New After Seven Years

It has been roughly three weeks since school first started here in Cincinnati. I have to admit it has been difficult to integrate myself into the community despite what the counselors say about their great acceptance of others. I wish I was back in Caracas constantly and I start to choke up inside when viewing images of my friends' current activities, parties and new inside jokes. I do not know what it is. Other new students already have good friends, and are spending time with them outside of school. I have to say that for me, that has not yet happened. In fact, yesterday was the first time that I sat with anyone at lunch besides my older sister. 

Is it me? Am I the issue? Maybe this is why I am not yet making friends. People are nice, yes, and I can have a good time in class, but after school I am left excluded. I joined the school play Alice in Wonderland, assuming that with practices I would get closer to others. One of the boys that talks to me in class is in some of my rehearsals so I thought that through him I would become a part of the group of girls he hangs out with. Instead, I felt left out, a third wheel to their group.

See? I feel like I am the one who is trying hard to gain these peoples attention and yet there is no success. I don't know why I feel like they are not even trying to get to know me. It has been three weeks, and people in my classes who have seen me for the last three weeks don't even know where I'm from. 

I know that making friends is a hard process, at least for me. It all comes with time, and yet I do not have the patience. I need to socialize and stop spending my school days in silence. I am left hoping my days of solitude will be short-lived. 

Sincerely, 

The Newbie

My Baby Sister's Birthday Party

Yesterday my family celebrated my baby sister’s fourth birthday and hosted her birthday party at my house. She chose her party to be of the Little Mermaid, so during the party we broke an Ariel piñata. The preparations for the party began early in the morning and although I found it fun to help I also wanted to have my own free time. There was a lot to be done; we had to inflate two dozen balloons, set the tables for the little kids, and run many little errands for my mother so that the house would be ready to host roughly twenty little kids and their families. During the party, I talked to my baby sister and was on Trampoline Patrol (basically carrying little kids on to the trampoline and taking them down when they didn’t want to jump anymore). The highlight of the party for me was watching my baby sister open her presents because there was an endless amount of them (she would open one and there would be millions more in her pile). All of the little kids were adorable but they became annoying after some time.

The only thing that was irritating was the date of the party. My friends had planned a goodbye party to those who were leaving this year on the same day and I was unable to go. It sucked because I am one of the people who are leaving after school ends in 12 days. Looking at the images of the party posted on Facebook, it appears as though they had fun, and I hated not being able to be a part of it.

In the end, yesterday was fun, but I wish I had been able to spend some time with my friends as well. 

A Modern Version of Greek Mythology

For the last month and a half, I have completed the Percy Jackson series and have really enjoyed them. At first, I was hesitant to begin reading the series since I wanted to read a whole array of books but after reading The Lost Hero and The Son of Neptune (both of which form part of a series which continues the Percy Jackson series) I felt obliged to read this series in order to further my understanding of the Heroes of Olympus series. In the end, I could not put the books down and even ended up prioritizing my reading to doing my homework (which I regretted later…) because they were just that good. The Percy Jackson series are about a boy named Percy who happens to be the son of the Greek God Poseidon. During the series he has five adventures (one per book) and (Spoiler’s Alert!) in the end manages to defeat the Titan King Kronos. Percy explores places such as Calypso’s Island and traveled a lot in the book The Sea of Monsters (which in my opinion is a modern retelling of The Odyssey) as well as roughly escaped places such as the Labyrinth.  I really liked how everything in the books is a modernized version of a Greek myth because I managed to subconsciously learn more about their beliefs and about the Gods through them. In fact, I even began to imagine which God or Goddess I am most related to and place myself into the books as I read. I think that it would be fun to be a Huntress of Artemis or be the daughter of Athena or something similar. I have always enjoyed Greek mythology and to have it placed in modern time was really fascinating for me. 

A Terrifying Thought

18 days, 20 hours and 33 minutes. That is how much time is left until the moment that class is dismissed on the last day of school.

That is a really scary thought considering that this crucial moment will be the time when I see some of my friends for the last time. I don’t want to leave, and yet I feel as if part of me is already gone, making new friends in my new home. It is a strange thought that my days with my friends and in my comfort zone are numbered and I hate the thought that while some of my friends leave for summer and prepare to come back to the life they know, I will be leaving the only place that I have made solid memories of. The memories of my years before living here are anything but lucid and I hate the fact that slowly my memories of my current home will begin to elude me as well. I know that at some point I will begin to slowly forget the faces of my best friends and this terrifies me. Sure I will have Facebook and other means of communication, but they will slowly start making new memories and creating new inside jokes that I will no longer be a part of. I have set myself apart at some reunions and I can already envision what my absence will be like. They promise me now that they will miss me, and I don’t doubt that they will (as I have missed my friends that have moved in the past), but I know that as always they will slowly move on and leave me behind in the shadows.

