Who knows- maybe you do have “money in the bank” so you’re screaming out money ain’t a thang, but if you’re like me you’re B-R-O-K-E.

I’m not talking about the savings account that the parentals have kept off limits since you received your very first birthday check in the mail. No. I’m talking about spending money- for a quick Chipotle run with the girls or an after workout Starbucks stop or adding to the “volume” of your closet.

“You don’t need those things” my Mom tries to convince me when I beg her for some quick cash. No Mom- I don’t need them, but I sure do want them. And what’s so bad about wanting something every once in a while? NOTHING!

But what happens when you have a job? I know for me, even when I’m making money I still can’t bring myself to spend it. I think I have an unhealthy attachment to my money… as well as a serious shopping addiction… So what do I do? I budget. Or at least I try to.

It all comes down to getting your parents in favor of your plan because if you’re under 18 they are the ones who control your bank account. We have come to the agreement that I put 25% of my paycheck into savings and I keep the rest for spending.

Now here’s another problem… I can spend that money within a matter of minutes. I fall into the trap of avoiding big splurges on things that I want but can’t convince myself it’s worth buying and then I spend all of my money on little purchases for food and Starbucks and the movies.

So it all comes back to BUDGETING! I’m not the best person to tell you how to do it because I haven’t quite figured out an effective system yet. But there are many resources out there that can spell it out for you plain and simple. Start by asking your parents for help setting up a plan. Next you can search the internet for tips and advice and personal experiences. I know I am going to!

Whatever you see when you close your eyes and drift away to your Summer place, I’m betting most of you don’t picture slaving away in a hot, crowded ice-cream store or in a stuffy, packed mall as prime-time sun comes and goes outside. Unfortunately for most of us, this is the reality of Summer which my friends and I like to call… Our Summer Bummer.

Last year my Summer Bummer consisted of grueling 8 hour shifts at a Starbucks run by a woman who could make a porcupine look cuddly. The year before, my Summer Bummer was filled with screaming, crying, poop-filled-diapered children. And the year before, my Summer Bummer was being B-R-O-K-E!

If only there was a way to make money while doing something FUN or just plain easy. Hmmmm I may be onto something there… Well, I’ve been doing some research (okay more like reading Seventeen Magazine) and I stumbled across a brilliant and I mean BRILLIANT discovery.

Guess what?! It IS possible to have fun AND make money! Want to know how? It quite simple actually. Ask yourself what you love to do. If you love to write scan craigslist for writing positions (hey that’s how I landed this awesome job!). Love to play with animals? Stop by your local animal day cares and sell them on your complete devotion to all things fluffy and cute. Are you interested in acting? Well there are TONS of opportunities for counselor positions at acting camps where you manage the kids but still get to take part in the activities! Sounds like a win!

There are jobs for ALL interests out there so pick an interest and Google away! Need ideas? The May issue of Seventeen Magazine has some awesome tips! Don’t let this Summer be just another Summer Bummer.

Now I’m sure that most teenagers view the act of drinking as a type of “right of passage”- that everyone needs at least one good blackout story by the time they enter college. And maybe it was… back in the 70′s when kids knew how to handle their liquor and the repercussions were far less severe. But can you really convince yourself that spending every Friday and Saturday acting like a babbling 1 year old just learning to walk is still a right of passage? Or is it a dangerous pattern that our generation of teenagers have taken to the extreme?

Let me rewind back to prom. Mine was this past Friday night. I wish I could say that alcohol was the hardest substance being passed between tables. Sure, drunk people aren’t the most fun to be around when you’re sober and you still wake up the next morning with pangs of embarrassment or guilt depending on where it took you the previous night, but at least it’s legal (well for 21+). But Ecstasy? Cocaine? Cat tranquilizers? ARE YOU INSANE?

Where do you draw the line…if there’s even a line anymore. When did alcohol and marijuana turn into hard core drugs? Where will it go next? These are the questions that I fear to hear the answers. 30 years from now, when I’ll most likely have kids that are the age that I am now, where will the standard for teenage partying be then? We are speeding toward a rock bottom lined with the remains of overdose victims and brain dead invalids.

