nancyred's posterous

Mission "Perfect Graduation": Successful.
Graduation night was perfect. I loved my dress, my makeup, my friends, the party, and the afterparty. At midnight, I did a toast with my parents and best friends for my 18th birthday, and porceeded to celebrate by partying all night. I didn't get home until around 7am, and I slept until 6pm. I had worried a little that all the teachers and parents had told me they loved my speech, but my classmates hadn't said anything after the ceremony, but that was probably just because we were all pretty busy having just graduated and getting/giving hugs and congratulations and having our pictures taken. At the party, however, many of my classmates told me they had absolutely loved and been very touched by the speech and that I had done a great job. I was so happy, because that was my goal. It was them I had wanted to please, because I wrote it for them. 

Mission "Blog for 21 days": Unsuccessful.
It's the end of the 21 days of daily blogging, and I was only able to post 7 times. However, I am glad that I tried it and didn't give up. Starting August 1st, Shay, Kenzie, Vikki, Tucker, and I will begin vlogging once a week as a way to keep in touch and keep up with each other's bussy lives, since we will all be separated for the first time. I hope that we all do better at that than we did with this (since Shay, Kenz, and I all had planned on doing the 21 days and none of us was successful). Wish us luck!

I enjoyed reading your posts, thanks for sharing :)

Finally, the day I had been waiting for and freaking out over.

I woke up at 7am so I wouldn't have to rush. I chose a simple outfit to wear under my toga: black dress pants, a simple black long-sleeved shirt, and really high black pumps with a criss-cross front- after all, that was the only part of my outfit that would be visible during the ceremony (I wonder if Miss Langely really thought any of the girls would listen to her "wear comfortable shoes" advice; I doubt it). I had breakfast, did my hair and makeup, stuffed some important things into a bag, and made sure I had my speech before heading out the door at aproximately 9am. On our way into town, we picked up Shay and Kenzie (we forgot first, but realized less than a block past the entrance to their house), stopped by the place where I had gotten my hair cut for less than 2 minutes so the lady could make sure she approved of how my hair looked after sleeping on it. We were at the Westin by 9:30, as we had been told to be, and Miss Langely was very pleasently surprised to see me there on time. I put on my gown, cap, and NHS sash, and spent the remaining time taking pictures and re-reading my speech one last time- I also made sure to place a tube of lipgloss and a bottle of water under my seat.

 The cermony started at 10am, as scheduled. The music started playing and we all lined up behind the small openings that led to the larger room where the ceremony would take place. As the music played and the 6th graders started entering the room, followed by the 9th graders, I heard my classmates saying things like "Just hearing this music makes me want to cry", "Here we go", "This is it", "We made it, guys", "We're graduating", and exchanged a hugs and a congratulations with Talulah and Lucero, who were in front of me and behind me, respectively. I walked out, tried to remember to smile, waved at Kenzie's video-camera, and sat down in my place at the front of the room. 

First, Mr. Selitzer welcomed everyone and read what a teacher had said about each of us. The comments that stand out most in my mind were the one one Mr. Heneghan said about Taylor in which he quoted the protagonist of the novel "Chocolate War" and expressed his belief that Taylor would in fact disrupt the universe; Mr. Marshall's comment about Cuba, in which he actually called him "Cuba" and described him as tall, dark, and handsome and about Jordan, in which he gave an appropriately basketball related piece of advice along the lines of "If you want to make a basket, you have to shoot"; the comment about Marco which expressed the belief that his knee injury, which has too often prevented him from practicing the sport he loves passionately, has instilled in him skills that will come in handy in the future; and Mr. Kilner's perfect description of Oli's reactions to in-class demonstrations and how he often flat out refuses to believe what he is seeing or is being told. It was this early that the tears started flowing from some of my classmate's eyes. 

