Welcome (back)!

          Hey everyone, welcome back! I originally started this blog in May 2009 because having a blog is a typical thing for an eight-year-old who just started exploring the internet and received an email for the first time. At the time, I was in my last month of third grade, and my biggest blog fans were my parents, my first grade teacher, and my fourth grade teacher-to-be. Now, I’m about to become a freshman at Oxford College of Emory University, ultimately looking to transfer to the Atlanta campus to finish the last two years of a 4-year BS in computer science (after a 2-year Associate of Arts degree from Oxford). The transition to Oxford is actually one of the things I might cover a lot in this blog: what it’s going to be like downsizing from high school to college. I live in the metro Atlanta area, and I just graduated from a large suburban high school along with about 650 other seniors in the class of 2019. In total, we have about 2700 students. In less than three weeks, I’ll move an hour and a half east of here to attend a college about a third the size of my high school for two years, then move again to another college about 15 times the size (15,500 students) of the first college I’ll be attending (only 950 students).
          A new chapter in my life starts August 23, and as that date approaches, I’m simultaneously more excited and more scared than I’ve ever been. Let me illustrate. If you can, open Google Hangouts. Then, look for the stickers section once you’re in a chat. Now, find and scroll through my personal favorites, the penguins. The “I’m-in-college-but-classes-haven’t-started-yet” phase of my life has been quite the roller coaster, so I’ve almost certainly reacted to something about college with every single emotion you’re seeing from those penguins. In its first generation, this blog covered pretty much everything my eight-year-old self was interested in: music, books, food, horses, travel, you name it. Well, people tell me I’m still quite the polymath, so the new version of this blog will be just as diverse. I’ll try to post daily, but I still have about three weeks before classes start as of the day I’m writing this, so I’m going to have to update you guys on whether that schedule is plausible once the workload becomes more intense and I actually realize that, yes, indeed, I am in college.
          I’m going to make a commitment to, outside of college assignments, write five thousand words a week because, throughout high school, during which I wrote the nonfiction book I am now editing, I discovered I really do love to write. I’m at the very beginning of the writing process with a fiction book, hopefully toward the end with a nonfiction book, and now I have this blog again, so meeting that goal shouldn’t be terribly difficult. As I said in the intro, I haven’t blogged since I was eight, so we'll just have to see if I have the time and discipline to come back into the blogosphere after so long away from this place. Well, that’s all for now, so I’ll be back here tomorrow! -Qwerty