What I Want From Life (Warning: sappy rambling!)

"Birds flying high

you know how I feel

Sun in the sky

you know how I feel

Breeze drifting on by

you know how I feel

It's a new dawn

It's a new day

It's a new life

for me

and I'm feeling good"

What do you want from life? Where do you want to be 5 years from now? 10 years? These are tough, almost impossible questions to answer. Whether you're 16, 25, or 50, it can be hard to articulate responses to them. We're not the same people at 16, 25, and 50 and therefore our goals and views change. I'm not the same person I was at 16 or even at 20 and I am extraordinarily grateful for this. You never wake up one day and realize you're a completely different person than you were yesterday, but you can wake up one day and realize you have grown in ways you never imagined over the past few months or years. 

 "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
- Ferris Bueller's Day Off

While here in DC, I've been taking part in The Washington Center's academic internship program. I have been interning with the United States Marshals Service. I have been doing a lot of self-reflection while training myself for my continual job search. I thought, then, that it would be good to sit down and articulate what I want from life in the most general terms. I am my father's daughter in that I am a planner, a list-maker, a lover of pro/con lists. I want to know where I'm going, even if most things that determine where I go are out of my control. So the best thing I can do for myself is keep some short-term and long-term goals. I believe every person should have these. They don't even need to be huge, cliche goals that sound ideal but are not realistic. However, there should be a mix of ambitious goals and down-to-earth goals. You can then measure what you have achieved versus what you hope to achieve. If you never reach your loftiest of ambitions, at least you can look over your mental list and appreciate all the things you have accomplished.

 "Remember, Red: hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."
- The Shawshank Redemption

So in the interest of self-reflection, here are some of my goals:

• I want to become independent
  This seems simple. But for someone my age, this is a huge step. I cannot wait for the day when I can pay all of my bills myself. I cannot wait to have my own apartment. I want to be a responsible, productive adult.
  
  
• I want travel to be a part of my life.
  Some people find comfort and support in staying in one place their whole lives. They build their lives in that spot and surround themselves with friends and family - a community. Since this whole post is already full of cheese, I'll just say it - I want to world to be my community. These days, I would prefer to stay in America. I took advantage of the freedom of my youth in traveling all around Europe. I am grateful for every experience abroad. Now, I want to see the United States. In the field I've chosen, there's a good likelihood that I will have to move around a bit, which is exactly what I want. I would love to live in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or other such cities at some point in my life. There is too much to see out there and, in my opinion, I would be cheating myself out of many great experiences in life if I stayed solely where I was comfortable. So yes, I would give a hotter climate a chance, if only to confirm that I hate hot climates (I am seriously counting down the time until autumn). The more I travel, the more I realize I enjoy cities and larger settings. The thought of year-round sunshine and heat sounds dreadful, but I would like to experience the West Coast. There is endless diversity of cultures in America and I hope to broaden my horizons beyond what I know. Because if there's one thing a young person should be able to admit, it's that you don't know what you don't know. So many things in life can't be known until you experience them.
  
  
• I want to be constantly learning
  And this doesn't only mean in an academic sense. Although one of my goals is to someday get my Masters degree, I want to always be learning and bettering myself. As people say, happiness isn't some finish line where you cross over into being "happy" and you're done. Likewise, education shouldn't be a destination but a process that is always occurring. I want a career that has opportunities for more training and more learning.
  
  

"I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue."
"You're not different. You're no better."
"I didn't say I was different or better. I'm not. Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is the solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It's easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work."
- Se7en

• I want to have job prospects
  Since I want to be constantly growing and developing, I want to have the possibility for advancement. I've never thought of myself as an ambitious person, but it turns out I just needed the right ambition.   
  
  
• I want a career dedicated to service and integrity
  I know it's idealistic and silly, but I want a career rather than a job. And I want that career to be more than just a paycheck. Now, I'm not naive. "Do what you love and the money will come," "Money can't buy you happiness," and like cliches are incredibly bad advice. Yes, life is about more than money, but you can't do much without it. I don't need to be making six figures, but I certainly want to be able to do more than pay for the basics of survival. Thanks to sensible parents, I understand the importance of being financially smart and secure. But I still don't want to go to an office and think and talk and plan about money all day. I always knew business was not going to satisfy me as a career field. I want a career that requires a certain caliber of character. At the end of my life, I want to be able to look back and know that I helped someone, that I made a difference to someone. I want this world to be a little bit better for having me in it. Cliche, idealistic, silly. Don't worry, in 5 or 10 years when the system's beaten me down I'll write another self-assessment chastising my foolish younger self.  
  
