 15. I used to be so cringy and bring it everywhere. I thought that I was so cool, but now I look back on this and am embarrassed. I wish that I would have lived in the moment more rather than trying to capture everything on camera. It is nice to look back on positive memories that I may not have remembered otherwise, but pictures like this are frustrating because it is so pretty I don’t understand why I needed to be focused on my camera out there. I used so swim out on boogie boards and try and get cool videos of all my friends surfing and now I’m regret not taking that time to actually surf. I feel like this phase happened for so many other people because it is around the time that influencers started to become a real thing. I thought that I was being so beachy and wanted to be like Jay Alvarez and Alexis Ren who were making travel videos around the world. It is crazy to look back and see how they were one of the first people who blew up like that and now being an influencer for work is what a lot of people are trying to do. I personally do not think that I would be comfortable sharing my life with so many people, but I do think it is a creative work of art who people who choose to do so.

I go and do work and the coffee shop Foxtrot all the time and I always see the little German market called Kuby’s across the street, but I have never been in. My friend Elizabeth is German so she has gone a couple of times and recommended it. When I got inside I was so excited because all of the snacks like the gummy worms were German. It felt so authentic. I feel like this place has to be so comforting for people who may be from Germany originally because it is like home away from home. When I lived in New Hampshire, I would always get so excited seeing something that reminded me of my home in North Carolina. This does not happen as much when I am in Texas because it is so much more similar to where I am from. I also love sausage because it is what my family gives out as gifts to people on Christmas. I do not know if this is something that people do everywhere or if it is just something people do in my town. Every family has something specific that they give to people like pickles or pecan pie.

My friend had to go to a museum for one of her classes and randomly sent me this. It reminded me of all the theories I kept hearing about on TikTok last night when I could not sleep. My TikTok has a lot of content from the Joe Rogan podcast and he had someone on who was talking about this theory that their have been advanced civilisations on the Earth before and the magnetic poles flip every 6,000ish years. This would cause a lot of tsunamis and earthquakes that would eliminate humans. This really freaked me out especially when they started to talk about the pyramids. I did not realize that we do not really understand how those were made. It makes no sense to me how they would have carried those huge rocks that are also cut so precisely with no modern technology. I could not sleep after looking into all of this and started to wonder how much of history is real and how much we had to make creative assumptions about. I have also been listening to some content from a woman who escaped North Korea and it made me sad to hear the way they are treated and have no freedom of expression.

I had to get a new car and for some reason a Volkswagen Bug was calling my name. I feel like whoever came up with this car took a creative risk because it is different looking than everything else. I feel like the car represents fun and young energy because it doesn’t look too serious. Their idea definitely stood out because they are so classic and have held their value over the course of time. I think it is so funny when I am at a stop light sometimes and I can see the people beside me hit each other because of the punch buggie game. Sometimes I think games like that are the best form of advertising because I don’t even know how it came about, but it keeps the product relevant. They also make the product feel more personal. There is this one old Bug in my hometown and it is painted like the one from the movie Herbie. I wonder if when people make movies like that they reach out to companies like Volkswagen to let them know what they are doing or if they have to get permission about anything. I also think about this when I see movies and they use a certain song. If I was an artist and they choose to use my music for something cool I would be so excited but I would also appreciate if they checked in with me to make sure it wasn’t used out of context.

I watched the movie Serendipity with one of my friends for the first time about 2 years ago. It is pretty much a romantic movie and the girl does not want to give the boy she meets her number because she believes in faith and wants it to happen more naturally. She writes her name on a dollar and then buys something with it and says that if the dollar ever comes back to him then it is meant to be. Obviously in the real life he would most likely never find that dollar, but it was a cute and creative idea for the plot of the movie. My friend wrote her name and number on this five dollar bill just because it seemed fun and was inspired after watching the movie. The other day I was cleaning out my car and had some cash I needed to organise and found it! I was so excited because it had been a good amount of time and I totally forgot that she did that. It would have been so crazy if I found this like 20 years later and we are still friends.

Freshman year I got Corona and thought I was going to die. I was so annoyed because it seemed like everyone else was going out and got a little cold and then they were immune, but I had every single symptom and more so bad. I stayed in a hotel and was so lonely. I gave my debit card to one of my friends to get me some snacks and stuff and they came back with this stuffed animal dinosaur and I named him Roger. I know that it was intended as a joke, but somehow that dinosaur made me feel so much better because I felt like I had a little companion. I literally thought to myself that I understood how Tom Hanks got so attached to that volleyball in the movie Cast Away. I thought it would be funny to keep my friends updated and I would send them a picture of Roger doing different activities in the hotel room everyday which was so funny for some reason. We still have Roger in our apartment and it is going to make me so sad to pack things like that up when we move out because there are just so many memories. I was never a kid who had to bring a stuffed animal or blanket with me places, but I think Roger has to come with me and stay on the couch at the next place I live because it makes me feel connected to my friends.