The 6th grade valedictorians were called up, and they gave a short and well-prepared speech followed by a slideshow presentation with pictures of their classmates. This resulted in many of my classmates turning to me and jokingly asking if IIII had prepared a slideshow. Next was Feris Gerber, the 9th grade valedictorian. It's really hard to estimate the length of a speech you delivered yourself, but according to others, her speech was longer, or about the same length as mine (only they said it felt longer because it dragged on a lot). The 9th grade speech tends to be pretty brief, seeing as there isn't too much difference between 9th and 10th grade, except for that you're one year closer to being in 12th, but this was the exception. About halfway through my classmates all started making comments like "Come on, it's not that big of a deal", and asking me things like "Yours will be better written, right?". I hope so, I thought. It didn't seem bad to me. Maybe a little repetitive and a little overdramatic for a 9th grade speech, but not bad. Which got me wondering whether mine could be deemed bad, and I wouldn't even notice. Luckily, Kenz is an amazing friend. I had told her a few days before that she should give me a list of jokes I could read to myself before my speech to ward of nervousness, and she really did! I'm not sure I expected her to take me seriously, but I'm glad she did. I took a drink of water, reapplied lipgloss, read a couple of jokes, and stopped thinking about the speech. Then my name was called and I had to remember again. 

I took the stand and read my speech. I looked towards my class as I read certain parts, and towards the end, I realized a few people were crying, which made me happy because it meant it had touched them. I got so absorbed in the speech, I forgot to remember to smile, which I realized and regretted later. Luckily, Kenzie said I had been smiling the whole time. I just didn't have to think about it. A few awards were then given. I received the Academic Excellence Award, and the Citizenship Award. Then came the diplomas. By this time, I had been on that stage and shook hands and kissed the people up there 3 times already. But this time, at the end of the row of people, after Salgado shook my hand, he passed the tassel on my cap from one side to the other. And officially, I had graduated. Our school has a special award called the "Fidelity Medal", which is awarded to those students who have been at the school since 1st grade or so. Marisol and Juan Carlos made sure to rub it in my face that they had an award I didn't have. Then we all threw our caps in the air and I actually caught mine! We were all happy and proud and it felt great. 

This was only the morning portion of the day, but since there is nothing to say about the day after this and this post is already huge, I'm going to end this post here and tell the rest in the next one.

Friday was all about last minute graduation preparations. Mainly concerning how I would look. I went into town to pick up my dress. Picked up my graduation gown from Jordan's house (where I had left it after rehearsal), got a mani-pedi, and got my hair cut and after-cut styled. I read my speech as many times as possible during the day to familiarize myself with it. Once I got home that night, I made a few final changes to my speech (which ended up involving completely discarding a paragraph and inserting a whole new one), and video-called Tucker. I read my speech to him, and he made a few detail corrections, taught me how to pronounce a word, and reassured me that my speech was good. I printed out my speech and was in bed before midnight to ensure I would be well-rested the next morning. 

Thursday was very much about shininess. As I was thinking about shiny stuff, I realized "shiny" looks really funny. It just doesn't look right to me. But I think it's right. 

Anyway. With graduation coming up, I decided I should probably get some jewelry on Thursday. So I picked Kenzie up in the morining, I went to my seamstress for a dress fitting, then we picked Tucker up and headed to Plaza Caracol. Tuesday night I didn't sleep more than a couple of hours because I was working on my speech, so I was very tired and my brain was working very slowly. After a really long time of looking at shiny stuff, I decided on some jewelry that I wasn't sure I really loved, but later decided I definitely loved. Kenzie was very helpful in this process, and I probably wouldn't have ever bought anything without her. Then we went back to my seamstress so she could check some little fitting detail and locked Tucker in the car because he wasn't allowed to see my dress until graduation. Apparently when we drove by the seamstress was pretty much holding it up to the window and he saw it anyway, but whatever. Then we picked up Shay on our way back to Bucerias, and all 4 of us proceeded to have a pool day at my house. I got an amazing tan for graduation! But after a while I got in a funk, which was not very fun and I think made some people think I was mad at them. Okay, maybe it was just Tucker that thought that. But after Kenz and Shay went home to have a lovely family dinner, Tucker and I talked about why I was in a funk, and I ended up crying about how stressed out I was about graduation and my speech and my fears of all of my classmates hating me because my speech wouldn't be good enough. Once I got that out of my chest, we had a lovely rest of the day. 