  

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

- Say Anything...

• I want a career with some variation
  I don't want to sit at a desk 24/7, but I also don't want to be out and about 24/7. I rather not have a "'typical day." I don't even mind if I have "typical work hours." I don't want to go in every day, 9-5, do my work and leave. I want my work to be more important than that. I want my work and effort to be valued. I want some degree of responsibility and expertise in my work.
  
  

• I want to become bilingual
  This is definitely one of my long-term goals. It's also one of my oldest goals. Every year I get closer and closer to this with Russian, but now that school is over for now, it's harder to self-teach. Even if it's just Spanish one day, I want to become fluent in a foreign language. (Preferably more than one, but one step at a time!) This has never been my particular area of skill and natural talent, but I'm always trying.  
  
  

"You want to take the easy way out...because you're scared. You're scared because if you try and fail, there's only you to blame. Well, Missy, let me break this down for you, Bobbo-style. Life is scary. Get used to it...There are no magical fixes. It's all up to you. So get up off your keister, get out of here, and go start doing the work...Nothing in this world that's worth having comes easy."

- Scrubs

• I want to go to McAuley's Career Day
  This one's silly, I know, but I LOVED Career Day back in high school. Part of this is just ego on my part, since I'm envisioning an awesome future self going back to my past (in a way) and telling students all about how much better it can get. I always thought people who said high school is the best years of your life were sad people. I refuse to accept that high school or even college is supposed to be the highest point of a person's life. Another reason I want to do this is because I didn't discover the field of criminal justice and law enforcement as a viable option until late in college. For some reason, I didn't even register it as a career path for a long time. Perhaps because going to college, you're supposed to study something sophisticated like philosophy or biochemistry, while criminal justice is the subject your hear promoted on late night informercials for online schools. But now I'm falling in love with this field more and more every day and can't wait to be a part of it. So I hate the idea of other young people, especially girls, not considering this field. It's not promoted like other college majors/career paths, especially for women, so I want to go to my old high school and show them another option in law, government, and service.
  
  
• I want to cut down on the cheesy cliches and rambling soliloquies.
  I promise I will, but this is the Summer of Amanda, her Quest for a Career, and her Journey into Adulthood.

As always, best of luck to everyone else! No experience is bad experience, and it's never too late to change or improve.

"You got your passion, you got your pride

but don't you know only fools are satisfied?

Dream on but don't imagine they'll all come true."

Blogging in the Dark

"At least four are dead and two million are without power Saturday, all as the Washington D.C. area contends with a record-breaking heat wave."

"Winds reached 80 miles per hour, and it's estimated that a full restoration of power could take up to five days."

"Temperatures hit 104 degrees in Washington D.C, breaking records on Friday. The forecast for the city shows temperatures continuing to reach the triple digits. There's also a possibility of even more thunderstorms for the region."

 - Slate.com

Yes, I am missing those cold Russian days right now. Last night one of the worst storms I've ever seen blew threw and knocked out our power. I had heard that it was supposed to rain last night but I didn't realize it was supposed to be that severe. It came on fast, too. I started hearing some distant thunder which quickly turned into gusting winds. I knew it was worse than usual when I heard a loud, harsh crash outside. The wind was blowing the metal chairs, tables, and umbrellas against the metal gate in our apartment complex's courtyard. Soon after our power went out. 

All of my prior experiences with power outages have been brief. A storm hits, power goes out, it comes back on within a few hours (if that). Well, as of right now, our power has been out for about 24 hours. If the news stories are to be believed, it's going to be a little while before we get it back. Since I've never dealt with this bad of an outage before, it didn't occur to me to go into survivalist mode and store my refrigerated goods in coolers of ice. That is, not until this morning when I wandered over to the store to get some breakfast and saw people purchasing bags and bags of ice. By the time we went back to the store this evening, the ice bags were long gone. 

I got some fruit and pastries to tide me over a little while. It looks like I'll be eating out for the next few days though. When you can't refrigerate, freeze, microwave, cook, or bake, you realize quickly how few nonperishable foods you have. You realize even quicker how those nonperishable foods are absolutely not going to constitute a full meal. I'm pretty ticked about that right now, since I was preparing to make a new salad dish over the weekend. I didn't have much in the fridge or freezer, but I did have fresh crab meat and a half carton of eggs that I had planned on using. I dread the thought of having to throw out a ton of previously perfectly fine food. 

