claire foley

Yale grad Marina Keegan wrote this for the commencement issue of the Yale Daily News just this May, and it feels very much like what I and a lot of my friends and maybe some of you need to hear. She died in a car accident this week just five days after graduating.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

Read all of “The Opposite of Loneliness” here. 

It’s heartbreaking and honest and really pretty perfect.

leslieleslie:

April: Adults are boring and I hate them and I don’t want to buy all this stupid boring adult stuff and become boring adults.

Andy: Hey, listen to me. Yes, we’re going to get a dishrag and shower curtains and a cutting board, but if you think for one second that I’m not also going to get that marshmallow shooter so that I can shoot you in the face with marshmallows while you’re asleep, then…you’re the dumbest woman I know.

April: You’re gonna make me cry. 

I’ve watched 40-something episodes of Parks & Rec in the last week and I don’t think I’ve ever genuinely loved a show and its characters so much. I want so much for every one of them. The writing is dry and nuanced and just I love it, I love Amy Poehler, I love Leslie Knope, I love it all.

Things I pledge not to do when I study abroad:

• Upload 27 Facebook photo albums — one for each travel destination, holiday weekend or shopping trip — each stuffed with 200 pictures of the same statue at three different angles and Instagrams of espresso.
• Maintain a shitty study abroad blog with said 200 photos of statues and coffee, self-aware in-jokes to my cool new study abroad pals and a painfully drawn-out minute-by-minute itinerary of my every breakfast biscuit and night in a hostel (so European).
• Maintain a shitty study abroad blog with an overzealous first post and subsequent sporadic posts all beginning with “oh my GOD I am so sorry to all my readers for not posting in FOREVER! I’ve been SO busy!!”
• Post a Facebook link to each post on my shitty study abroad blog.
• Adopt any kind of accent other than my own. I will not be Madonna.
• Wax poetic about how everything is so different and fabulous and oh my god the wine is so cheap and British students are, like, so cultured and I got this bag from a street vendor, isn’t it so trendy?
• Be a douche. In any respect. Hopefully.

Because the bottom line is this: None of you care about my study abroad experience, and none of you want to look at my new Facebook cover photo of a bridge in a city you don’t care about, and no one is actually going to suffer too much in the three months I’m gone. Got it. I know.

Aaaand despite all that, I did make a shitty study abroad blog. I’M SORRY, I JUST LIKE TO WRITE, OKAY. If you’re interested in what I’m doing, go ahead and give it a look.

These are the mountains I got to look at (gasp at) after hiking 12 miles uphill, uphill, uphill on the Appalachian Trail yesterday. I sat on a little rock ledge with my friends and we laughed about stupid things, but then the silence was comfortable so it sat with us for a minute and we just looked.

The past three days were affirming and sometimes tough and full of real joy. I loved the quieter parts of hiking — peeling off my socks and knowing I earned my blisters, stirring pasta while the boys hung the tarp, hushed moments in the morning repacking and folding the condensation-soaked tent. And the big moments, too — the summits of two mountains, the clouds hugging the valleys, sharing flasks of whiskey on top of a fire tower after sunset, watching Saturn and Mars and stars and lightning strikes share the same sky, coming to the end and feeling like, yes, I did it, I did it.

I’m thankful for a brother that, upon my finding and falling in love with this nylon dream of a jacket, didn’t even blink when I wore it for the next two days — to dinner, to walk the dog, in front of his friends. 

My greatest high school accomplishment was convincing my track coach that the best slogan for our (losing) team’s t-shirts was “At Least You Tried.”

Chalkboard motivation for finals.