it's the small things.

jonathan morley wants me to blog more often.

so here i am, sitting in my chair drinking a gatorade, listening to mumford & sons, and wearing a high lighter yellow shirt that denotes that i enjoyed my AP chemistry class in high school.

i got home today after a three day weekend of being in michigan with my boyfriend. we went to lake michigan. we watched lord of the rings and quoted it like nerds. we made pasta. we climbed a driftwood tree.

we spent six hours making door decs.

this six hours of sitting at his dining room table, holding a pair of scissors and cursing the thickness of construction paper, inevitably marks a new and adult phase of my life.

i know how weird that sounds.

i should first address the issue of you possibly not knowing what a door dec is before i get too ahead of myself trying to be a blogger. you know those fun, cute, construction paper things stuck on your dorm door with your name on it in puffy paint?

that's a door dec.

so, making door decs (with or without my boyfriend) is a gigantic life transition into the adult world.

i am a resident assistant. RA. the cool person who makes neat hall programs. the bitch down the hall who wrote you up for drinking. the person you go to when you're homesick. that person who's excited about EVERY STINKING PROGRAM the college ever puts on. (we genuinely are.)

that's me.

i have not become an RA yet, technically. i was hired in april. i have my own room. i move in on saturday. from there i go through training.

i am unbelievably excited.

being an RA, well, it's the most responsible job on campus. i spent two months applying. i filled out an application. i made a resume. i went through a mock interview. i went through five hours of group processing with a hundred other hopefuls (all of whom i loved and i wish they all could have been hired too). i then had an actual interview with all five hall directors. then i waited for a month in agony before they emailed me to tell me congratulations.

i knew that i wanted to be an RA as soon as i figured out what an RA actually was. so maybe... tenth grade. i wanted to be the person who kept the hall safe, who had the extra key for when you locked yourself out of room when you showered (and then you stood there in your hallway in a towel cursing), who kept up the bulletin board, who planned hall events. i knew that this was what i wanted to do.

it wasn't the pay. it wasn't the having the room to myself. but those are big perks, believe me.

(this sounds incredibly like my summer job. you know, the fun responsible job that you love enough to do for free, but you really enjoy being paid.)

so. my first step of being a real RA, before going through a week of training next week, is to make door decs. this was an insurmountable task, my boyfriend and i thought. (what do ya know, he's an RA too.)

i have twenty-four residents, if my calculations are correct. i am also responsible for making a door dec for each of my RA team members, the other RAs on my part of campus and in my building. this is thirty door decs. thirty.

this doesn't sound too bad, except i am not artistic. i suppose i am, because i play six instruments and write novels, but when it comes to drawing and being creative on paper, my stick figures have genetic mutations.

so i decided to make a nice tree. you know, the kind with the big trunk that swoops up and the leaves are just a big bubble that looks like a cloud.

i did that. i drew it. i cut it out. and then i traced it. thirty times. then i cut out every single tree with my boyfriend's awkward almost but not quite left handed scissors at his dining room table while it stormed on saturday. my thumb and my forefinger are not happy with me. they won't be happy for me with a long time.

i had a list of my RA teammates, so i commenced to puffy paint their names onto my multicolored first grade trees. and i remembered about five of my residents who had told me excited in april that they were in my hall. i do not have a list of my residents yet. so i could only puffy paint fifteen of my first grade trees. the other half is waiting. my mother's puffy paint is cowering in the sewing room downstairs. it should tremble. when i get that list of residents, i will become a puffy paint master.

(this is not likely. i still have puffy paint on my wrists from saturday.)

so being a creative little kid for six hours (this is how long it took) is a new transition. the entire time i was cutting out these trees and puffy painting, i was becoming increasingly excited for training. this is a real job. a responsible job. a fun job. an adult job.

i. am. so. terrifically. excited.

i am also terrifically excited in the fact that something so incredible, like making door decs, indicates a significant life transition for me.

but honestly, i believe that the biggest life transitions for us as human beings are not the big things, but the small things.