Overnight, power returned to a few select places in our apartment. The building's generators keep the hallway lights on as well as a few outlets working in apartment's master bedrooms. So my roommate's outlets are working and one kitchen outlet is working. We managed to plug our Wireless modem into a working outlet so we have Internet, which is keeping me from going crazy. I think the generators are keeping air circulating in the building and my roommate has a fan plugged in in her room, which is keeping our apartment from being a total oven right now, but it's still stuffy as hell. The worst part of all of this is that we don't get hot water and only a small dribble of cold water. We're going to have to form a plan on where to go to take showers because it's basically impossible here.

Well, all in all it's been a pretty bad weekend. My plans of experimental cooking and filling out job applications today was destroyed. Most of my food supply has been rendered useless. But I won't let that get my spirits down, because next week WILL be better! On Tuesday, all of us Marshals interns have a field trip to the Drug Enforcement Administration's training academy at Quantico (same place as the FBI academy). I don't have concrete plans for Wednesday yet, but it's the 4th of July and I'm in DC - I'll find something awesome to do! Even if it's just sitting next to a monument and being proud to be an American having the time of my young life (cue cheesy, inspirational music). "I believe I can fly"? "Don't stop me now?" "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades"...? Yes, things are going great, and they're only getting better. (Or at least they would, if the darn power would come back on!)  

What I Miss About Russia (and What I Don't)

It took over a month, but I've finally started to miss Russia little. I was pretty homesick by the end of the semester, so all I could think about was my upcoming awesome summer back in America. Now that I'm back in the good old USA enjoying said awesome summer, I've had some time to reminisce. Here are some things that have been on my mind since I got back:

• My commute here in DC is about 40 minutes each way. After my hour journey in Petersburg, the commute here feels like nothing.
• Food is probably on the top of my list of Things I Miss About Russia. I'm trying to make some of the things I had there, but others are too weird or complicated for me to attempt. I'm not quite ready to try making my own Herring Under a Fur Coat yet. 
• "Step back, doors closing" doesn't have the same ring as "Осторожно, двери закрываются"
• I LOVE LOVE LOVE not having to pay for everything in cash. It's a big inconvenience having to run to the ATM all the time and plan out how much money you need for a week. 
• Dryers are still the best things on Earth. I know they aren't technically a necessity, but I'm an American and I hated having to hang my clothes to dry and the subsequent process of taking them down when they had turned to cardboard overnight. 
• On that note, everything is so soft! Tissues, toilet paper, clothes...it's just wonderful. 
• Every so often I do notice the "personal space barrier" people create on the metro here. The only time people pack onto the train cars like sardines is if it's rush hour and they absolutely have to. Even then, I find myself thinking we could fit more in a car than are there. It's funny, we all try to have our bubbles of space but we still say "excuse me" when navigating through the crowds on the metro cars. 
• I will never take cold drinks for granted again. I order a coke and it's ice cold and refreshing. I never did figure out how Russians (or at least Smolny) managed to buy refrigerators that don't refrigerate. And it's not like you could root around for a cold one since you had to get the cashier to buzz open the fridge door once you got to the front of the line.
• I love not feeling like a criminal when I enter stores. There's a security guard in the front and that's it. Going into Russian supermarkets always made me paranoid for the amount of security personnel they have.
• There are so many people jogging here! (Including девушки!) 
• After Russia, I feel like no one smokes here. And I love it.
• I know I'm crazy for saying this, but I sort of miss Russian weather. Summer has always been my least favorite season and DC can get really humid. Granted, Petersburg is probably very humid now too, but my memories of it are primarily cold ones. How long is it until autumn?
• The Petersburg metro system is absolutely wonderful. Here, I pay up to 5 times the amount I did in Russia for worse service. Trains here stop on their tracks because they're timed so terribly, there's constantly track maintenance somewhere, and escalators are often frozen (come on, they're short escalators! If Petersburg can keep theirs working, why can't DC? Probably because you can't tell people in Petersburg to just walk up and down those things. I can't even imagine it.) Just paying for my transportation every day is my biggest expenditure here. I've already re-filled my metro pass multiple times, whereas I can count on one hand the amount of times I re-filled it in Russia.

First days in DC!

