Unapologetically Me

Sunday morning journaling at 918 Coffee in Tulsa

I've never been homesick before in my life, so naturally it took a while for me to recognize the emotion I'm feeling as homesickness.

The first week of Teach for America training flew by, and it left me spinning in circles Friday night.

Seriously.

I miss my friends and my cat, and the coffee shops and restaurants I'm so used to going to in Phoenix. These emotions, when compounded with all the teaching techniques and social justice information I learned in the past week, have been lot to process--so I've been focusing one thing this weekend:

Being unapologetically myself.

I'm pretty good at this when I'm with people I already know, but whenever I'm thrown in with a group of new people, I have a hard time owning my unique likes and dislikes.

For example, I dislike going out and I really dislike most pop music--but it's hard to make friends and bond with people who are SUPER into these things.

I'd rather sit around and play Cards Against Humanity while drinking wine and listen to Sufjan Stevens or Iron and Wine than go bar hopping.

So I'm working on owning that part of myself and hopefully will find some friends who like the same things as I do.

March Forth

Photo by Jackie Cotton

Today is the last day of March.

2016 is already 1/4 of the way over.

I'll be 23 in three short months.

With all this looking ahead, I need to stop, take stock, and be thankful where I am.

I'm functioning perfectly fine as an adult. I'm paying my bills on time, I'm devoting attention to my closest friends, and I'm balancing a need for peace and quiet with my desire to be out and about with people all the time.

The ambivert struggle is real, y'all.

I'm exploring exciting opportunities for the future (can you say "grad school?") and thoughtfully and intentionally trying to decide what path is the wisest. Meanwhile, I'm blessed with a job that pays me enough to live comfortably while saving up for the future.

But let's be real: I have a hard time being thankful for those things. When things are good on the homefront, I get an urge to gooooooo somewhere. Not long term, of course. Just a vacation.

The day-to-day adult life gets very boring, very quickly. I enjoy having a routine, but I like to be able to change that routine up on a dime, and a desk job really doesn't give you room to do that. Without the ability to say "nah, I'm going to work on this from 8-11 pm instead of this morning," I lose a bit of freedom. And day after day of losing that freedom feels very constraining and makes me want to swing the pendulum from being stuck in an office all day to doing some extreme travel.

I'm dreaming about taking a 4,000 mile road trip looping through the southwest and northwest, touching ten different states and finally getting to go to Canada. It'd be by myself because I'm craving a lot of alone time right now.

I don't know if it will actually happen, though. I'd also really like to go to Chicago/New York with my friend Jackie when she goes back home after graduation and then moves to NYC.

I also really want to go on a cruise to Cuba, but gosh--that's a really expensive dream.

There's a lot I want to do, and I know I can't do it all. I'm incredibly grateful for where I am and what I'm doing, but being cooped up in an office is grating on my soul and I really just want to go.

Happy Birthday, Ed Abbey!

Check out Leah Flores' Ed Abbey stuff on RedBubble. I got my Nalgene sticker here.

It was my favorite author's birthday last week. January 29th, to be exact.

I first found Edward Abbey through my friend Ben, who is an artist incredibly interested in the preservation of natural resources. He's also super adventurous.

We hiked the Grand Canyon four years ago this May (amazing how quickly time flies) and I had forgotten to bring a book. Ben grabbed me and insisted I read The Monkey Wrench Gang, which is one of Abbey's most popular books.

It's about a gang of four activists who wreak total havoc on development and billboards and local law enforcement in the southwest in the name of preservation and keeping nature the way God intended it to be. I think it took me a grand total of three sentences to get hooked on the book.

During the past four years, I've read at least six of his books (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives, The Brave Cowboy, Good News, Earth Apples and Beyond the Wall are the ones I can remember) and have oogled and drooled and obsessed over the profile and video work my home newspaper, the Arizona Republic, published last year on Abbey's death in Tucson in 1989. I also named my cat after a character from The Monkey Wrench Gang because why not. She wreaks just as much havoc as George Hayduke.

Rain, greenery and a good book.

A photo posted by A M A N D A 🌵 (@mandalyn93) on Jan 29, 2015 at 2:55pm PST

Abbey does what many authors are unable to do--he addresses important topics with humor. I could just as easily have picked up a book about preservation and land ethics (re: Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac) and read it, but let me tell you--Sand County Almanac doesn't have the zest or spice of Edward Abbey's books.

His books build dynamic characters who are placed in otherworldly situations (especially Good News which is sort of set in a futuristic Phoenix). The characters are actual characters and do active things in the novels, which is more than I can say about a lot of other books that would be classified as environmental literature, probably because Abbey never set out to be an activist or a world-changer--he just wanted to be a novelist.

And he was a novelist. Abbey achieved that goal. He surpassed that goal. He has exceptional novels which address real issues in the world in a way that makes the reader want to make a change. I highly recommend his books to anyone with a passion for reversing apathy and a desire to see and enact revolution.

Adventure is out there.

The last major trip I got to go on was to Michigan. I drove across the country, from Arizona to Michigan, in about 30 hours' time. I woke up on Route 66, I ate a sub for breakfast while looking over the freeway somewhere near Missouri (I think.) It was a whirlwind of a trip, but I don't regret it. It was an adventure--not a vacation.

I don't want to write too much about vacation travel right here (I have a whole blog dedicated to that) but I do want to write about adventure. The trouble is, I'm not sure how to define it.

It's the feeling I get when I set foot in an airport, backpack strapped around my chest. The pit of my stomach lifts like I'm on a roller coaster as I hear the hustle and bustle of people on the move. My senses tense up and relax; my anxieties disappear.

It's how my heart beats when I'm somewhere risky. Exploring an abandoned building, following a protest with my camera, biking somewhere at night. I know I could very well be in harm's way, but I also know I'll be fine.

It's the voice of a stranger with whom I've struck up a conversation. Discussing things like we've known each other for years, listening to the words hanging between us as the train rumbles onward, the plane slices through air, or the cars pass on the sidewalk.

Adventure is the assurance of a large world to be explored as well as the small place I have been given to occupy.