here I am!

if there is a god, I hope he's keeping a tally of how many journals/diaries/the like I've kept over the years. it will be question number one when I meet him at the pearly gates.

...that is a total exaggeration. it'll be number four. right after the meaning of life and the cause of all man's suffering and what's the right way to eat a Reese's.

in any case, my journal tally is a high enough a number that I expect only a deity to be able to calculate it. I think my main challenge is change--as a person, mostly. I look at the January version of myself in May and I think, who WAS that? what a poor, naive, ugly, awkward little thing. I'm so much better now. NOW is the time to start over. and then in October I look back again and think, what on earth did I know back then? I better pull out another blank book from the shelf, better log in to another online journal website, better prove to myself that I'm capable of starting anew, that I am better now than I was before, that I am in a constant state of flux and that my quality as a person is on the rise.

and here I go again.

why? because I just got promoted, maybe. because after a brief, exhausting few months of trying to juggle two jobs and school, I finally quit one and got a raise at the other... and because with my new fabulously empty schedule I feel like my social life is starting to blossom for the first time since high school. my relationship status is about as steady as... well, a roller coaster is a pretty fair analogy, if nauseatingly cliche, so maybe I'm itching to chronicle that adventure. maybe it's because I feel like I should be documenting the monumental events in my life because if I don't attach some significance to them--even if it means on a cheap online blog--they'll fly by me like the past couple of years have.

I think that last one probably has a lot of truth to it. when I haven't seen someone in awhile--a family member or friend of my parents', for instance, they always ask the same stream of questions. and who can blame them? what else do you talk about to a college student you only see twice a year? what are you studying, what's your major, what do you want to do with your life, when do you graduate. or some derivative of that chain. and I hate it. I hate those questions so much that I tense up even when I just see their lips starting to form the words. I'm studying English, but no I don't want to be a teacher. my major has nothing really to do with my current career choice (I'm an accountant as of recently, but formerly front desk of a Marriott brand hotel). the last is my least favorite, though. when do I graduate? good question, when I figure it out I'll get back to you.

but tied into that truth is the fact that my college experience has been mostly a blur. and I don't mean that I had one too many keg stands... on the contrary, I think I just did too much. worked too much, did too much homework, spent too little time with my friends while they were still in San Diego, saw my family too seldom... and that gap in my memory scares me. so this will be my attempt to document my life. so that later, when I say my life has been a blur, at least this will provide me with some glasses, be they rose colored or not.

lame metaphor number two, I'm sorry.

I'll get into the specifics later, I hope. for now, my name is Susie. I will be 21 in October (I like saying that better than "I'm 20," since I'm the last birthday of the year in my group of friends). my favorite color is green, I have a boy (although not a boyFRIEND, pay attention) named Kyle. I am, as of this week, being trained as an accountant at the Residence Inn. I love my job, and right now I should get to bed for the sake of getting enough sleep to be able to perform it. I hope that if I read this six months from now, I won't choose to start over.