Sure, there are the regular promblems- where to find a prom dress that someone doesn’t already have or which hairstyle will make me look like the perfect mixture of an elegant princess meets sex kitten. But now there are a whole new set of promblems that they definitely didn’t have to deal with back in the days of horse drawn carriages and gentleman decorum.

Limo or driving? Who’s having the pre-party? Who’s having the after-party? Taking pictures with my friends or with my dates friends? And most importantly… WHO THE EFF AM I GOING TO GET TO TAKE ME TO PROM?! Excuse me boys, but I was under the impression that it was your job to figure that out. Well, apparently not. Apparently, we girls are supposed to figure out who we want to take us and then it’s just a big rat race to get them to ask us first. This is news to me who, two weeks before prom, still doesn’t have a date!

So how can you make sure that you don’t get caught up in the chaos of promblems? Here are a few tips:

1. Once January hits, it’s NOT too early to start planning for prom (despite what people may tell you).
2. Decide way ahead of time if you want a date or if you just want to go with plans and DO NOT CHANGE YOUR MIND LAST SECOND.
3. Don’t be certain that you’ll be able to rely on a guy friend to be your backup. date in case you don’t get asked IF YOU HAVEN’T FIRST CONFIRMED IT WITH THEM.
4. If you are going to order your dress online, order it at least a month in advance to make sure it fits and doesn’t need to be altered. This gives you enough time to send it back AND receive a new one.
5. Spending $100 dollars to get your hair done won’t guarantee that it will look better than a $20 styling.
6. Start a Prom Dress group on Facebook where all of the girls in your grade can post the dress they are getting so no one has the same dress.
7. Stay out of Proma! You’ll have your own stress to worry about, you don’t need other peoples’ stress too.
8. Know EXACTLY what you will do the day of prom to get ready. Stay extremely organized but remember to have fun!

I have two types of friends. I have my friends who make me feel good and I have my friends that make me look good. Let me explain.

Well, as you may have figured out by now, High school is a place where everything you do matters. Yes, Mean Girls wasn’t lying. It’s horrible, but it’s true. Even the lunch you get can make people look down upon you or approve of you.

So obviously, the people you are seen with matters greatly. I have been lucky enough to have stumbled into my friend group. They’re beautiful, admired, well liked, and well known. They’re not the highest on the totem pole, but they’re high enough up there. I’ve been with them since sophomore year. So how is it that I’m miserable? They’re my friends right? So, why then do I worry myself sick when making plans with them? I worry they won’t have fun. I worry they’ll look better than me. And what happens when they drink? I don’t drink. Sorry, I don’t really enjoy looking and acting like an idiot. But they do- drink that is- so now what? Name a worry and I have it. Sure, once we’re together I have a blast, but sometimes the worry is so strong that I don’t even make it out the door. I’ll text them an excuse and an apology and stay home where it’s safe.

Then I have my friends that make me feel good. These are people from all different “groups” and “social circles”. When I’m with them I’ve never thought I could laugh so hard or laugh for so long. I choose them because of who they are, not how they make me look.

These are the friends I call when I’m upset. These are the friends I call to laugh myself to tears and talk myself to death. Unfortunately, it has taken me until my Senior year to realize who I should be spending my time with. Can you guess? Need a hint? It seems so obvious and straight forward but has eluded me since Pre-K. The ones that make me feel good. Duh!

Though I don’t eagerly anticipate the pictures from our gatherings to crop up on Facebook to show off my “status” or “worth” or “value” blah blah blah. I’m left with something much better. I can wake up the next morning knowing that my friends actually care about me and not just about what I can do for them or how much alcohol I can get for them. I don’t need to impress or overdress. I just have to be me. So screw highschool standards. I’ll be out of here in a month and one day you’ll be here too and you’ll finally realize that no one cares who you were in high school. So why waste your time trying to be someone who you’ll just leave behind in between the pages of your old yearbooks? Answer: Don’t.

