Life

Better Late Than Never

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A New Year’s resolution post probably isn’t what you expect on February 1st. The truth is I’ve just gotten around to really truly thinking about my resolutions. There is some reasoning behind this. January was a crazy month, and with the instability of being home and then starting a new semester, I decided to take the time to gauge where I really am. I want to make a lot of changes this year.

Usually, my resolutions resemble an outline, just an endless list of little things I should improve on, like drinking more milk so I can be slightly less healthy. This year, I want to stay realistic while focusing more on the big picture (maybe I should add that to my list). Here’s what I want to work on for the next 12 11 months of 2011:

♥ try to create a somewhat-regular sleeping schedule

This is hard as a college student, especially since so many random commitments come up. I need to work on going to bed and waking up at consistent times

♥ create a budget

I’m decent at saving my money. Knowing how much money I have saved, not so much.

♥ keep things organized on a daily basis

I have this terrible habit of not putting away my clothes and books at the end of the day, letting it all pile up. Not pile up.

♥ take classes and future more seriously

Not that I don’t have panic attacks about how much every little assignment will impact my future, but too often I want something without doing anything to get there. No bueno.

♥ blog at least ten times a month

Weekly goals are a little constricting for me, but I can work with monthly goals.

♥ work on creating better content on here, whatever that means

♥ cut back on my complaining

I like to think that I’m really talented at complaining, but the truth is no one likes a whiner.

♥ work on that health thing some more…

Work out buddy + healthier grocery shopping = ??

♥ drink more strawberry milk

Because it’s delicious

♥ Be more positive

This half-empty girl needs to be more glass half-full

♥ take classes and future more seriously

Not that I don’t have panic attacks about how much every little assignment will impact my future, but too often I want something without doing anything to get there. No bueno.

♥ stay in touch with my friends from home better

I know the most amazing women back home, and I want to talk to them more often! I miss my girls. 🙂

♥ ♥ ♥ The one thing that I want most though is to be happy. I never realized until recently that happiness is a choice, not something that just happens. I need to take an active role in creating my own happiness.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How have you been working on them?

~ Sarah

Night At the Ballet

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This past Friday night I made my first trip into Manhattan of the semester. My friend Christine invited me to the ballet, and along with our friend Abby, we bought student rush tickets ($15!!!) to the New York City Ballet. I was super excited, because I’ve never seen a real ballet before, and as a kid, I had only taken dance classes for about a New York minute.

The dilemma, of course, was what to wear. Not only was I going to the glamourous Lincoln Center, but the windchill Friday night was hovering around ten. And by hovering, I mean it definitely hit the single digits. It’s been absolutely freezing here in New York, which is appalling considering I left temperate South Florida less than a week ago. I digress.

Sweater- Target; Dress- Walmart; Belt-unknown; Leggings- unknown; Boots- Target.

After posting panicked tweets and Facebook statuses looking for advice, this is what I put together. My mom is letting me borrow this black skinny belt for the semester, which is super exciting because I can now do so much more with my clothes! Case in point, layering a sweater over a dress and not looking completely lumpy. This polka-dotted dress (which I know came out funny in the pictures) is actually one of my favorite dresses of all-time, so I’ll be wearing it even more often now. I wore two pairs of leggings, but the outer pair is actually this kind of shiny material (as opposed to cotton), so from a distance it gives off the appearance of thick opaque tights. My favorite riding boots also make another appearance, but by the time I took these photos they were all dirty again because of the snow. Of course if I didn’t want to risk hypothermia, I still had to wear a hat, scarf, gloves, and a warm coat on top of all these layers! I loved this outfit though, I felt pretty and girly – perfect for the ballet.

(Speaking of photos, I know that my saturation is way off in the picture on the left. It was pretty annoying. Then again, it’s also annoying trying to take pictures without a photographer or tripod, and since I’m incapable of taking “proper” webcam pictures, this is what I get. And posing is pretty strange. How do you fashion bloggers do it??)

Back to the ballet- it was wonderful! Not exactly my scene, but still really, really cool. Even the theatre itself was stunning- the gold curtains, the balconies, and the ceiling looked it was a bejeweled flower. Beautiful. We actually saw three different performances: Walpurgisnacht Ballet, Dances at a Gathering, and Concerto DSCH. I loved the music, but it was hard to follow the story behind the ballets. I guess that’s something you acquire the more you’re exposed to it. My favorite was the last ballet, it was quick and much more contemporary. The stuff ballerinas can do with their bodies is unbelievable – totally mind-blowing. The highlight though was Benjamin Millepied, Natalie Portman’s fiancé and choreographer of Black Swan, perform in Dances at a Gathering. No Natalie sightings, but those two are going to have one beautiful baby.

After my exciting Friday night, the rest of this weekend has been pretty low-key. And by low-key I mean totally unproductive, but that’s going to have to change. This coming week is going to be a long one.

Stay warm, Northeasterners!

~ Sarah

Big Lights Will Inspire You

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It’s weird being back in New York. I flew in yesterday afternoon, and today was my first day of class, though it didn’t feel like it because I only had one class and it was in the afternoon. I’m easing back into the grind of a new semester, but I want to make sure I do things right since I had such a difficult time in the fall.

One of my last weekends in the city before break, I went downtown and had dinner (Chick-fil-A, holla) with a couple of friends I went to middle school with who are now classmates at NYU. When you’re a sophomore in college, seventh grade can feel like a lifetime ago, and I’m pretty sure that was the last time we had been together. And now years later, here we were, living our dreams in the capital of the world. With everyday pressure and stress, sometimes I lose sight of that. How many suburban girls can say they accomplished their lifelong dream of living in New York- and by the time they’re eighteen?

Sometimes I forget that I can, because I did! I’m twenty years old, and here I am, living in New York City!! It’s be hard to wrap my mind around that sometimes. Catching up with my girlfriends was actually really inspiring, because it’s crazy how far we’ve come. (It was kind of serendipitous too, because we’ve all turned out to be aspiring journalist and occasional bloggers.) They motivated me to do better, and I’m ready to give it my all this spring. Not everyone gets the opportunities the three of us did, and I have to be grateful for that, and take advantage of it too.

People ask me all the time if I’m planning on staying in New York after graduation. The truth is, I don’t know. I have no idea where the future will take me, and that’s okay. I do know one thing: the day the skyline stops inspiring me is the day I have to leave the city.

“Of all the great cities in the world, New York is still the one that holds the biggest glittery, giddy promise of promise – the idea that if you have something to say, do, be, create, try, or conquer, you can do it here, that the romance of the self can actually be fulfilled. The young, ambitious types who set out for New York with movie-made notions of what’s to come discover that the city is in fact better than the fantasy, because there’s so much more to the place than they were able to imagine.”           ~ Roberta Myers

~ Sarah