I am not sure if I am all that good at this. There are a lot of things that I could talk about from the last two weeks. Like how we randomly decided to hop in the car and drive to California. Or how after I spent 28 hours on the road back from California, my mother greeted me by telling me to take a shower and put my stuff in a smaller bag because we were going to be leaving for Chicago.

I learn lots of important life lessons while sitting in cars. In California we are split between our oldest and best friends in the Los Angeles area and our actual family in the San Diego area. I drove down to San Diego to go out with my cousins and brother since my brother was leaving to go sell helicopters in the U.A.E. because he’s a real person with a real job that involves being paid to do cool stuff and if only I knew things about math and science I could go into engineering and have a job like that too. But I don’t. Anyway, as I sat there in my mother’s behemoth of an SUV in terminal traffic while the carpool lane flew by me, I was certain that the universe was punishing me for not caring more about the environment.

Later, as I drove back to Missouri with my cousins, sister, and sister’s friend, ranging in age from 12 to 15, I had two rather important epiphanies (or at least they seemed important to me at 4am). First: being around 14 and 15 year olds makes me want to listen to the music I listened to then which further suggests to me that teenage angst is somehow contagious. All I wanted to do was scream along to Seventy Times Seven and assorted Brand New and Taking Back Sunday broken heart mantras even though my high school self didn’t have enough of a love life to ever encounter said broken heart, but then maybe this is the real reason I was so filled with angst. The point to this: if teenage angst is, in fact, contagious, then I’m going to have to rule out “high school teacher” as a profession because my poor family had to live through that shit once and I just won’t do it to them again. Or myself.

My other grand revelation was that I was clearly getting a glimpse of my future. Like it or not, we will all become our mothers (or fathers) some day in some form or another. Driving a car full of kids across the country on a moment’s notice is obviously going to be a part of my own incarnation of my mother. I also suspect it will include her penchant for temporarily acquiring stray children. It is unusual for my mother to go more than a few months without a spontaneous road trip (preferably with a middle-of-the-night departure) and equally as unusual for her to spend more than a few months without a kid who isn’t her own living under her roof. Our foreign exchange student left while I was in California and within days of coming back I hear that we may be taking in one of my sister’s friends ostensibly to be helpful to this kid but really because now that my mother has one child left she’s starting feel dangerously close to being an empty-nester which is not a condition that will suit her well.

After all of this really important deep thinking and emo-music-belting spanning a period of 28 hours, I got home wanting nothing in the world more than my bed. My eyeballs were in serious pain. I didn’t know that could happen. I was so delirious that I was beyond exhaustion and my eyelids weren’t even all that heavy but my eyes themselves were so dried out that it was a bit excruciating. So of course my mom decides that we should shower and then pile back into the car with two more people and take the 6 hour trip to Chicago. Upon arrival to Chicago I managed to keep myself awake long enough to watch the Ghana-Uruguay game that ended with me throwing things across the room and then crying myself to sleep for a long awesome nap, albeit marred by all the angst this re-inspired in my soul. More sadness ensued in Chicago, since the city decided that there would be something inappropriate about laying off tons of workers and then dropping a ton of money on the elaborate fireworks show they host on the 3rd of July.

Fortunately, we returned to Jefferson City for the 4th and my small town did not disappoint. I know, I know, I hate on Missouri relentlessly. But everything that I typically dislike about this state is awesome and perfect for Independence Day. The whole downtown area was turned into a carnival, of sorts. Stands sold deep fried candy bars, drunk redneck girls got in fights disbanded by police officers, and my sister’s band of idiots acquired a rabbit from a friend who won it in some sort of game of skill and stupidity. I went to some sort of alley-way two-buck-drunk concert with my dad because there’s nothing awkward about that at all. Other highlights include: man of questionable sobriety riding a Segway around, and drunk girls belting “My Heart Will Go On.”

So there it is: I’m already becoming my mother, Ghana was robbed (and this fills me with feelings), and my arteries may have clogged from the number of times I had to type “Deep Fried Candy Bars” between here, Twitter, and text messages.