Last year in English class we had to write weekly blog posts. We could write about literally ANYTHING we wanted to. To us English-lovers, this is the best assignment known to mankind- stretching the imagination to the extremes. Well, would you like to know what I wrote?

How to not write a blog post

There are an infinite ways how to not write a blog post. The first thing that you must do is make a list of the things you’d rather be doing. I included mine below:

1. 1. Eating lunch
2. 2. Bugging Paul
3. 3. Making fun of Nicole
4. 4. Sleeping
5. 5. Playing Guitar
6. 6. Watching TV
7. 7. Shopping
8. 8. Shopping
9. 9. Shopping

10. Reading

11. Shopping

…You get the idea. Now that you have your list it is time to create a full scale day dream about one or all of the items on your list. In order to have a realistic and detailed daydream you need three things:

1. Place
2. Subject
3. Action

For your Place it must be a place you’ve seen or been before, that way you can recreate it easily and not waste time trying to make one up in your head. Make it as vivid as possible so you can really fall into your dream.

Your Subject is easy; it’s most likely going to be you. If there are any other people in your daydream then try and recall their main, distinguishing features, bright eyes, tan skin, tall, etc.

The Action is the most important part. This is when you can enter your fully created daydream and let your imagination take over. Try to see it from the eyes of your main Subject (you) so that you can really be completely immersed. Let your characters take over and

Pathetic right? And I know that I’m making light of procrastination and ignoring the fact that it is actually an extremely dangerous habit to form. So with that in mind I just want to say that sure, putting off writing that essay to go to the ice hockey game with friends or pushing back your homework night from Saturday to Sunday is harmless as a one time offense, but beware of the sneaky devil we call procrastination.

My motto? You’ll have to do it eventually so just do it now. Don’t wait until you’re shaking with anxiety from leaving it until the last minute.

The first thing you must know about me is that I have never had a “normal” relationship with my siblings. There are three of us: 21, 18, and 15. I am the 18 year old, the dreaded middle child.

Our childhood relationship eerily resembled that of Full House…

Three girls with large personalities that rarely fought and always ended on a happy note. That all changed when my older sister turned 13.

So used to our easy going relationship, you could say I was shocked when she suddenly slammed the door in my face, saying I was too young to hang out with here. That’s when my intense desire to earn my sister’s attention had begun.

As the years went on, her weight dropped, her hair constantly changed, and her mood was more unstable than uranium. I was desperate for her attention, as was my little sister for mine. The more my older sister shut me out, the more I shut my younger sister out. Subconsciously I suppose I thought that’s what sisters do: act as though they are the biggest nuisance in you life. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. It breaks my heart to think of what my younger sister must have felt. She was hardly 10 and she already felt alone in a house full of people.

The next 5 years are a blur of screaming, fighting, groundings, and finally disappearances. My sister and my parents were at it again. I think this time they were fighting because she had come home an hour past curfew. I remember my sister cursing, my mother crying, my father screaming, the floorboards stomping, and finally the door slamming. I didn’t see my sister again for 6 months. She was only 17.

She moved in with her boyfriend-he was drug dealing and 23 years old. She came home from time to time for visits. What she was doing during those 2 years of living with him was a mystery to me. Finally, to all of our reliefs, they finally broke up. We thought this would mean she was coming home. Wrong.

She moved in with a new guy, this time he was 27. I was 16 at this point and used to shutting my sister and her crazy behavior out of my mind. Yet I still yearned for her attention and affection, so on the rare occasion that she came home I accepted her every offer to hang out, even if it meant putting me in danger. There was that time she had to pick up drugs when we were supposed to be going to church, or that time that she came home on cocaine and I covered for her. All of this was in an attempt to feel included, for her to see me as cool. And during this entire time not once did I ask my little sister to hang out, or even how her day was.

SISTERHOOD IS A SACRED THING….

I remember the day everything unraveled. I had just gotten home from school and my mom called me and my little sister into the family room. She told us to sit down. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Your sister is pregnant. She’s been on heroin. The baby might not survive.”

