It's difficult to write in this daily, mostly because I still haven't put my computer up in my room and because I'm just too lazy to do it everyday. Ah, the laziness of summer. I've done nothing but lay out in the sun, exercise, and watch movies all week, and it's been wonderful. Still no attempt at finding a job, but that will come later in the week. Hopefully I'll be able to work somewhere in the mall, like a clothing store or something. Yeah employee discount! Well for now, I'm catching up on all the movies I didn't get to see during the school year since I never rented movies. I think I've watched nearly 10 movies, 3 of which I saw today. I watched Sylvia, based on the life of the poet Sylvia Plath. It was somewhat disappointing. I admire Sylvia Plath as a writer, although she was very mentally and emotionally unstable. I felt that the movie focused too much on her tumultuous relationship with her husband and not on her writing accomplishments. Only once was her fantastic novel The Bell Jar mentioned, and that was only when it was very briefly mentioned that she was writing a book. Overall, the movie made it sound like her husband was a fabulous poet and she was just hiding in his shadow, constantly paranoid that he was having an affair. While it was a fairly accurate portrayal of her life, it could have spent more time discussing how she really was a great poet, despite what she may have felt at the time. After all, her collected poems have won a Pulitzer Prize. I think Sylvia Plath was a brilliant writer and poet, and it makes me sick to think that by the time she was 19, she was going to Wellesley College, an all women's school that was considered Ivy League back in the 1950s, had won an internship for a famous fashion magazine in New York, and had already had several poems and short stories published in magazines. Yet she lived most of her life thinking she couldn't write well. I know that I'll probably never accomplish half of what Sylvia Plath accomplished by the time she was 19 in my entire life. Perhaps mental instability is the price you pay for having such a brilliant mind. It's so sad that she finally succeeded in killing herself just before her most famous and most widely praised book of poetry was published. Oh well, I still admire her work even if she did have such a tragic demise.

After that, I saw the movie 13 Going on 30 at the theater. It was the perfect feel good movie after the somewhat depressing Sylvia. Sometimes it's just really nice to watch a happy movie where everything turns out perfectly in the end, even if it is very unrealistic. It's also pretty cool that Jennifer Garner grew up in practically the same area that I did. She went to my rival high school and was a band and theater geek (kinda like me...hehe). Plus she went to Denison! I actually talked about Denison with a lady at a college fair that was Jennifer Garner's high school and college friend. Pretty neat I guess. I suppose that's as close as I'll ever be to a famous person. It's just so funny that it's on the local news when she comes home to visit her parents. I think she graduated the year I started kindergarten, so it's not like I would've known her anyway. It's just nice to know that someone from West Virginia really can do big things.

The other movie I watched today was Gothika. I was really in the mood for something kind of creepy, and it really fit the bill. I thought the whole movie was just plain weird from start to finish, but I liked it. It was a lot better than the other suspense movie I watched, Cold Creek Manor. That movie was nothing but classic suspense movie cliches: creepy old house with all the furniture and stuff left in it, sketchy guy that hangs around the house all the time, mysterious deaths and disappearances, domestic abuse, cheesy use of foreshadowing for creepy things in the future, insane serial killer guy chasing the lead characters with the gruesome weapon playfully discussed throughout the entire film, and of course who could forget the "coincidental" thunderstorms, power outages, and disconnected phone lines right when the crazy guy enters the picture. Yeah, that movie was boring and I laughed most of the way through it. Gothika was sooooo much better and even made me jump in a couple of places.

After that, Mom and I were watching TV and happened to catch the WVU marching band performing at the Majorette Festival back in September. It made me feel kind of sad and nostalgic and set my mind into a frenzy wondering if I made the right decisions. I could have been there with Amanda, Nathan, and Jonathan and had my name announced over the loudspeaker at Laidley Field as a member of the amazing 300 piece band. I could've spent New Year's in Florida for the Gator Bowl, and traveled all across the Eastern United States for football games. That was my road not taken, the easy way out, or so I thought. I could've gone to WVU with the majority of my graduating class. Actually, I didn't go because most of them I didn't want to see ever again. Then again, what are my odds of actually running into them by accident at a school of at least 25,000? But I would've been there with Lisa, and since we were both going to be in the honors program, we probably would've lived in the same dorm, the nice dorm reserved for honors students. I wouldn't have had to go through all the awkwardness of being somewhere far away completely alone and instead would've had some of my best friends from high school right there with me. Plus this coming fall, the rest of my friends will be at WVU, probably all in the band, and we could've had a blast together. I think my mom was concerned because yesterday I said that I wondered if it would make any big difference in my life whether I went to Denison or WVU. I mean, my family is spending so much money to send me to Denison when I could've gone to WVU for virtually nothing. It's not that I don't like Denison. It's fine and I'm sure it'll get better every year, I just wonder if it was really a big deal. I wanted so badly to get out of the state that I really didn't consider WVU as an option, despite everyone, including my parents, counselor, and friends, telling me that it was the more logical choice. It's kind of late to change my mind now, but I'll always wonder what would've happened if I had gone to WVU. It's sort of like the same choice I made in high school of whether to go to Hoover or Capital. Now my mom tells me that it probably wouldn't have made a difference in what high school I went to either, but at the time, it seemed like a life or death decision. To this day, I feel tension around people from Hoover, like they've permanently labeled me a traitor for leaving them and going to the city school that they think is stuck up and not better than them when it is really a million times better. I still think I made the right decision about high school, but with college, there is a lot more on the line. There is the money and the time spent traveling, plus it just has a bigger impact on your life. I'm not going to change my mind, I guess I just don't feel completely confident in my decision. I'm sure as college continues, I will have no more concerns, or at least they will be less frequent. Sometimes I wish life were like a choose your own adventure book where you could peek ahead and see what the outcome of your choices would be before you made them. I suppose that would be considered cheating and would take all the excitement and spontaneity out of life, but it sure would make it a hell of a lot easier. Every decision branches out into a new and different direction, leading us to all sorts of unexplored roads. It seems as though I took the road less traveled by, and hopefully that will make all the difference.