Breaking Up with Social Media

Hello everyone again! I have been slacking on giving my time to my blog for the longest time now, but I have finally decided on what I need to write about. I was struggling with my blog and the branding I wanted to have for myself and my blog. For some reason, I could never get my content right. I could never write what I thought was real or what I thought was click "worthy." However, now I've discovered that I will not write for anyone but myself. I will do it because it makes me joyous and productive, like it always has. 

I have always been the type of person to watch and then do. No, not necessarily a follower, but someone that envies others. It is a disgusting lifestyle and I am sick of it. However, in this special case, I am following something that I think will make me happier and an all-around better person. 

This is going to be so extremely hard for me to do. I mean, part of my college major is based on the sole idea of social marketing and branding. This break-up I am putting myself through with my phone and my laptop…it is going to be hard…and I am probably going to screw up, but I am doing this!

For a week, starting tonight at midnight, I will be deleting my social media apps. My focus will be on something that is so much more than likes on Instagram or how many views My Story on Snapchat gets. I am so done with the pettiness of social media and all of the competition it has to have the most likes on your picture. SO DONE!

I am taking this journey and I am ready to learn about everything outside of social media. Maybe I will finish the book I have been trying (not so hard) to read since June. Maybe I will make a new friend along the way since my eyes will not be trained on who's #ootd is the cutest. Maybe I will (fingers crossed) study a little harder. Maybe I will become a better me, a more confident me, and a happier me. 

If you would like to watch the video that encouraged me to do this, click here.

If you would like to read the article that provided the video to me, click here.

Spectrum Ministries Mission Trip 2015

Early morning on June 13, I departed Atlanta with a dozen or so team members to San Diego, where we then drove across the border into Tijuana, Mexico. I'd been planning on this trip since my freshmen year of high school about five years ago (yikes, has it really been that long?!) and I cannot thank God enough for allowing me to go on this trip with some strong Christian role models. Also, to all of my supporters that helped make this trip happen with your financial help, and more importantly your much needed prayers, thank you immensely because it was an experience that helped draw me nearer to Christ but also helped open my eyes to many political and controversial topics it seems our country has completely tried to shift our beliefs from. Every opportunity it seemed that someone could pray for me and my fellow team members was taken upon as a task of an individual, a church, and a community of Christ worshippers whether home in Atlanta or across the nation into the different beautiful city of Tijuana, Mexico.

I will be posting in the next upcoming days individual blog posts of each day we spent serving the Tijuana community and how your prayers and financial offerings helped the community. Thank you to everyone who allowed me to go across the nation and share my love for love itself. It was more than a blessing for me.

Also, my Spanish honestly wasn't too bad (jokes, it was really bad). I kind of mixed up hermosa, meaning beautiful or handsome, and hermana, a sister, like a lot (the whole trip actually.) It wasn't until the end that I realized why I was getting some weird side glances from the children when one of my teammates corrected me. Next trip, I will have better Spanish and I will master my atrocious and unacceptable language inadequacy.

 However, it is crazy how well you can communicate without knowing each other's language. We still had fun laughing and joking around as we fellowshipped and loved on one another. The one major thing I learned, and hope everyone else in the world is able to understand, was that our love, kindness, and happiness truly wasn't shown through words or the things we brought to Tijuana with us, but through our actions and our genuine time spent with each other and their community.

Thank you to everyone who has been thinking and praying for me, our Atlanta team, and the Spectrum Ministries staff, 

Emma xoxo

New Year, New Me?

Ah yes, the "new year, new me," mantra...

As the year of 2014 closed I was able to spend it with my best friends, who have earned the title best friend in more ways than one, at Underground Atlanta celebrating the descend of the past year and the climb into the new year. We spent the night listening to the drunk people running about and watching families protect their little ones from the chaos.

Good bands played on the Main Stage and soon enough when Ludacris came on, the entire place erupted into mass entertainment. There was thirty minutes left in 2014 and the entire place was packed with locals jamming to our favorite rapper born and raised in our city.