This is a very obviously rushed post, and I apologize. But Dexter awaits me. Goodnight.

"Better lare than never." Common excuse of mine, seeing as I'm always late. 
So I obviously failed at blogging every day for 21 days. Since I can't go back and fix that, I will instead now try to blog 21 times in 21 days, and kind of put back together the week that I missed. I do wish that I had done this the right way, since I am having toruble remembering even the basics about the week, so the posts are more likely to be vague and boring. The fact that I am using my "show-motivation-technique" probably won't help too much. It helps me get things done, but can result in some rushing.

The show-motivation-technique: I am watching a show I love (and am probably hooked on) online instead of doing what I should be doing (usually homework, in this case, catching up with my blogs). So when I finish and episode, even though I really want to watch the next one asap, I don't. Instead, I make a deal with myself. I will do x amount of work, and then I am allowed to watch one more episode, and this can be repeated with some more work, and another episode. Shorter shows work best with multiple pieces of work. I have to get everything done if it's going to be a long show. The way this usually looked was something like: "After I finish my calculus homework, I can watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother (20 minutes). Then I have to finish AP Lit, and then I get another episode. Today it's: After I restart my blog with this post, I get to watch that next episode of Dexter.

So I'll try to pick up where I left off. Wednesday:
Wednesday was spent with Tucker. His parents were spending a week at a friend's condo in Bay View Grand -beautiful ocean-front condos in La Marina (http://tinyurl.com/3vnpqy4)- so they invited us over to spend the day by the amazing gigantic pool you can admire in that picture. I woke up early and went to Tucker's, but when I got there it started to rain, so his parents called and changed the plan to dinner since the weather wasn't very appropriate for a pool day. We hung out for a while, ended up falling asleep for a couple of hours because we were both very tired, and then left around 5 for dinner. The marina bus took about 40 minutes to pass, but it eventually did. We had a lovely dinner of lasagna with Tucker's parents and Will and Kathy. After dinner, we decided to play some Rummy. I had never played Rummy, but they taught me and I ended up winning. We only got through 3 rounds before my mom picked me up, but by the end the points were something like: Nancy-205, Tucker-180, Joy-70, Ric-65. Ric was a sore loser and at one point said to me: "You know I'm letting you win because you're a girl and it's your first time playing, right?". And when I was leaving and thanked them for dinner and teaching me how to play rummy and laughed a little after I said they were very good teachers, he threatened to stop inviting me over for dinner, so I haven't mentioned it any more. 

It was a good day. I am having a lot of trouble remembering what I did thursday, so I will leave it for tomorrow, when I hope my memory will be nicer to me. Goodnight, guys. Hello again, Dexter.  

Surprise, surprise, Nancy is late. Not very surprising. 
For anyone who doesn't know me very well. I have a serious problem with tardiness. I am constantly trying to improve my punctuality, but I very often don't try enough. So today I am honoring my reputation by posting this technically two days late (I am slightly comforted by the knowledge that at least two other people missed their second post, but that doesn't make me any less late). Even though this blog will again be a retelling of my day, I will try to make a point of incorporating the theme of tardiness into it. 

Yesterday (Tuesday), I had a "carne asada" as an early birthday celebration with my classmates. As I mentioned in my previous post, I will turn 18 this Sunday. I would have prefered to celebrate my birthday after the weekend, which is still what I will do when I celebrate with my closest out of school friends, I wasn't able to do this with my classmates. Starting on Monday, my classmates start leaving to Europe, Canada, and the US. I don't know all of the departure dates, but it's possible that by the end of next week, aproximately half of my class will be gone. So, to be able to have more of them present, I decided to celebrate with them ahead of time. I planned a small "carne asada" at one of the pools in Punta Esmeralda starting at noon on Tuesday. 

