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!

ice water summer camp

Before last Tuesday, my limited interaction with northern California involved two inland drive-bys on the 5 freeway with my freshman roommate en route to San Francisco. Both trips (each as impromptu as humanly possible) combined probably amounted to a grand total of about 47 hours spent between San Fran and Berkeley, so northern wonders like redwood trees and banana slugs were essentially fairy tales for me until this week. But now I’ve been to the mountaintop and can attest that both are real and very cool.

For the next 50-something days (which run scary close into depart-for-China time), I’m a counselor at Camp Hammer in Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains, and even though I don’t know where anything is up here yet, I’m in love with it.

Because I really love camp. Lame sentence. I love trees, I love sunshine, I love KP duty, I love running around in the forest, I love singing, I love yelling, I love games, I love campers. I love that all of these things mixed up with summer sky and breeze are always warm and familiar. And even though I’d never been here before, I can tell you that this is a wonderful place, very different from what I’ve done before, and wonderful, warm familiar things go on here.

It’s so different up here from anywhere I’ve been or camped before. Redwoods and cedars are so different from Jeffrey pines and manzanita, and moss grows on everything. Everything! I would show you pictures, but I have yet to take any, and it would take a million years to upload them here with mountain-internet. But at some point you’ll be able to see mossy sunshine trees and lots of smiling faces, because I’m pretty sure it will be impossible to take an uninteresting picture in this place.

Le sigh. This post is not at all verbally representative of the calm and happiness of being here. Sometime soon I’ll sneak away into the forest, find a large-ass tree and curl up underneath it with journal or something, and then the next time you read this it will be way prettier. In any case, I’m blessed that this summer I get that warmth and familiarity right up until I run away to China. So the last ‘thing’ I’m doing in the States is one of my favorite things in the world. Cool.

In other news, part two of my childhood life story will be on its way soon . And so will invitation papers from my future-university in Harbin! It feels so good to have another wave of certainty on the way. Peace and blessings.

apple juice childhood, part one

If you’re reading this, you probably at least know my name and that I’m of some relevance to your life, but I would like to tell you some other things, including pictures, which make everything more fun and provide an excuse to convince you that I was an adorable child at one point in my life.

Everyone has one of those things most like to call a childhood, and here is mine (up to this point). Here we go! Ahem.

Once upon a time, Bob and Joy of Williamsville, New York, had a beautiful baby girl they called Barbara. Barbara eventually became my mother.


So, once upon a time, my cute future-mother


met my cute future-father, Ray (this picture I feel is pretty indicative of my father as a whole character. Sorry, Dad)


and Barb and Ray decided to have a life together.


Which is where I enter the scene, just before the end of the glorious 1980s, after one Paprocki child had already been birthed and before the dawn of the final Paprocki offspring.


I was a very cute middle child with early proclivities for looking demure,


being academic and cutting my own hair (something I put on hold until age 15 after this rookie pre-K attempt. Sorry, Mom).


I was a pretty peaceable child, very shy and into artsy crafts and books when I wasn’t playing the typical little sister.


I was also very into sweets. What else is new.


We lived in Buffalo, New York until the summer I was 7, when we moved to sunny, rural Aguanga, California


at the encouragement and with the help of my favorite Aunt Diane and Uncle Dwight (charmingly dubbed AD and UD, who here are falling in love a few years earlier in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia). They are two of the most whole and loving people in the world, and their generosity is a lot of why my life is as good as it is.


Needless to say, that was a pretty big jump for little Rachel, who was used to running around in humid green backyards in the summer and being thrown wholesale into copious Buffalonian snowbanks in the winter. This part of California lacked both. But, ranch life had some definite benefits, including but not limited to big sky sunsets


and horses (Nick and Jed) who considered our swimming pool a perfectly acceptable drinking trough.


I learned how to ride those horses (maybe not as well as AD and UD may have liked, but at least I was decent at mucking out stalls, for a little skinny kid) and run around outside constantly. I was therefore super tan for a long time, which led church ladies to ask if I was adopted whenever I stood next to my bright blond siblings.

So, we lived on the front hill of Aunt Diane and Uncle Dwight’s 11-acre parcel of land, which was full of mustard and sage brush. Very pretty-but-not-on-purpose herbal. So, I had some birthdays and things,


(yes, that is a mouse/cheese motif birthday cake. AWESOME) and I grew up there. So did my brother and sister (their birthday cakes were less mousey). The three of us went to a tiny rural public school, and we all read a lot and won too many of those honor roll-good student awards. We wore a lot of mucker boots and crispy blue jeans. Very cool. Anyway, Aguanga was hot and dusty but very beautiful, and besides for hanging out in the pepper trees/grape vines I always had distractions like reading and sewing and knitting (look at the iron concentration on my face)


to keep me busy inside. You know, normal active 9-year-old things. Honestly I was (am) a huge nerd—totally the teacher’s pet and the kind that gets teased for it because I didn’t know how not to be. So that sucked. But I was (am) kind of a dreamer child, and we all spent a lot of time doing club things through church, so there was a little outlet there. Not that I didn’t have friends! I did, I swear, and we had our fair share of adventures. Anyway, I always, always loved reading and drawing and I wanted to be a teacher or a writer or something bookish.