BOOM! That’s what it felt like. The room was spinning and I couldn’t make sense of even the tiniest thought.

Now, sitting here and writing this, putting the darkest years of my life on paper is probably one of the hardest things that I have ever done. There are many things about this story that make me sad, but none has the ability to keep me awake crying at night as what I’m about to share with you right now:

Not once did I ask my little sister how she was doing or how she felt. It was my job to take care of her, my job to protect her. I left her as a helpless child, alone to deal with things that most adults have never even thought about. I can try to make up for it, like I’ve been trying to for the past year, but it will never make it right, just like how my older sister has been to rehab, given birth to a beautiful little girl, and has been clean for a year but it will never give us back our innocent years.

Sisterhood is a sacred thing, but it’s so easily tainted. Of all the things that I have learned as a younger sister of a heroin addict, that is the most important one.

 I noticed nothing however. Not the music, not the dancing, not the lights, nothing. The only thing that filled my mind was how everyone looked in their dresses and how I, no matter how hard I tried, didn’t look as good as that girl, or that girl, or that girl! I stood there, with my arms crossed over my concave stomach in a fleeting attempt to hide the phantom weight that I would’ve bet my life was there.  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t dance without seeing black spots envelope my vision. It didn’t matter that I could only wear my hair up to hide the hair that was falling out. All that mattered was that I wasn’t good enough; I wasn’t thin enough; I wasn’t pretty enough.

“Abby, can I interrupt for a second?” My kind eyed therapist interjected.

“Uh, sure Dr. Sullivan,” I said confusedly, unaccustomed to being interrupted during a session.

“Who told you that you weren’t good enough? Who told you that you weren’t thin enough or pretty enough?”

“Well ED did doctor. ED always tells me.”

Dr. Sullivan sighed and I could tell she didn’t like this very much. “I thought you were making progress with him.”

            “I was but you know ED. He always has a way of wheedling himself back in.”

I pushed my way through the dripping, sweating throng towards the door. To my left I saw my two best friends, skin tight sequined dresses glinting softly in the night, waiting by their cars for me. Arriving at my house we quickly changed into our pajamas and set up camp in the basement. We looked at each other knowingly and we raced to the kitchen for our midnight pantry raid. Ravenous I decided to celebrate my month of starvation with a cookie. Okay maybe two cookies. Why not the whole bag? How about two whole bags? I stared down at the battle field of rappers and crumbs before me with disgust.  “You know what to do.” ED whispered in my ear.

The front board was a mosaic of paintings tacked to the board awaiting critique. I pulled up a stool in the back of the room behind the protective wall of three or so friends. And the critique began. Students stood up and down with their artworks creating a sort of synchronized dance. I remained silent in the back, speaking up only to support the views of my friends. Finally, the last piece was up for critique. The red and black spray painted face of a stenciled lady grimaced down at me, her shiny black eye glaring into my own.

I acted before I could think. My hand shot into the air so fast that I almost toppled off of my wobbly stool. My teacher, surprised by my uncharacteristic enthusiasm called on me with her eyebrows raised. Words flowed from my mouth uninhibited for once, rising and falling in a sort of song. Those eyes, those colors, the symbolism, the technique. Finally I closed my mouth, slightly out of breath. The room was silent. I widened my eyes in horror at what I had just done. What if they think I’m crazy? What if they think I’m stupid? What are they thinking about me? I sat there in silent terror unsure of what would happen.

Suddenly, three, four, six hands shot into the air. The first one- agreeing with me; the second- praising my observation. The class broke into a frenzy of conversation and I was astonished by what I had just caused.

            My heart was a rock in my stomach. My face turned red. I fixed him with my most careless expression. “What makes you think I care what you think? Is that shirt old, cause it looks a little snug,” I added as an afterthought-I had previously calculated this would hit him where it hurt. I turned on my heavy heel. I walked back to my seat. My feet felt like weights.

            I put those boots in the attic to keep company with the stuffed animals and the Pokémon.