Tag: personalblog

A Very, very, very Bad Day

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Okay, gents and ladies. It’s about time I write about an adventure…

So come and listen to my tale, sad but fantastic, of one of the worst days I’ve had in a long, long time. 

I’m am of course taking about the NyQuil and boiled egg train wreck. And I don’t mean train wreck in the sense that is was a mess of a day (though it was) but in the sense it involved a literal train wreck. 

Are you intrigued yet? Well I sure hope so because I’ve pulled nearly every trick to gain your interest. 

But truth is, it really was just a bad day. One of those days where it felt as if nothing could go right and everything that could go wrong, did. 

So let us turn back the clock… back to where it all began….

This tragic chain of events was put into motion on a Sunday night. 

I had a cold. 

Nothing too bad except for the fact that every time I tried to lie down my nose decided to run like Usain Bolt. So it was kind of hard to sleep. So (like a Norma person) I took some pills that just so happened to be cold medicine.  But what I didn’t realize is this wasn’t just any cold medicine; this was NyQuil night time, coma inducing, death emulating cold medicine whereas I didn’t even think I was taking a night time cold medicine (it was in a regular day time box). So I, without being in full possession of this knowledge, took not one but TWO of these pills. When I realized my mistake, I was… stressed?

You see, NyQuil is some pretty strong stuff and it seemed to effect me pretty bad in the past. So much so that if I ever needed to take it, I would only take on capsule and even then I was a zombie the next day.  

But I had work this Monday, so the next morning I needed to be up and going at a pretty decent hour. 

So I googled how long it took NyQuil to leave one’s system. I wasn’t super happy with the results where I found that it could take anywhere from 8 hours to THREE DAYS. 

yikes. 

But there was nothing to be done at this point, so I just went to bed and slept in my tired defeat. 

And so began my soon to be bad day, when I woke the next morning feeling about as conscious and awake as A sloth during hibernation (I don’t think they actually hibernate but that’s not the point). 

But simply getting out of bed wasn’t the end of my problems. Turns out my siblings don’t know how to replace the toilet paper roll so I had that fun moment. 

Then I had the boiled egg issue. Usually The night before work I would pre-boil an egg for myself so I wouldn’t have to worry about breakfast on a Monday morning. But I had forgotten to mark the egg so my mother thought it was just a plain ol regular one and put it in a container with all our raw ones. 

So I began cracking our eggs into a bowl in a desperate search for my chosen boiled one. I never found it. So instead I had six scrambled eggs for breakfast. Yummy.

And then it came time for work. Or so I thought. The road the way I normally went was blocked off so I had to go the slighter longer way. No big deal… until I realized they had construction going on down that road. And to top things off, when I slammed on my breaks a little to quickly to stop for said construction, my coffee decided to have a will of its own and commit coffee suicide, pitching itself forward so it could spill all over my radio, blue tooth speaker, and music player. But hey, at least my entire car smells like a caramel frappecino. I’m sure THATS going to age well with hours of sunlight!

But I didn’t have time to clean up that mess just yet. I was still driving at the time. So I drove on, trying to wipe my jeans dry as best as I knew how. When I leaned over I noticed that only half of my coffee had been spilt so there was still a little silver lining there. 

Noooopee. 

I cross over a railroad track to my work and unfortunately this train just decided to take a quick nap right in the middle of the place I needed to cross over to get to work. And (also unfortunately) I wasn’t expecting this stop so I slammed on my breaks and said goodbye to that last half of my coffee. You will be missed. 

Thankfully they got the train up and running fairly quickly though so I was only about twenty minutes late for work. But it wasn’t too bad for there on out. I had to kind of deep clean my car though. 

But hey! I lived!

How to feel Magical

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

How to feel magical for all my fellow princesses and fairies out there…

Take baths with rose petals and moonlight

Use enchanted lotion

Aquire books

Gather flowers

Treasure keys and trinkets

Light candles

Paint

Write your favorite things in your journal and on your arms 

Collect cool looking glass bottles 

Learn languages of all kinds, especially Latin. 

Eat different things and try new foods on a regular. 

Go on walks often 

Admire nature

Stargaze 

Do your hair with sparkling things 

Stretch 

Give yourself time to think

Explore music

Draw in dark ink

Record the stars and how they move

Read stories and collect them like treasure only to share them with others. 

Makes wishes. Whether it be blowing the fluff off of a dandelion, throwing a penny into a well, or spotting a shooting star, don’t be afraid to make one. 

Graduation Thoughts

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

“We ARE rich,” said Anne staunchly. “Why, we have sixteen years to our credit, and we’re happy as queens, and we’ve all got imaginations, more or less. Look at that sea, girls—all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen.” 

Let me tell you something. This quote is everything. Never have I felt something that so perfectly mirrors what I feel about looking back on high school. 

High school has been hard but it’s like any time period of your life. You take it: for the good and the bad. 

If I had any regrets in my high school experience, it would probably be the very thing that this quote seems to express. 

I wish I had spent less Monday’s wishing it were Friday. I wish it didn’t take me this long to figure out that I’m happy as a queen. 

But better now then never.  But I guess that’s just how life works. Especially when you have eighteen years to your credit. You finally realize how rich you are. And knowing this makes facing the uncertain future all the easier. 

