My summer bucket list (& a collab!)

I am officially OUT OF SCHOOL. Which can only mean one thing…. SUMMMMMMER!

To start these glorious three months off strong, Em at Two Girls Two Mountains and I are doing a collab on summer bucket lists! I’m posting mine a few days before hers, so if you’re reading this during the gap, here’s some other posts she’s written: photoshoot tips, songs to dance to, and life changing books.) As soon as she unleashes hers onto the internet, I will link it here.

1. Watch the new movies that are coming out

Incredibles 2: June 15 (trailer)

I actually don’t think I’ve fully seen the first Incredibles movie (and I’m pretty sure I didn’t like what I did see), BUT I still want to watch the second one because of two reasons:
1) I remember not liking Monsters, Inc. from when I was little, but I watched it again on the bus during a school trip last year and it was good. Which means that my younger self’s opinion on movies might not be the most reliable.
2) The origin story of Incredibles is a cool one. I learned about it from the awesome book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong.
Here’s some backstory for the backstory of Incredibles– Pixar was on a roll with a bunch of huge movies, but Steve Jobs and his people were all nervous that they were going to fall off the roll. So they hired a new guy named Brad Bird who decided the best way to help them keep their balance was to shake things up. Here’s a shortened version from Barking on what happened next:

Bird revealed his plan to address the creativity crisis: “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to.”
Bird’s new “Dirty Dozen” of animation didn’t just make a film differently. They changed the way the entire studio worked:
“We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. We did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do.”
That project was The Incredibles. It grossed over $600 million and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

Ant-man and the Wasp: July 6 (trailer)

Um well so, I haven’t the watched the first Ant-man either… but hopefully I will have by the time it comes out.
(Sidenote: Paul Rudd, the actor who plays Ant-man, was also the step-brother guy in Clueless. Isn’t that weird??)

Eighth Grade: July 13 (trailer)

Crazy Rich Asians: August 15 (trailer) (the book it’s based on)

Haha, there’s going to be so many Asians going to watch Crazy Rich Asians. 

2. Get comfortable maneuvering an incredible but potentially dangerous invention

In other words, take driver’s ed and get my permit.

3. Try kdrama (AKA Korean drama) and anime

The kdrama I’m going to watch (more like read-watch with all the subtitles that are going to be happening) is called Tempted, and the anime (wait, is it an anime show? series? both of them sound awkward) show/series is called My Hero Academia. The plan for the kdrama is that my friends and I will buddy watch it, and the plan for the anime show is that I’m going to watch it and then update one of them who is already on season 2 with all my thoughts.

I’m more excited about being able to talk about episodes afterwards with them than watching the specific shows. After listening to people at school talk about Friends and The Office and Stranger Things, watching the same TV show as someone else seems to be a very bonding experience. Oh my, I hope they don’t read this, they’re going to think I’m being so cheesy. Also, I sound like that high school narrator in books who talks about his/her peers like they’re scientific specimens he/she observes.

4. Spend a lot of time in the kitchen with my mom

AKA LEARN HOW TO COOK. And how to interact with food related stuff in general- grocery shopping, knives (agh I don’t like knives they make me nervous). For example, I’ve been practicing peeling oranges with a knife.

Let’s just say this goal is a major work in progress.

5. Hang out with people from school

I’m not good at hanging out with people from school during the summer. Usually, on the last day of school, I say bye to all my classmates and then say hello to them for the first time in three months on the first day of school. BUT THIS YEAR IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT.

Specific ideas:
– go watch the movies above
– have a photoshoot (I’m excited about this one)
– go swimming
– play board games (One time at youth group, it was a free night, so we were just hanging out when somebody pulled out CandyLand. If you’ve forgotten how to play CandyLand or if you’ve never played, it’s basically the simplest game to be invented- the box said it’s okay for THREE year olds to play it. But it was awesome and I had so much fun.)
– go to an escape room

6. Research homelessness in America

It started when my dad and I were talking about the recent school shooting at Sante Fe High School. The news had upset him, I could tell. As for me, I knew in my head that it was sad, but I didn’t feel sad. This happens every time I hear that another school shooting has happened.

Something that does make me feel sad is seeing people on the streets with cardboard signs. That’s why I don’t like visiting New York. One time when I went for a few days, it just hurt to be there. When I told him that, he told me that seeing homeless people doesn’t make him sad because he believes that here in America, most people can get a job if they tried to and many of the people living are the streets are just lazy.

I said I disagreed. I didn’t have the information- I’ve never seen the data, the hard numbers and facts and first hand accounts. I didn’t want to make my decision before doing the research.

So here we are.

Some questions I want to get answers too:
– What are the major and minor reasons people become homeless?
– What is the process like for people who are homeless to become not homeless?
– What are the best ways for me to help them?
– What is life like on a daily basis if you are homeless?

7. Clean my room

These past few days I’ve been getting the itch to clean out anything and everything. It’s a feeling that only happens to me once or twice a year, so when it does, I always go all out. If I had to make a prediction, I would say that for a good part of this weekend, my bedroom and study room are going to be in a state of disorder.

Sidenote: dramatic cleaning is a perfect example of the quote, “it always gets worse before it gets better.”

8. Interview my parents

I want to do this for a number of reasons.
1) My parents have an awesome story. I’m talking awesome awesome. Like, AWESOME awesome awesome.
2) Here’s another fact from the Barking book that I mentioned at the very beginning of this post.
“What’s the best predictor of your child’s emotional well-being? It’s not great schools, hugs, or Pixar movie. Researchers at Emory University found that whether a kid knew their family history was the number-one indicator.”
3) I want to be able to tell my kids these stories.
4) It’ll be fun and funny and interesting. And it’s cool to hear the stories from two points of view- my mom and my dad almost always remember stuff differently.

9. Stock up on blog posts

The best piece of advice I read and didn’t follow before starting this blog was to have twenty posts already written before launching. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice, but I was too pumped to wait that long. But, I’m taking the advice to heart now. Hopefully this way when school starts, I’ll be able to post on the same day each week instead of jumping all around.

More ideas for your summer bucket list:

– Em’s bucket list!!! Which will be linked HERE.
– Finish a wreck-this-journal
– Take advantage of the free month Skillshare offers and take a million classes
– Write someone a snail mail letter (I strongly recommend this: getting one back in the mail is like Christmas morning)
– Do Camp NaNoWriMo
– Try geocaching
– Make something:
1. s’mores at home (I LOVE S’mores. Whoever invented them is a genius.)
2. origami bowtie (I found out about these when a student gave one to an art teacher that’s leaving- they’re so cool.)
3. pop up card (also very cool)

If something in this post made you go ‘cool, I want to do that this summer,’ raise your hand in the comments!
Specific ideas for what to do while ‘hanging out’? Dude, I think hanging out is harder than it sounds, especially when it’s at your house. I’m pretty sensitive to whether or not people are bored, which is a feeling that multiplies when I’m the ‘hostess’. Sometimes I also get tired of being ‘on’ in the middle of having people over, but unfortunately, I still haven’t found a nice way of kicking people out with the excuse that I need to get back to that really good book I’m reading. 
Have you taken driver’s ed yet? Some of my friends took it last summer while they were fourteen so they could get their license ASAP. It’s weird thinking that my classmates are going to be out on the road. 
What’s on your summer bucket list?