My summer break basically started May 8 after finals, officially started May 16 after graduation (not mine, I still have three more years), but didn’t really start until May 23 after the retreat. Now I’m 18 days into summer break and I’ve managed to do… nothing. Meanwhile, many of my friends are working, a fact my parents never cease to remind me about. I really did want to apply for an internship or job for the summer, but I didn’t have a resume, at least not one updated since the one I sent off for my college application, and I really did want to put together an updated version, but it didn’t cross my mind until later on when I also had to worry about summer storage, my Chinese visa, and the dreaded finals. I didn’t have very much time to WRITE UP MY RESUME, so that’ll be first on my summer bucket list:

At the beginning of summer break, I made an A to Z summer bucket list inspired by Rainy London and gave myself until my eighteenth birthday (today, whoop whoop!) to see how far I’ve gotten.

I’m the kind of person who writes down her whole life in her planner (I just got a new Lilly Pulitzer large agenda day planner orange grove monkeys 2014-15 and I adore it!!), from my homework to appointments to blog post ideas. I have countdowns and am always looking forward to the future, which is great, but on the other hand, waiting and waiting can sometimes make me bored of present life. Stop living with the mindset that tomorrow will be better. Why not let the best day be today? Instead of thinking about what you want life to be like in the future, live in the present, get lost in the moment, and enjoy what you have!

My last night in Beijing was spent binge watching Once Upon a Time until I finished season two at five in the morning. I only stopped because I realized that I should probably start packing for my flight that was leaving in twelve hours. There is a method to my madness. You see, staying up until five in the morning in Beijing time is staying up until five in the evening in USA east coast time—getting a head start to overcoming jet-lag, overachieving already.