Although I announced noon as the time the party would begin, I myself didn't go to the pool where we would meet until 12:30 (tardiness!). And even then, it was with only the first of a few loads of stuff I had to take. Of course no one was there yet, but I still wasn't there on time either. The first guest, Kari, arrived around 12:45, and I thought it was funny that there was later joking about how Kari was the only one who arrived early. In Mexico, arriving to an event less than an hour late is arriving early. Everyone else started arriving after 1pm. The rest of the guests arrived in 3 parties. First: Ena, Jonathan, Ingrid, and Gigi. Second: Christian, Jordan, and Juan Carlos. Third: Marco, Pietro, Luis Jaime, and Olivier. Notice the abundance of guys? I did. And so did the rest of the girls. My class is made up of 16 girls and 6 guys, so us girls are extremely used to being the majority both in class and when we go out. For example, on our last event- Christian's birthday-, there were 4 guys and 10 girls. This results in us also being used to getting our ways because we are the majority. This time, most of the girls weren't able to make it because some were out of town, a few had people to pick up at the airport, and other simply didn't get permission or couldn't arrange a ride. And we had two extra guys: Luis Jaime and Pietro, who were in our class but moved away a couple of years ago. As a result, there were 8 guys and only 5 girls. It doesn't even sound like the ratio is that disproportionate, but with what we are used to, it was to us. When we wanted to have cake, the guys were playing soccer on the beach and made us wait for them. Then, when they all got back and jumped in the pool and us girls were still outside, we kept commenting on how many of them there seemed to be. It sounds very silly to an outsider, I'm sure, but it was a very interesting experience. It also was very useful because they were able to take turns carrying the grill all the way from my house to the pool halfway across the complex and back. They were all very helpful and took care of pretty much everything. Christian manned the grill, while Jonathan sliced all the meat and wouldn't even let me pour my own soda because it was my birthday (almost). The day was spent swimming, talking, eating carne asada (which was delicious), and listening to music. When the boys finally decided it was cake time, I blew out my imaginary candles, got my face shoved into the cake (cheesecake with raspberry), and had to eat all the raspberry sauce from my face because it would have been a waste not to (although I did leave the part that went into my nose alone). 

After everyone left, I rushed home and spent a while trying to get a hold of my mom to figure out if I would be able to go to the movies. When she got home, I got permission and she helped me bring back everything from the pool so I could leave faster. I figured out what the plan was minutes before leaving the house, and got to Galerias late, so we entered the movie 15 minutes late (5 minutes after it had started). Kenzie, Tucker and I watched "Lincoln Lawyer", and the power went off halfway through the movie. We went out to the hallway to investigate, and it looked very creepy. The power came back a few minutes later and we finished our movie. Kenzie and I decided to stop at tacos Itzel on our way home, and on our way there, saw Venus pulling into her driveway, so we kidnapped her and took her there with us. Then Kenzie spent the night, and we talked until about 4:20am. I was suprised by how well we handled waking up at 8:30am.

So that was my Tuesday. My post for Wednesday will also be late, because right now I have some praying to do and a speech to finish. Goodnight, everyone.

So today is day 1 of the blogaday challenge. I'm lucky that this challenge is happening on such a crazy week for me, because I'm not a very good writer, so at least I will have stuff to talk about most days. Some of the upcoming important events in my life are: my highschool graduation on the 25th, my 18th birthday on the 26th, and my 6 month anniversary on the 27th. Pretty packed weekend. This also means my time for writing is more limited, because I have so much stuff going on. But regardless, I consider it a good thing. 

