- - ayiMori - -

Week 13: My Biggest Fears

Music is hugely important to me. I have been playing piano for 13 years, violin for 7 year, as well as dabbling in guitar, ukelele, and clarinet. I'm surrounded by music all the time, I love to drive with the windows down and the music blaring. I love running to new songs on my ipod. I love not only attending concerts - but experiencing every minute of it!

My playlists are constantly being changed or updated, so it's really hard to pick what my favorite songs are. I have certain favorites based on genre or style of music. So I have decided to look into my iTunes library (of 8,515 songs...) and pull my top 10 played songs. Each song varies from the next, so I'm just listing them in the order they appear. Keep in mind that this is from a collection of music I started when I was in middle school... so are you ready for my random mix?

1. Breaking Point - Crown the Empire

2. Dr. Bizzaro - The Afterlife Kids

3. Hello Fascination - Breathe Carolina

I just want to say that Breathe Carolina is one of my favorite bands, and I've even had the opportunity to meet them a couple times! They're music is recently more EDM and dance style, but I also like their original sound, a mix of hard alternative and electronic garage band.

4. You Were Wrong - The Downtown Fiction

5. Break Me Out - The Rescues

6. You Make Me Wanna Die - The Pretty Reckless

I'm not normally a huge fan of female "rock" singers, but I love Taylor Momsen and I think her band is simply perfect. Sure, she's known as Little Jenny Humphrey, but I think Taylor as a singer is just as amazing, if not better.

7. The Only One - Hello Astronaut

8. Twenty Years - Augustana

This song is hauntingly beautiful. Augustana is a band that never fails to make me feel more calm or help me relax. I know it sounds cliched, but their music has helped me through some tough time.

9. Messin' with My Mind - Five Knives

10. Pumpin Blood - NONONO

Fun fact about this song - the first hundred or so times I heard this song, I misheard the lyrics as pumpkin blood. So I enjoyed this as a Halloween song, until my friend so kindly pointed out the correct words are pumpin blood. Oops!

This post was so fun to write, and I think it reconfirmed how much I like music. I think starting after this post, I will start to post more often about my favorite songs, concerts I attend, new bands, new singles, and all things that relate to music! This new series will be called Music Monday.

Let me know if you want more or have any suggestions! Or a better series name haha!

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Week 14: My Worst Habits

Week 13: My Biggest Fears

I don't think there's any pretty way to go through bad habits, so I think I'll just list all that I can think of. So here we go...

- Restless leg shaking

- Binge watching Netflix

- Picking off old nail polish

- Biting the inside of my lip

- Stealing all the blankets

- Staying up too late (with nothing to do - aka bumming around on the internet)

- Worrying to much about unchangeable things

- Checking my phone too much

- Procrastination

- Chocolate consumption

- Piercing and tattoo obsessions (I blame tumblr)

Ehh.. there are probably more but I can't think of any right now. Do you guys have any? Or can think of any obvious ones that I haven't listed?

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Fear is the one feeling that no one ever welcomes, but it always makes it way into our lives in various forms, shapes, and sizes. Whether or not your fear is justified or not, it's a scary feeling that is hard to make disappear.

I like most people have multiple fears, some stronger than others. Sometimes I have small fears, like jumping off of the taller diving board. But other fears can stop me in my tracks, I not only get scared, I get nervous and anxious at the same time. My most paralyzing fear is disappointing others.

My fear mostly applies to academics; I fear not being a good student, I fear failing important exams, I fear falling behind in my work. Any time I feel that I did not do my best, or did not receive the best marks or grades, I feel worn and sad, leading me to fear that I am disappointing my parents, my professors, and my classmates. I know how hard my parents worked to get me into college, and I know how much work my professors and classmates put into these classes, so I feel absolutely terrible when I don't do well.

This leads my thought process down a terrible path. If I do poorly on an exam, I'll do poorly in the class, and then I'll do poorly that semester, which will lead me to do poorly after college, leading me to get a career that I am not passionate about, and I will fail to feel successful in life. I know - is this likely? - probably not, but this is how my anxiety snowballs.