Books to read in the Woods

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Books to read in the woods by a creek or in a tree:

Poems by Robert Frost

A fairytale collection

The goose girl

The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe by cs Lewis

Caddie Woodlawn

Beowulf

The dark hills divide 

Any book by Beatrix potter really 

James Herriot collections 

An Agatha Christie mystery 

The hobbit by jrr Tolkien 

Peter Pan 

Norse Mythology 

The secret garden

Anne of green gables 

The princess bride

The adventures of Tom Sawyer 

The legend of King Arthur 

Aesop’s fables 

The cricket in time square 

The last dragon

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes 

Redwall 

Recycling Emotionally

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

Learn to recycle emotionally. 

Turn the energy that you use towards disliking yourself to building yourself up. 

The energy you use to envy others, use it to be thankful  

The energy you use to hate your enemies could turn into love towards those closest to you. 

Regret of the past can turn into the hope of the future. 

All emotions take energy. Make sure you’re putting yours into the right ones. 

Where to leave your perfectionism

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

When I was younger, I wasn’t worried. Not In the least.

I would wake in the morning with a light feeling in my chest and a carefree air about me. I would set out armed with a stick and go play in the woods and in the mud in search for adventure. 

I would crawl through culvert pipes and pretend they were entrances to magical worlds, rabbit holes to far off places. 

I would climb up to the highest part of a tree, and where the branches would meet at the center was a throne that I imagined was made for me. I would sit there and overlook my kingdom and pretend I could talk to the birds as the flitted past, giving me news of the worlds beyond. 

Then I would return home and write of my adventures in a notebook and draw maps of the new kingdoms I had conquered and discovered. Page after page I would fill with drawings and notes, describing the magic that I had found that particular day. 

But that’s not the way things are anymore. Now I’m worried, scared even, bogged down by fear and perfectionism. The stories don’t come as easy as they used to and the feeling of lightness and the glow of curiosity no longer radiates in my chest. 

Many times I have rested my pen on a blank page only to be met with a emptiness of mind and spirit. And on the rare occasions that I would actually write something, I would return to it, and rip its pages away because it was not perfect. 

I still relished the feeling of pages beneath my finger tips and the smell of new notebooks but I could never bring myself to fill them with the same colorful stories that I used to create so many years ago. 

But there came A Day I was tired of it. Tired of being perfectionistic. For my fear of creating something substandard drove me to create nothing at all. 

So I took with me a journal, perfect and empty, on a walk. More times than I’d like to admit, I had wanted to fill this book with a great many number of ideas and drawings but I could never bring myself to mark up it’s crisp, empty pages. 

So I walked to a pond’s edge and looked out upon its reflective surface, unblemished and smooth like a mirror. At its shore, I tied a string around the book and left a long tail that I could hold onto. And then I cast it as far as I could into the water. 

I reeled it in, the journal now a soggy pulp of pages. So I took it home and dried it. 

It was not longer perfect. The pages were wrinkled and the cover was beginning to peel. But that was alright. 

So I set it on my desk and opened it and began to write. 

A Lesson In Statistics

~ Brooke F. ~ Leave a comment

All throughout my high school career I have known two things: one, I was good at English. Two, I was not so good at Math. Not terrible mind you, just not good. But I was always able to “get by” as they say. I worked hard enough doing additional research on math concepts that I was able to get a “B” and move on. But this was not so by the time I reached my senior year. I had to pick my final math, and my options did not look good. Calculus? Sounds scary. Trigonometry? Sounds super scary. Statistics? Eh, I’ve never really thought about it. But how bad could it be compared to my other two options?
Turns out, pretty bad. At least for someone who was never really good at Math in the first place. I think it would have been a challenge for those who were average at it, but doable. I, on the other hand, was just trying to keep my head above water. All my life, I had never, ever failed a class (this was partially due to the fact that my parents had a pretty high standard as far as my grades went and a F, D, or even a C would never do). But as I forged onward in the course, my grade point average just got lower and lower. At this point, if I got a another single bad grade, it would lower my grade to a failing one. I was at a loss. I had done the worksheets, read the lesson slides, and watched the tutorials but for some reason or another, it just wouldn’t click.
I told my mom about this and she thought a moment before saying, “Have you tried reaching out to your teacher?”
In short, the answer was “no”. I had always managed to get by without help. I hated bothering people (even though this was literally their job). I just didn’t like asking for help.
But as I continued to struggle in my class, I thought about it more and more. And finally, I was struck with an epiphany.
I always found it weird that when baby animals were born, they learned so much quicker as compared to a human baby. Deer walked within minutes of birth, the same for cows. Ducklings within days of hatching could swim. Baby Chicks were pecking along side their mother’s within a weak. Humans? Well, we can’t even hold up our heads. Pretty much all we can do for a long time is cry. And that’s when I realized that babies learn the most important skills for survival first. For ducks, it’s swimming. For Deer, it’s running. For Chickens, it’s pecking. And for people, it’s asking for help.
And so I did.
I messaged my statistics teacher in a plea for help of any kind, and through a series of quick emails, he directed me to a resource folder that I didn’t even know existed. Inside, it contained tables that were detrimental to my course work. He also sent me links to various live-lessons and video clips that expounded upon my lessons.
And just like that, my grades started improving. And now whenever I don’t understand something, I know exactly where to go. I feel like even if I don’t understand something, I’m not at my wit’s end. I still have plenty of resources and tools that can help my understand a concept better and, eventually, help my pass the class, not just with a passing grade, but a good grade as well.
Now, thanks to my high school career I know two things: One, I am good at English. Two, I’m not a natural at Math. Three, that’s okay, because I should never be afraid to ask for help.