I will slowly have to move on myself as I face what will become my new home, on my own. 

Fourteen Going-On-Fifteen

I am excited for the near future that will dawn on me quickly. By near future, I mean the next month, February, where I will celebrate my birthday. It is actually quite a coincidence that I have three friends whose birthdays take place in the same week as mine.

Unfortunately, I will not be in school on my birthday, as I will be in Ohio taking tests and having interviews to see whether I am accepted into the Christian Hills High School in Cincinnati. This is unfortunate because as my last birthday here, I would have liked to spend it among friends here at school, but now I know I won’t. I try to make the best of any situation, but missing my birthday here in Venezuela isn’t something I am very happy about.

Anyways, I am turning fifteen in roughly three weeks, and I am excited because in Mexico, where I am from, turning fifteen is a big deal, and it is normally celebrated with a party: a Quinceañera. I won’t have one of these parties because my family is going to take me traveling during our spring or Easter break, but turning fifteen is something to look forward to nonetheless. Besides, I have asked my parents if perhaps I can have a Sweet Sixteen birthday party once we are living in the States.

Anyways, I still look forward to traveling to the States on my birthday because that means that instead of traveling once, and having a big trip during spring break, I will have two trips. When I think of it this way, instead of thinking of it as a necessary trip before we move, it has a much more positive spin on it and is something I am happy of.

                Sincerely,

                                Me

Moving to the States

So, I found out at the beginning of the year that I was moving during the summer, but it wasn’t verified until a couple weeks ago. I’m not too keen on moving, especially now that I’m in high school, because I have been living here in Venezuela for the past seven years of my life; as a fourteen-year old that is already half of my life spent here. I would like to say that I really have no country to really call home, being an international student who hasn’t lived in my country for twelve years and all, but Venezuela has started to feel like one in the past couple of years. I am always the girl who sees friends come and go while I stay behind, but growing up here has made me treasure the friendships with those who have stayed with me since the first day I got here.

I don’t want to move, so unlike my sister who is excited for the new opportunities that lay ahead of us, and wondering about the new friends she will make once we are overseas. She is already willing to leave everything we have built here in Caracas in the dust while she makes way for the new experiences that lay ahead. I do not want to move, but it isn’t really my choice here, and saying that I wish I could stay here enough to graduate high school would be rather selfish of me seeing as my father will have a better contract from our new home.

My dad says we are moving to Cincinnati, Ohio and I am excited to go there because I have visited many times during the summer and really like the place. Unfortunately he says that the school we are going to doesn’t regularly have new students, so I am curious as to what that experience will be like. But anyways, in the meantime, I will enjoy the rest of my time here in Caracas.

                Sincerely,

                                Me

Good News

These past couple of months, I have felt like my parents have attempted to stop me from having the career of my choice (which would be something that does not lack creativity), for the future. I have felt as if they have set boundaries, and put up walls to impede that I get to where I want to be in life. So, in Wellness class last week, when the class talked about success and parent pressure, I began to tear up, and cry, because I have felt this too, and I noticed then that I am not alone in this. I finally had a place to let everything out, and people would understand me. Normally, though, I take everything out here in my blog, because sometimes I feel as if it is a place where no one will know who I am (obviously though my friends and teachers know that is me) and I like the feeling of telling the world anonymously. I haven’t done this lately, and I think that this affected me because I have no one to tell.

                 Anyways, on to the good news. I spoke to my parents the other day about wanting to be something creative when I am older, and they are still against it, saying the usual: you will not have the lifestyle you have today, etc. but, they are more accepting that I do want to be something creative and that I will never abandon my creativity for a more technical career. My parents have agreed to let me take a photography class in my next school (because I have found a passion for photography) and I think that this will be my chance to prove to them that I can be successful in this line of work. So, for now, we have reached an agreement, or midpoint. For now, that is, because I am not ready to give up my dreams of having a career involving creativity (such as photography, for example). 

                 Sincerely,

                                Me.