Although not directly related to my fear of disappointing people, I have a fear of losing things. And things encompasses everything - people, things, memories. I'm afraid of losing close friends and family members, both in the sense of relationships and death. I'm afraid of losing important things, like important trinkets or photographs. But I'm also afraid of forgetting things that happened in my life, which is why I keep so many different journals and keep a very detailed agenda planner. The thought of losing anything gives me a heavy unexplainable feeling that makes me want to just curl up and retreat to the covers of my bed.

I don't know of any of this makes sense, but I think it's a difficult thing to explain. I tried my best, and I think it's important to share. If you have any fears or just need to get it off your chest tell me about it.

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Wow, so I realize that I am almost about two months late writing this post. My mistake about study abroad was thinking I would have more time to myself. Fortunately (or sometimes unfortunately) my program keeps me rather busy, and I have found myself without much free time to myself. I have already apologized, but would like to apologize again for my lack of blog posts regarding study abroad. However, I will try to make up for that right now with a slow trickle of blog posts from my adventures abroad!

Bon Voyage - Off to Prague!

My first destination was to Prague, Czech Republic! I headed off at the end of May via Chicago ORD and endured a long 9 hour flight to Frankfurt, Germany. Getting there was not difficult, unlike most of the other students on the program, I have flown internationally by myself, so I had no troubles or worries getting from one place to another. The hardest part of heading out was looking back through the security line and seeing my mom watching from the other side. After passing security, I found my gate and waited my turn to board. The flight itself was not bad. I am of the unlucky variety who find it difficult to sleep on planes, so I spent the majority of my flight mindlessly watching the small television screen in front of me. I did get to watch some quality shows, like Friends, Big Bang Theory, and 2 Broke Girls. The rest of my flight was spent catching up on journaling and eating whatever meal the flight attendants delivered to me.

Safely arrived in Frankfurt and felt slightly dazed. The local time read about 5am, however the time at home was still in the afternoon to early evening. Still had one more flight to go though! The airport layout of Frankfurt was one long strip and unfortunately flight gates did not get posted until about one hour before they departed. I therefore got the chance to run across the airport to find my gate, making my fitbit buzz from all the walking! I did find the gate and boarded alright, then proceeded to completely pass out on the 1 hour flight from Frankfurt to Prague. Imagine my surprise when I woke up in Prague and found a sandwich sitting next to me in my seat! (Thank you flight attendants!)

No stress getting my backs or finding my program. CIEE did a wonderful job providing shuttles to our new homes for the session. I ended up in a 4 person apartment with two other girls, Malerie and Katie. Together the three of us took to calling Apartment 6, Slezska 61 our new home for the month!

When I was a kid, I loved reading. And while, I still love catching up on a good book today, I used to be that kid who always had their nose in a book. And I literally mean always, I would read in the car, in restaurants, in class, and sometimes my parents would even catch me reading under the covers at night after I was already put into bed.

I read so many books, spanning a variety of different genres; novels, comics, manga, sci- fi, mystery, horror, fantasy, historical fiction. I even read most of the famous children book series; Harry Potter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Nancy Drew, Magic Tree House, The Chronicles of Narnia. Out of all the books I read though, I never was a fan of re- reading any books, no matter how much I enjoyed it the first time. However, there is one book that I re- read multiple times and it still never gets old to me. And that book is The Silver Crown by Robert C. O'Brien.

(Here's my own copy - it's so worn the cover is starting to fall off!)

The Silver Crown is a standalone children's sci- fi novel published in 1968. With that being said, it's quite an old book. I remember picking this book up at my elementary school's book fair, and yes, I was a child, so I picked the book because I thought the cover and the title were really cool. At the time, this book was the longest book I had ever finished reading by myself. I was really proud of myself, and I remember going around telling anyone who would listen that I had completed a 272 page book.

The book focuses on a girl name Ellen. She awakes on her birthday to find a silver crown placed on her bed side table. After putting the crown on, Ellen's whole world begins to change and she must figure out what happened to her family and her life. The book is a perfect mix of mystery and fantasy- like sci-fi.

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