Next Year

I was reminded this morning of how much I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading next school year.  You see, I’m not going to school next year.  I am proudly graduating next June, and at that point I will be not quite seventeen.  This all goes back to when I was twelve years old and going into seventh grade and my mom decided I didn’t actually need to do seventh grade, and I therefore skipped seventh grade and went straight on to eighth.  So now I am a just sixteen-year-old senior in highschool, and I am not planning on going to college as a just seventeen-year-old freshman because, quite frankly, I am sick and tired of being the youngest in my class and of people asking me, when they finally put my age and grade together, “Oh, so are you like, really smart?”  Because the answer is no, I am not “like, really smart”, and I did not ask to skip a grade, and this is all my mother’s fault.  Therefore, next year I intend to take a year off and travel.  There are only two problems with this plan: a.) I will be alone, and b.) I will not legally be an adult, which creates a lot of problems when combined with problem A.  My initial plan was to move to Washington DC for a few months, because my favorite uncle is going to be living there, and I have always wanted to live in DC for a few months, ever since the first time I went there when I was eleven.  Then I thought I might go chill in Texas for a bit (a very, very short bit), because my mom is getting married next summer and moving there.  Then, if she hasn’t been sent somewhere too remote, I figured I might go visit my sister, Hannah, who is planning on joining the Peace Corp.  And in between times I’d come back to my home sweet home in So Cal to visit my other sister, Camryn, and my grandma (we’ve lived with my grandma since I was two; Camryn goes to school a few hours from our house).  This plan fell apart for the simple reason that it simply didn’t take up enough time.  I have about nine months to do all this, and I’ve only filled in about five, and I do not intend to sit around my house for four months.  I was thinking about this, and then I got what I thought was a really great idea.  You see, I want to be a director when I grow up, so I thought maybe I could get an internship with a film studio so I could have some experience in the industry before studying in college.  The problem is that all the studios in the US require you to be 21 (which is fine, there is really no point in doing something in LA when I have lived about an hour from it my whole life and will be going to college up there anyway).  I’m going to look at some stuff in the UK and NZ, but I really don’t know if they’ll be willing to hire a seventeen-year-old foreigner.  Just had to get that off my chest.

Chapter 16 still in queue.

Peace out.