As expected, I had a fast turnaround from Russia to DC. I arrived home in Cincinnati last Friday (May 18th) and left for DC on Tuesday (May 22). I had to just power through the jet lag until I got DC, where I could unpack and collapse (which I did this Wednesday). It was so nice to be able to settle in somewhere. I sort of settled into my room in St Petersburg, but I was always a guest in the apartment, not a resident. Now I'm back to making my own meals and cleaning up after myself. In short, I get to be an adult working in DC now instead of some college kid studying abroad. After resting up, I had orientation with The Washington Center on Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday, I headed to their Residential facility, where most of the interns live. It's located around Union Station in a nice little neighborhood and it's where I'll have my class on Monday evenings. From 6:30 to 9:30, starting on June 4th, I'll be taking "Introduction to Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure." It beat out White Collar Crime, Forensic Psychology, and Criminal Justice Policy Wars, which were also incredibly tempting choices. Anyway, on Thursday we had our program orientation, which meant I met with only the advisors and other students in the Law & Criminal Justice program. After we went over the basics of the program, we separated for lunch and then met up at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment for a Scavenger Hunt.

 On Friday, we got all dressed up in our suits and met at the National Housing Center downtown to have our general orientation for all Washington Center students.  It was a really nice building with some lovely conference rooms, even if I'm not entirely sure what its actual purpose is. We heard from several leaders of The Washington Center about what the organization's mission is and what it expects of us. We went over basics of professionalism and networking, heard more about extracurricular programs we'll be doing this summer, and interacted with students from all different program areas. It was great to get to meet other people on Friday and hear where some of them are interning. It ran the gamut from law firms to non-profits to lobbying groups. Fun stuff. I also got to formally introduce myself to my advisor and then get my professional picture taken for LinkedIn. I really hope it turned out okay because the humidity here works hard to undo everything you do to make yourself presentable. Like St Petersburg, DC is built on swampy land and therefore ridiculously humid. I need to stop picking swamp cities to live in.

Over the two days, we learned more about the extra things we do over the summer. One of the things that attracted me to The Washington Center is the fact that they engage you in a lot of different activities. You not only work at an internship, you take a class for credit, participate in service projects, attend lectures in the city, etc. Two programs students take part in are Civic Engagement Projects and Public Policy Talks on Capitol Hill. For the Civic Engagement Project, we pick one of several social issues to dedicate ourselves to. We work with the community through service projects, advocacy, etc to learn more about the issue and learn about getting involved and impacting your community. The Public Policy Talks consist of meeting with your Congressman to discuss policies and legislation. They try to hook you up with your representative, but since mine just so happens to be the Speaker of the House, I'll probably meet with my Senator or some other rep. Although the thought of having a sit-down with John Boehner is both frightening and exciting. Talking one-on-one about policy with someone so high-up would be quite an experience.

After this wonderful 3-day weekend (which is probably the most relaxing chunk of downtime I've had in months and will have in months), I start my internship. I am still incredibly excited. The President of The Washington Center spoke to us a lot about opportunity and the significance of taking advantage of opportunity. I'm naturally nervous, but I'm confident that I can prove myself if given the opportunity (which it seems I will be this summer). I've been working towards this for years and cannot wait to dedicate my summer to working hard in a field I care about with an agency I respect and admire.

How To: Blend in as a Russian Woman

How to Carry Random non-Purse Items

Using plastic bags to carry things
is a no-no. Plastic souvenir bags are
the worst to be to seen with.

Kind of like Victoria's Secret bags, Rive Gauche bags are used
for all purposes under the sun. I'm convinced that the
easiest, quickest way to blend in here is to carry one of
these bags. The store itself sells make-up, soaps, and hair
products. 

How to Walk the City

A Russian woman in sneakers?
Are you kidding?
What are they, animals?!

Russian women have a superpower of
being able to walk on ice in stilettos,
but they wear heels year-round and
the higher, the better

How to Pack for Classes

Russian women do not carry backpacks. For that matter,
few Russian guys do either. 

  

Where do Russian female students keep
notebooks, textbooks, print-outs, essays,
etc.? Do they ever bring laptops with them
anywhere? These are all mysteries to me.

How to Dress for Classes

Typical American college girl attire. 

(Approximation of a) Typical Russian college
girl attire. Hair will be perfect, makeup will
be flawless, heels will be high, skirts will be
short, and sweaters will be low-cut.

How to Wear the Basics

A Russian woman in a T-Shirt? Do they
even MAKE t-shirts in Russia?

I don't know what these t-shirts are you speak of,
but it's spring, we can wear skirts now!
Russian skirts/dresses=just barely covering
your lady bits.