So today...
Let's start at midnight. The first few hours of today were spent working on my graduation speech. As I mentioned, my highschool graduation is this Saturday, and I was chosen as valedictorian for my class. I am super nervous about this speech. I want to say so much, but I don't want to bore people. I'm having trouble deciding on a length, because I don't want it to drag on, but I also don't want it to be so short that it doesn't do justice to my classmates and the importance of this event. I want it to be moving and make all of my classmates cry, but I don't want it to get too cliché. I also want it to have some humor, but I don't want to overdo it and give the impression that I'm not taking this seriously, and even more importantly, I'm scared that my jokes will be lame and no one will laugh and they will just result in awkward silences. I feel a little bit of extra pressure because a large part of my class has been together since nursery or kindergarden, while I've only been a part of the class since 8th grade. I know that this has happened in years before, and it has created a lot of problems with the class not wanting the chosen valedictorian (chosen based on academic achievement) to represent them. My classmates are trusting me, a semi-newcomer, completely, and I really don't want to dissapoint them. People keep saying little comments like "It better be good!" in a fun encouraging way, but it only makes me feel more nervous about dissapointing them. But anyway, I got a fair amount of progress done from around midnight to 4am, and then went to bed. 

I woke up early to be at the Westin Resort by 10am for our graduation ceremony rehearsal. It was pretty fun. During and after the rehearsal, us seniors passed around our yearbooks for the rest of our classmates to sign (because they gave them to us once we were out of school, so we didn't get a chance to do this at school). I had a dentist's appointment in Plaza Marina at one, so I asked Jordan if I could get a ride there since he lives close by, and he said "sure". At noon, we were the last ones to get out of there because we were signing each other's yearbooks. There was no signal inside, so once we got out, he called his mom to get picked up, but it turned out she was at Walmart and couldn't pick him up that soon. So we sat around for about 20 minutes and talked about the class and West Side Story (how happy he was to have been able to get the part of Riff, who was his favorite character in one of his favorite musicals), Love Actually (this resulted from talking about the sexiness of British accents), and other random stuff. His mom picked us up, since I still had to wait a while until my appointment, I went over to his house to hang out until then. I got to meet his snake. She is very pretty and colorful and actually a lot less scary and a lot cooler than I expected. I'm not a big fan of snakes, but she was pretty cool. Then he gave me a ride to Plaza Marina on his motorcicle and I felt like a goof wearing a helmet, because I haven't worn a helmet in a while. This hour made me sad that I didn't take advantage of the opportunity to hang out with some of my classmates like Jordan as much as I realize now I should have. 

I was pleasantly surprised when my dentist told me my teeth were all in place, and we could remove my braces a week earlier than planned. I know it's only a week, but it still made me happy. Then Tucker arrived, followed by Shay and Kari and Christiana, and soon enough we were on our way to Bookmobile. On the way back, we got to drink "Agua de crema de coco" (one of the most amazing drinks in the world), and that made me happy.

Shay, Tucker and I got dropped off at Sam's, and that's where I got SUPER happy, because I GOT TO SEE KENZIE (and Claudia)! I love Kenzie immensely, and I hadn't seen her for 4 months and a half, so I was pretty stoked. We all talked and walked around Sam's a bit and had to part a little too soon for my liking, but I know I will spend a lot more time with her very soon, so it's all good. The Forgets and Claudia went home, and I went to Tucker's house for a couple of hours until my mommy picked me up. Then I got to try on my graduation dress (Still a work in progress, but it looks promising). On the way home, I picked up my "guardas", which are little plastic retainers that wrap around your teeth and feel extremely funny at first.

I got home and had dinner, then went to brush my teeth. I think this might have been my favorite part about getting my braces off. Everything was so fast and easy! I was able to slide my toothbrush up and down over my teeth! Just like that. No brushing above the braces, then below the braces, then trying to get the middle, and then spending up to half an hour getting the dental floss in between teeth and wires. I flossed in less than 5 minutes; it was glorious. I think everyone who does not have braces should take a second to appreciate how lucky they are to be able to clean their mouths so easily. 

Now I am here, at 11:52, finishing up my first blog post 8 minutes before the day finishes, like a true procrastinator. So I'm going to wrap this up now so I can be done in time. 
Goodnight guys.
Nancy.