Blog Challenge 13: Act your Age

I'm another week behind on the Blog Challenge, but I am eventually getting through them......

Jenner posed this question last week:

If you could go back to any age again, how old would you want to be and why? What age would you least like to be and why?

I had an initial “gut” answer, and then took some time to “think” about it. Even after pondering the question some more, I still decided to go with my initial answer, although I have qualified things a bit.

If I could go back to any age, it would be 17 - and some of 18 – basically the summer before my senior year through the next summer – 15 months. Why? To take advantage of the opportunities I didn’t take when I was that age, and to be a little nicer to my parents (yes, they were indeed right about MANY things when I was that age. I was too caught up in being 17 to realize that!).
What would I do differently at 17? Here’s the list:

• The summer before my senior year, I would have attended The Tanglewood Institute, Young Artists Orchestra program – eight weeks at Tanglewood, playing music.
• I would have been a lot less stressed out about the college application process. And I would have applied to Stanford and UC Berkeley. Who knows, I might have been accepted at one of them, maybe been allowed to visit.
• I would have learned more about the countries I visited as a part of GBYSO's tour of Yugoslavia, Austria and Hungary. I definitely would have taken more pictures during the trip and I wouldn't have been so stressed out about my mother being on the tour with me. Here is one of the very few pictures (snapped by my mother) - in a Belgrade park, with violist Catherine Pepper.

Now, if I wanted to go back to the time / age when I had a ton of fun, I would journey back to the summer of 1988 - I had just turned 21, was working as an intern at 3M in St. Paul. It was an idyllic summer - great weather, tons of other coops and summer interns my age, good money and lots of free time. I was dating Tom, a classmate from MIT, whose family lived in St. Paul, and most weekends we spent at his family's cabin on a lake. Tom's entire family enjoyed water sports, so I learned to water ski that summer and enjoyed numerous boating adventures.

The age I would not want to repeat? That would be 16 - ugg, what an awful age. Not old enough to drive, just a ton of drama that year. Never again.