We were right in front of the peach as it dropped down and we yelled with the rest of the crowd ringing in the new year as fireworks and confetti were blasted for our entertainment. We stayed until our favorite songs were played by Luda, and we continued "throwing our hands up" and rapping along with him, well, to the best of our ability that is.

Soon after the peach dropped, we all went back to my best friend's apartment and had our own little party that consisted of cotton candy, chips and salsa, and recovering from freezing our behinds off. The next morning we slept in until practically noon and our clothes smelled of dirty downtown struggles (weed, alcohol, and smoke, which were none of our own).

I would recommend going to the Peach Drop at least once! We got there before the crowds came tumbling into Underground so we got to be right in front of the peach as it dropped and we got to watch Ludacris and the other acts perform from a good, but still safe distance. There is a lot of security and a lot of police monitoring the crowds everywhere you look.

We did take Marta, the Atlanta transit system, to Underground and it was probably a lot easier than driving and finding a parking spot in the chaos getting there and leaving would be a totally different story. The train cars were packed, but mostly everyone was respectful to each other during the cramped ride.

Would I go again? Probably not, but if an artist I liked was performing at any of the stages set up, I would.

Northern Roots

This week back in August started off with an eight hour journey from Atlanta to Cincinnati in the tight backseat of my dad's Dodge Ram pickup truck. My sweet puppy, Bella, who is not much of a puppy anymore, but I still pretend like she is, was excited to be on the road and couldn't begin to hide her excitement in the car by seat changing from the front to back the entire eight hour road trip to Grandma's and Grandpa's! Note my excitement over that...

When we arrived to Cincinnati, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents were all there welcoming us back to Ohio. It was fun getting to talk to all of the family again, seeing as we only get to see them once a year, or if it's a really good year maybe twice! 

Before our family reunion, my parents and my aunt and uncle decided to make a rest stop in Ludington, Michigan which is a beautiful city to stay in up north. It was family friendly and Lake Michigan is right there with a beach and good, good food all around. The town is super cute with pretty shops and gift stores all around. It was hard to imagine the town packed in with snow and ice everywhere. 

We all got an ice cream when we got to the beach and then ascended on our walk to the pier. It was about a half mile walk down a concrete walk way where everyone was fishing and families were gathering to take pictures. And it was totally wheelchair accessible, which is always what we look for since my dad had his leg amputated and was impacted. We got down to the little lighthouse and it was so extremely cute!

Then after our afternoon on the beach, my aunt, uncle and I walked around the town some more and discovered such neat things we don't see everyday down south. For example, the super cool ferry people ride through Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. I, personally, have never seen such a neat ship up close like that besides the cruise we went on when I was a teeny tot. We saw the anchor dropped as they pulled into port and cars being driven off the ship once the boat was docked. And for the cars being driven on, they even had a bomb dog sniffing the vehicles. I do believe the ferry was the SS Badger, but I could be wrong. 

After our neat expedition that day, we spent the night and then went to Eight Point Lake in Michigan for our family reunion on my dad's side. It was lovely! I had seen family I never even knew I had and of course the ones I see all the time, but can never get enough of. I was even coerced by my lovely family members to go paddle boarding for the first time with all my clothes on. Well, lets just say I tried going back to shore and ended up in the water haha. My beautiful cousin Isabella even got me on the home made zip line which made me nervous considering my appeal to outdoor tasks has decreased tremendously since I was a kid. BUT I didn't break my neck...or the chord...so everything was fun! (PS look at my wet hair and different dry clothes)

   

When our family reunion was over for the night, we went back to the Soaring Eagle Resort, which is the nicest Indian Reservation hotel and casino with awesome customer service, and went to the slots! My first legal gambling trip (with my parents): check! Bella, our service dog and my sweet little puppy, was so tired from the day that she even took a nap in the chaos of the casino. The next morning we said bye to mom. (She didn't want to be with us on our 12 hour drive home.)

After our family reunion, Reed, my dad, and I were driving to his old home up in Farmington, Michigan when we were listening to a cover by the extremely talented Madilyn Bailey and that cover song so happened to be Miley Cyrus' hit "Wrecking Ball." My dad knew right away that it was a Miley Cyrus song which was pretty out of character for him considering his bluesy and rock 'n roll music genre he prefers. He then proceeded to tell me that if Miley Cyrus was his own daughter that he would tape a one hundred dollar bill to her forehead and send her out of the house with a good luck pat on the back. Ahh, welcome to my conversations with my father.

