Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

 A few weeks ago, I logged in to put my first day of my first real adult job on my Google calendar. I clicked on June 1st, feeling very old and very young, and saw that June 1st is also the anniversary of the day I started watching Glee in 2016.  This anniversary is one of many on my calendar, not because I really need to commemorate them, but because I need to mark the passage of time. None of you knew me before September, but believe me when I say that the only change in my appearance in the last four (eight?) years is the length of my hair. While media consumption is not the only important thing in my life, I can count on it to document my growth in the absence of anything physical. To this day, I automatically think of the Divergent series whenever I catch a whiff of the cucumber deodorant I wore in seventh grade. It is less blessing and more curse. After this post-graduation purgatory ends, I will surely have more updates for you all, but until then, I will record my curr...

     Does anyone remember the essay we read in EN502, titled "The Doctor is a Woman" by Sloane Crosby? Nothing about it is relevant, except for one line that stuck with me: "Camp is fun. We are cold." Now whenever someone asks me how I am, my first urge is to reply with that sentence, regardless of if it's applicable.      How is being in the Tetons, you ask?      Camp is fun! We are cold.      This morning I met my coworker at 7am to carpool in the Work Truck to our respective destinations. The Truck is a large, formidable white Dodge that I have to hoist myself into and out of; it is unmarked except for the government license plate.       Perk number one of working at a national park: the government plate means I get waved through all ticketing booths.       I dropped my coworker off, then headed to park headquarters (shortened to HQ). It was a misty, foggy morning, but it all burned of...

  Greetings EN502! I am writing to you now from my childhood bedroom—a bizarre place to be after the buzz of senior year. Only a week and a half after graduation, I am finding that I am already juggling a life in-between. I am working at a bookstore on Newbury Street (a bucket list job) and regularly seeing the friends from school who stuck around Boston, but also feeling like my independence is on pause. I do look forward to summer night walks with my Mom, home cooked food, and the comfort of being surrounded by all of my books.  The day after graduation I drove eight hours with a group of friends to an island off the coast of New Jersey. We spent a few days by the beach, enjoying the salty air and recovering from senior-week chaos. I got very excited about sand dollars and hand-churned ice cream. The sunsets on the bay were pink and perfect and I would like to bundle them up and keep them with me.  For the rest of June I will be working and preparing for a two-week van ...

Hi! Welcome to the EN502 blog! I was an Earth and Environmental Science major as an undergrad at BU, but I registered for an English class in the fall semester of my senior year to complete a graduation requirement. To my surprise, Reading and Writing Literary Nonfiction  became my favorite class I took all year. My classmates and I got to know each other through writing about our lives, thoughts, and emotions. We got along so well, in fact, that we had a reunion a few weeks before all of us graduated and went into the real world. During our reunion, I jokingly asked my classmates, "How fun would it be if we had a blog to stay in touch after graduation?" One week after graduating from college and here I am, our blog up and running. I am thousands of miles away from Boston and hundreds of miles away from anyone I know, bursting to share what I've learned in just these few days out in the unknown. Here are our guidelines: 1. We each will submit one post in the first seven d...