I feel like this is a good stopping point for now, about halfway through the skim-milk version of my life up to today. And by skim-milk, I mean there are little nuances of things you don’t blog about, but skim milk will still give you a general idea of what baby cows experience, if that makes sense. In any case, we’ll return to the rest of my thrilling life at a date in the near future!

Until the next tea,
Rach

gas station coffee roadtrip

The latest of my pre-China adventures has been an almost-cross-country road trip with a carful of friends to Arkansas, which taught me several things:

- Short-legged creatures will never understand the plight of tall people in small cars. My deepest sympathies to those whose heads brush the roof, but I just cannot relate.

- Highway patrolmen likely rank high on the list of most-loathed Americans in probably every single state.

- That grimey feeling you get from sleeping overnight on a train headed to Germany…you can also get it in a German car headed to Arkansas. I think this speaks to the wonderful unity of ride grime across all borders.

- Humidity is a real trip.

- There’s something about gas station coffee that tastes like travel and I like it.

We drove pretty much straight through and straight back, armed with granola bars and fresh produce, making those intermittent gas/coffee/pee stops reliably every four hours or so, always talking about how good it feels to stretch and how ugly/pretty/hot/windy/humid it was outside. And occasionally we’d stop and actually eat something, which exposed to the wonders of Waffle Houses, Cracker Barrel and of course where one of my hubcaps was discovered missing. Le sigh. We moved on.

I should apologize to the state of Texas for insulting its grammar, spelling and political practices. Texas: I am sorry. Someday I hope to understand you. In the meantime, I appreciate your kitschy expanse of land and cows.

So, anything east of Murrieta truly is just desert, straight through Arizona to New Mexico, where it changes into magical cool mystical desert until Texas happens, at which point dead roadside armadillos begin attesting to the general overarching nothingness. And slowly but surely Oklahoma convinces you that America does, in fact, have more to offer than dead armadillos (which I think we should pronounce arma-dee-yos) and oil wells. However, along with those plains and creeks come indigenous pick-up trucks with beds full of live animals and small children. Anyway, before you know it you’re in Arkansas, which is so green and full of trees. And the air is so full of humidity that you feel like you should be able to drink it, but you can’t, so your whole body just feels kind of soaked and soft. Then, the fireflies are incredible. They've gotta be magic or something. The south is a very sweet place.

Driving through the night stretches on forever. Once the sun goes down, there goes your book and your journal, and on comes either Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion or Mumford & Sons or Explosions. And every twenty minutes or so you drive through a smattering of those orange streetlamps, which means a small town where everyone’s asleep, including the mothers and fathers and preachers and brothers. Or a truck stop with those big white lights, where everyone’s awake. Sometimes you drive a really long stretch without seeing any lights that God didn’t make, but the big wide sky is full of stars. If you can’t see the stars on those stretches it’s probably because those thunderclouds are doing their thing, every few minutes flashing lightening, which you might see hit the ground in one bright fracture line or stay rumbling in the clouds, showing off the edges of the cloud in front of it. Very beautiful.

I love certain things about America, I really do. And I’m glad I got to see some of it this way before leaving for a little while, scrunched up in my grimy small German car, checking out what’s outside the windows.

almond black biscotti introduction

If you told me three years ago that tonight I’d be sitting cross-legged on the floor in my bedroom in my mom’s house, listening to Bon Iver, wearing my glasses and drinking loose-leaf tea while blogging about graduating from college and moving to China, I don’t think I could have believed you, even if I had cared what you were saying.

Well, I would have to ask you who Bon Iver was, I’d probably believe the bedroom part, definitely the glasses and tea part, but when you got to China I’d think you were talking about someone else.

Someone who: was probably a year older than I am, because they’d already finished school; who had some sort of cash flow, because they were taking expensive transportation very, very far away; who had majored in Very Impressive International Business with an emphasis in Intercultural Communication, a concentration in Conflict Negotiation and a minor in Mandarin or something, because they obviously had some serious direction in life; who knew what they were doing.

I am/did/have none of those things. Cool. But this is what I’m doing tonight, including the loose-leaf almond black tea and glasses (not the cute hipster kind, the nerd kind I need to see with and that some hot bearded nerd man will one day find hopelessly attractive).

My name is Rachel and I am a twenty-one-year-old recent graduate of Pepperdine University from Murrieta, California, United States of America. I like to be outside and knit. In eleven-odd weeks I will put my English Literature degree, some clothes and a lot of books into suitcases, and I will leave on a jet plane probably not knowing when I’ll be back again. That jet plane will be going to Harbin, Heilongjiang province, China, where I’ll teach English in a public university while drinking hot tea and being a human.

I mean, I might not actually drink tea in the act of enunciating clearly and discussing gerunds, but I have a feeling there will often (always) be a thermos or mug within arm’s reach, warm and thoughtful.

Because I can imagine myself needing a bit of that in the next year (or two or three), since I did indeed graduate from college and will, in fact, be moving to China. There will be a lot of stretching, a lot of movement in many different directions, for which I am so excited and by which I am already blessed. Just a lot of elasticity and loose leaves.

So, elasticitea: the practice of constantly growing in and seeing the world, regardless/because of latitude and longitude, accompanied by a cup of love and a good spirit.

I know, I’m witty. Cute title. Good thing I actually mean it! So come with me-

Until the next tea,
Rach