We then stayed with my dad's good friend from college and they got to reminisce over the good 'ole days. After our evening and night with his family we got back on the road to discover the monsoons that destroyed I-75. My dad and I kept thinking we were in an apocalyptic state like in our favorite show The Walking Dead. Finding our way through the sketchy parts of Detroit was fun...to say the least. 

And then the drive home... My dad drove through the rest of Michigan once we found our way back on the highway, then I drove the remainder of the way back to Atlanta. It was definitely a task I had to prepare for. There was lots of Mocha Frapps involved from the convenient stores right off the highway and a ton of jamming alone to Ed Sheeran and Jesse McCartney with annoyed looks from my dad about the latter. 

At the end of the day when we arrived home, I got to sleep in my bed and then I woke to a new day where I had to pack for school. Lives are busy when you're starting new things and traveling, but they're two of my favorite things and doing them with people I love makes it all the better.

Emma xoxo

WWYD?

I've been in school here in downtown Atlanta and the homeless population around my university is relevantly high. Today walking back to my dorm room which is about a half mile hike from where I was finishing up a questionnaire on studying abroad, and I noticed something across the street through the maze of cars. I saw through the window of a sedan I was walking next to a homeless man on the other side of the street, who I had then believed slipped on the new fallen leaves on the sidewalk. When the car next to me drove forward, that wasn't the case at all. The man had fallen onto his side and started to convulse. I stopped dead in my tracks on the side of the road and watched and wondered if I should cut through the traffic and help the poor man. I stood too long in waiting and watched as a professional office worker ran through the traffic and to this man's aide. The professional didn't know the homeless man, but he rushed to him without a second thought when he realized what I was so caught up in. He didn't think twice about asking him if he was alright or if he needed to call an ambulance. He did a good deed, while all of us watched the sick homeless man convulse on the sidewalk not knowing if we should intervene or not. 

We are all so caught up in ignoring the homeless when we are in cities or places they tend to gather. Do we really need to ignore them this selfishly? Where is the mercy in that? Shouldn't we act kindly and compassionately towards these people? Why did I walk away from the convulsing homeless man? Where was my compassion? What I am trying to tell myself is that there was nothing I could do. That's completely wrong, I know I have a cell phone, I could have given someone a call to pick the man up. I could have stayed by his side while he recuperated. No one deserves to be alone and I let myself be the victim of society. 

Hopefully there will be no next time, but if I see something like this happen again, I have proven to myself the difficult situation isn't easy but it is necessary. That was my mistake of the week, and I intend to pay it forward in another way to make my community more of a community. 

Aloha Friends!

Hello all, family, friends, and soon-to-be friends!

Since I will be going off to college in t-minus 18 days, I decided to create this blog to keep you all updated on my life. Facebook gets clogged up from all the use of "look where I'm at" and the occasional soppy teenager "bored and can't believe he/she is gone again" or whatever everyones over addicted fingers decide to tap away on that website. 

Well, here I've created something that you can read and be updated about my life while I begin to establish myself in school and in the city of Atlanta! EEEE! How exciting it is to finally be able to call myself a college student and not the disinterested high schooler I so was. I've been looking forward to college since my freshman year in high school and now here it's coming and I'm prepared to take it by a storm...or so I think? 

Anyways, thank you to everyone who has pursued my interest in journalism (my super cool major) and my many gifts from graduation you all supplied me with. Mom, I know you will be reading this, thank you for always being my number one supported and picking me up when life oh so diligently kicked me in the rear end. Dad, you will always be my number one guy, doesn't matter how aggravated we get with each other, you're exceptional with showing me when life get's tough, you get tougher, and that's exactly what you do! And to all my friends reading this, don't worry college won't kick the nutzykookoo out of me, it's in my blood :). 

Soon enough I will be posting another small passage of how move in went into my dorms! 

Love you all!

Emma xoxo