I love this picture.  I love this picture so much because it was taken during one of the greatest and most unforgettable summers of my life.  I was surrounded by people I love, doing the thing that I love, and all under the summer sun.  Every summer  for the past five years I have spent three to six weeks at a summer theater camp in the Catskills. And every summer for  the past five years has been better than the next. 

      Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Training Center is the camp that brought me together with these people. These are some of my very best friends and even though we only see each other three weeks out of the year, I know that our friendship is something special. Being separated from our families for that long, we really had to rely on each other for support.  But most importantly, without any electronics we had to rely on each other for entertainment. We are rarely distracted by the outside world and just get to spend our time laughing and basking each others company. After one day we loved each other. 

       Stagedoor Manor taught me how to be free and how to be myself. I feel that I am my best self there. I love this picture because it encapsulates all of the amazing and hilarious moments that I experienced in one place in one image.

Link: http://www.stagedoormanor.com

The key to reaching your goals and becoming successful in life is to plan properly and to always be prepared. A moment in my life when I had failed was in the eighth grade and I left an extremely important project until the last night. It was something that I knew would take me a while and I started to dread the idea of doing it. I knew that not doing it at all would only hurt me and be an embarrassment if I were the only one of my classmates not to have it in on time. So I procrastinated with every intention to leave the project until the last minute. The night before the project was due I sat down and went to work and stayed up all night to finish my poster. Looking at it through the eyes of someone who had only slept for an hour it was something I was actually proud of doing. That is I was proud of it until I got to school and saw everyone else's projects. A lot of my classmates worked really hard on there projects and it showed. My sloppy last minute work still got a good grade sand wasn't a complete embarrassment but that wasn't the point. The point was that I wanted to be the kind of person who always put their best work forward. Because the people who plan and are prepared are the ones who are successful.

Procrastination: http://sas.calpoly.edu/asc/ssl/procrastination.html

Reading is Magical

It may be cliché to write about how  much Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling impacted my life but the truth is that I would never have discovered the joy of reading without that series. Harry Potter is a gateway for so many other children to the world of reading. While you read those books you could escape into a world so magical you didn’t know was possible. Thinking about the world of Harry Potter brings me back to when my mother and I would practice reading by switching who read aloud each chapter. I felt so proud when I had graduated from this that I began to read them by myself. Harry Potter is and always will be a large part of my life. Having read  them twelve times I learned so many life lessons and can  hardly be seen without them.