Assignment 18 - Ella Franklin

High school? No ambitions. College? A little more than none. After college? Many, but unrealistic.

I genuinely have no items on my bucket list for high school. I have already kicked high school's bucket. There are things I would like to have done but I didn't and I no longer want to now that it's over. The past stays with the past.

I could write about what I have accomplished in high school. I would imagine as an incoming freshman, my bucket list would've looked something like this:
1. Get all A's.
2. Start something really cool or something and make it to where no college could ever reject you.
3. When the time comes, get into a really good school, like Northwestern.
4. Get a "best friend," whatever that is.

Maybe I'm just tired or my lack of ambition now is blinding me from seeing my past ambitions but truthfully that is all I can think of. Did I do any of those things? No. I got B's. I started a club, yeah, but colleges will definitely still reject me. I remember always desiring  really good friend when I was a freshman, and since I've come to realize there is no such thing. I don't long for it anymore. I guess really that is the ultimate level of completion? Not longing for something you once longed for? I've realized the only person who will truly ever understand you is yourself.

I do, however, think I have done a lot of things that aren't on my bucket list from freshman year just because my freshman self would never have imagined me doing them. I've made a lot of friends I never would've thought to be friends with as a freshman, to name one. I just feel like I've discovered a lot of things within myself and outside myself which I find interesting. So I guess if I really really had to make a bucket list for "the rest" of high school, it would be:
1. Surprise yourself.
I've been doing it for a few years now and I've enjoyed myself.
Also,
2. Finish calc homework that I interrupted to do this.

Ok, for college I have more ambitions. Only because it hasn't started so I can't be over it enough yet to not have ambitions for it.
1. Meet new people.
2. Try new things. (vague)
3. Live out of town and start a new life, without parents, with actual independence. (finally)
4. Be more social.
5. Go to UVA. (hopefully)
- if I go to UVA, live in the rooms that are down in that area where the rotunda is that I can't remember the name of but only special students get to live there.
6. Get super into something and take a lot of classes in it.
7. Take sitar lessons.
8. Surprise myself!!
My top priority here is probably to surprise myself. I'm telling you, it's the way to live.

Life beyond college: the final frontier. I have given this a lot of thought over the years, a lot of thought. So much that I can't really list what I want. I guess traditional "bucket list" things for life are like, "Go skydiving," but I'm thinking more of how I want my life to be. I will say, I have always wanted to visit the redwood forests in California. But more on the topic of my life, I would like:
1. Have a nice apartment.
2. Have a really nice wardrobe.
3. Have dogs - names are a big deal - possibly something from mythology or if not that, music. Probably a male Bassett hound or just a mutt named George, after George Harrison, like The Beatle that everyone says is irrelevant but really that just means they don't know what they're talking about.
4. Don't get married before age 30.
5. God forbid, don't have kids before 30. Don't even consider it before 28.
6. Have a good job, maybe writing or maybe talking.
7. Don't live in D.C. I like politics but God I hate Washington.
8. Drive my dad to church when he's too old to drive himself.
9. Live in Boston or stay in Virginia (maybe) instead.
10. At the end of your life, as a retired widow living alone in some little retirement town, commemorate your husband by running errands bad and bougey in his old Cadillac.
Wardrobe is top priority, even when I'm in the Cadillac.