Welch's Grape Juice, Bernie Sanders and Assholes. Rachael Gilbert

I’m kinda terrible at keeping promises and also making reasonable goals, but I am good at making lists so we’ll see how this goes. (*note from me after I finished writing this: it is sappy. I’m sorry. I’m pretty sure all goals are toasted in sorrow and baked in dreams (ewwww) or whatever and are thus required to be sappy, but just fair warning, these follow that same rule.*)

1.)    Before high school ends I’d like to say or do something that actually matters. A lot of high school is pretty self-centered. It’s about my grades and my life and my career. I get caught up in that. And a lot of times I care more about what I’m going to get on the next calc test (or how the hell I’m going to finish all of my homework) than the person sitting next to me. I want to change that. I want to be there for my friends (my grand total of 1.8) or even for that random guy who always cries in the hallway (shout out to green hallway stairway cry man. Actually maybe not him, I low-key think he’s a drug dealer). I mean, in ten years I’m not going to give two fucks about whether or not I did my physics homework (and to be completely honest, I don’t really care now), I’m going to care if I was there for the people that mattered to me.

2.)    In a similar vein, before college is over (dear god, watch out 2021) I want to be a good friend. As previously established, I’m the kind of the sarcastic asshole you only keep around for the puns (but they’re really good puns). I want to be more than that.

I think about that a lot actually, it’s like, you know when you wake up in the middle of the night and somehow by the grace of Lucifer himself, you’ve remembered that you completely forgot to do “x” and you feel like you’re about to die in the hell depths beneath? That happened over winter break (as it often does when I am given Welch’s sparkling grape juice, a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and too much time on my hands). I “woke up” (to use the overly used and stereotypical phrase) and realized: I’m a kind of shitty friend. I talk over people, I sometimes care more about myself than others, I’m overly concerned with how I’m perceived, sometimes I’m overbearing, I cry a lot which isn’t a real selling point in the friendship market, etc. And I want to change that. I don’t really know how to do that, or how that can possibly happen by 2021, but I hope it will.

3.)    On a lighter note, before I finish living, I just really want to be a good parent. I don’t really see myself getting married, but I do see myself adopting a couple of kids (*channels inner Angelina Jolie*). I want to be the family who drives up to parks in a minivan and unloads an equal number of children and dogs, the kind who make waffles (note: no pancakes will be allowed in the Gilbert household as they are the literal spawn of satan) on Saturday mornings and have weird holiday traditions. I want us to spend weekend hiking or stargazing, on the first snow of the year I want us to have a LOTR marathon (yes that will be a legitimate opt out of school card in my children’s future), I want to read them Harry Potter and make terrible, yet adorable, crafts with them. I want to be a person they can cry to when they get a boo boo (and subsequently an Avenger’s Band-Aid), or when school is terrible (thanks American education system) or when they’re sad and they don’t know quite why, but everything is going wrong. I want to be there.

4.)    Okay, also, one last goal (for America really), by the time I die Bernie Sanders had better have been president at some point or I will come haunt all your asses. #FeeltheBern.