I like the quiet things in life, the beautiful stuff that most other people don’t see, either because they walk blindly by or they take it for granted. I guess you could say I’m a quiet person, myself; a bit of an outsider. I don’t socialize very much. Maybe that’s because I’ve never really had a long enough chance to get comfortable in any one place. I’ve moved from one place to another every year for as long as I can remember, living in places as different as a small village in Kenya, and Tokyo, Japan. So I haven’t really “put down roots,†as it were. But I really like where I am now.
This past year my parents moved us to San Rafael, CA, which is a quiet, but not remote, suburb in the Bay Area. I know that living in the suburbs is supposed to be lame, but I don’t think San Rafael is. There’s a lot of really great stuff. For instance, my favorite place to sort of get away from it all is called Delilah’s Garden . I’ve never shown it to anyone. It’s a sculpture garden my uncle built that some might call “quirky.†But, again, I think it’s beautiful. I often bike over there just to photograph it—which is, I guess, another thing I should mention. I’m a bit of an amateur photographer. Actually, I pretty much take my camera everywhere. I take pictures for the Wildcat—the school paper—and the yearbook. I’ve been told that I need to get out from behind the camera, but, it’s like I was saying before, I like beautiful things. And since the most beautiful things are often ephemeral, if I have the chance to catch one of those moments on camera, I hate the idea that I might miss it. That said, for the first time in my life, I want to be more than just an observer. Maybe it’s because I feel so comfortable here, but I’d like to…jumpstart my life, as it were.
Okay. I’ll admit to another reason. There’s a girl at my school who I sort of have feelings for. Her name is Sara, she’s a sophomore, and this really incredible soccer player. It’s stupid, I guess because I don’t know her very well, and she really doesn’t have time for someone like me in her life, but I think she’s fascinating. I feel like if she weren’t always training for soccer, she’d be one of those people who would really get me. I’d like to take her with me to Delilah’s Garden sometime. I think she would see the beauty in it. But, I don’t see a way that could ever happen.
