apple juice, part two: decaf soy misto teenagehood

I am currently stationed in a laundromat in Boulder Creek, obvi a very high-class establishment with hand-drawn caution signs and grapevine wallpaper, exchanging dollar bills for excessive amounts of quarters and detoxing from my first week of campers. And by detoxing I mean already missing them, two hours later. There's so much to say about them and so much to be thankful for. The thanking is already underway and the saying will happen soon.

But in the meantime, there is more to my moving life story and quite a bit to the part that those campers are paralleling right now. Heavy stuff. Alright, let’s get down to business!

You’ll notice a gap in photos beginning around age 11, which is due to the fact that my awkward stage (where we left off) was significantly less cute than the surrounding time periods. There are three or four of my mom’s photo albums that serve as more than sufficient evidence of that. And I’m not yet humble enough to call them funny.

Anyway, what you should know about post-fifth grade Rachel is that we moved half an hour northwest into suburbia when AD and UD started travelling a lot and relocated to the east coast. Leaving Aguanga’s space and my friends was way lame, but you get over those things when you have to.

Enter middle school and awkwardness. It didn’t take me long to make new friends in Murrieta, but I was definitely still a teacher’s pet and a ‘smart kid’ in a ‘regular class,’ which is the worst torture for a new girl with glasses. But the good thing is that I slowly grew out of that, and by eighth grade I was having fun and becoming cool. Okay that second part is so not true, but I did have my first love then, and I started figuring out what I thought about the world and everything in it.

Cue discovery of: music, J.D. Salinger and C.S. Lewis (at the same time, for which I am grateful), and journaling. THANK HEAVEN.

So ninth grade rolls around, and of course I’m going to the brand new (and therefore not cool/artistically typical American enough for 14-year-old Rachel) high school in Murrieta, which correlates with first heartbreak and beginning of teenage misery. I was just super, super introspective and probably too bored, which I’ve learned is a bad combination. But there were always books around, plenty of cul-de-sacs and little parks to take walks in and endless scarves/bags/skirts to be made. Crafty nerd central. I started to embrace my glasses again around this point, and I did a lot of hanging out in Barnes and Noble, drinking mistos and reading Tale of Two Cities over and over.

I would like to take this opportunity now to thank Jimmy Eat World, Death Cab for Cutie and Damien Rice for providing the background music and thematic movements of 2003-2005, which are incredibly important when you’re doing the ‘growing up in suburbia without a car’ thing. Honorable mentions to Cool Hand Luke and Sigur Ros. Couldn’t have done it without you.

(And myspace, definitely could have done it without you. It was fun while it lasted...not.)

I did the AP class thing for all of high school, and somewhere along the line I figured out I didn’t have to justify liking to learn. I could just do it and no one had to care. I cared, though, and I totally had ambitions of being a Mr. Holland or John Keating (a la Dead Poet’s Society) for future generations of artistically typical American high schoolers. I still do. I loved English, loved social justice, did a huge amount of community service, protested war and big oil on Murrieta's busiest street corners (which were not very busy but made my mom nervous and most of Murrieta pissed) and almost always took the left-er side of class discussions because I really believed the ideal is possible. The humanities were really my thing starting freshman year even. And I owe such a debt of gratitude to those teachers that taught way more than they had to. How do you even begin to thank someone for just the forum to do that? Anyway, even if I complained about it, I loved (still and will always love) school.

Which meant that college was the place for me. I had people telling me that starting in eighth grade, so even though I grew up with a single mom and no real idea how to do college, I knew it was going to happen. And my resume was just fine, peppered with honor roll/service club things and yearbook editor-in-chief-hood (which was a HUGE part of high school for me and where most of my time went. I will always have a big thing for layout design, copywriting and grammar-fixing. NERD). So, craft nerd idealist 17-year-old Rachel who knows nothing about the world, choose where to spend the next four years of your life. Ok!


(That's me getting into Berkeley and receiving my financial aid package from William and Mary at the same time. Cool coincidence, fates of college. Way to herniate me.)

To make a longish back-and-forth story shorter, by April my choices came down to The College of William and Mary, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine. I ruled out W&M because of the distance from home (and, let’s be honest, boyfriend. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time, but you make those kinds of choices when you’re 18 and I don’t regret it) and nixed Berkeley because of the size (which I know was the right decision, as incredible as that opportunity was and as hard as it was to give up). So that left Pepperdine, land of future entrepeneurs and ring-by-springers. I was still stoked out of my mind to go, though, and I knew it was the edge of a big deal thing in my life. I had no idea just how great of a thing I was getting myself into.

So, the summer after I graduated from high school, my first job was at a discount home goods store in Temecula that I didn’t realize was really terrible until my next summer job, which was mostly less terrible. I did too much vacuuming and too little getting paid that summer. But it didn’t matter, because in August I busted out and started being way cooler than I had ever been before.


And the dryer buzzes. To be continued!