My essay. i think it's pretty good, you?

Lettuce or Something

Lettuce, what a weird vegetable, then you have your tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, mushrooms, carrots, cheese, and ranch. Perfect. You have a nice glass of tea, a side of croutons, if so desired, and a bread stick. This is the meal that changed my life, maybe for the better. It wasn’t necessarily a particular event, more of a series of events, so there isn’t that much dialogue in this story. Now would be the time for you to drop this stapled mess of paper and ink and then in turn, go and read another Narrative Essay of your choice.
In the ninth grade, I was kind of chubby, kind of not. I had long, blonde, wavy and awkward freshman hair. I wore glasses, wrote a lot poetry, baggy pants, comical graphic tees. Converse was the shoe style of choice. I still miss that pair of shoes. I had them for years. I rode the bus to school and had lunch in the cafeteria every day just like the rest of my classmates. Then, one day, I told my mom I was thinking about packing my lunch.
She was quick to buy groceries and brown paper bags so I could recycle at school, Ziplocs, Tupperware, and began coordinating meals for the week, which gave me the idea that I could pick whatever I wanted. It started out that I would just get random snacks and then I started making salads. I love making salads. I would get so creative. I would get bean sprouts and hummus with tuna, or ranch and tomatoes with cucumbers and black beans. Oh, there were endless possibilities! Eventually, I realized that I didn’t really eat that much meat anymore. Half way through the year, I told all of my friends that I wanted to be vegetarian and they all told me I couldn’t do it. They told me I’d break and get Chik-Fil-A, which I did. So the vegetarianism was postponed for another month.
Finally, I stopped eating meat all together. Well, except for seafood. I had to have some kind of crutch for those times where I just really craved the texture and taste of meat. I became a fan of dishes with seafood in them like soup and pasta, which filled the void rather nicely. It went on like this for years. I’m still a vegetarian today. But being a vegetarian isn’t always fun and easy.
For instance, when I was in Australia, I was offered so many kinds of meat and foods that looked and smelled weird but delicious. At this point in time, I had a new style. I still wore the slim jeans, but I wore contacts instead of glasses, or whenever I had to, I wore thick rimmed glasses, like I have now. I had my hair cut shorter; my bangs were longer and bleached blonde, while the rest was my natural brown. At this point, I didn’t have any tattoos or piercings other than my gauge, which was only a size two; not to say you would know what that means.
By me saying, ‘when I was in Australia’, I’m referring to the time period of two days into the summer between junior and senior years where my mother and I packed all of our belongings away into storage, packed our clothes into bags, moved out of our house and got on a plane headed for Yamba, Australia, NSW. We lived with some family friends who we had known for years prior from three houses down, who had also just moved to Australia. Together, we were eight. There was my mom, their mom, Kelly, my little brothers and sisters, Bo, Walter, Crae, Grace, and Cora (Roo). We lived in a small townhome; it was small and yet roomy, as well. There were three bathrooms and three bedrooms, an office we turned into a bedroom, and garage, where I slept. My mom slept on a pull-out couch for most of the trip.
While in Australia, I lived life pretty much the same as I do here in America. I went to school, I talked to my neighbors, I made friends and played on the beach, I read books, stayed up late, watched the stars, learned life lessons; I even discovered what I wanted to do with my life. I came up with this dream of changing the world with music, making a name for myself, you know; really going places. I came to this conclusion on the first day I attended Australian public school. I walked into music class and the teacher asked if I was an instrument or a voice. I only replied with, ‘I can do anything you like.’
He was tall and kind of “nerdy”-looking. He had glasses, and semi-long, curly hair. He, like the rest of the population in Australia, had a rather nice taste in fashion. For some reason, everyone in Australia had this great fashion sense. It was like everyone had walked right out of fashion magazines. There were so many attractive people, and with the Australian accent, irresistible. Not to mention that sometimes it was really awkward being me in Australia. Everyone would stare and ask me questions. They would even make requests for me to say things in an ‘American’ accent. I can’t remember his name, but he replied with, “What instrument do you play?”
“Trumpet, French Horn, Mellophone, a little Flute, Saxophone, and Clarinet. Plus, I sing.”
“Wow, I don’t know if we even have any of those instruments here. Hold on, let me go check,” and he left the room. He returned some time later with an old beat up case that I wasn’t sure what it held. “Here ya go! One Trumpet, sorry it took so long; had to go to the faculty kitchen and boil the mouthpiece. It should be clean, though. Go on and try it out.”
“Uh... sure,” I replied, hesitantly. It had been a little while since I’d played the trumpet, due to learning the French horn.
“I don’t have any sheet music for you, though. Maybe you could play scales or something?”
“Yeah, sure. No problem.”
Putting the mouthpiece, I noticed the room getting quieter and quieter. As I held the trumpet to my lips, you could literally hear crickets from the audience, also known as the classroom. I played the first note and stopped. There was a gasp, I took a deep breath and played a few scales sequentially. By the time I was done, most of the class had gathered around in a circle around me. There were several requests to ‘try’ and several loud, noisy attempts at playing the trumpet. After a bunch of laughter, a lot of loud noises, and bunch of commotion from surrounding classrooms, I had decided that music was what I needed to do with my life.
Not necessarily a famous singer or band member of a “Top 40 Charts” group, more of a spiritual thing. I want to travel the globe and bring music into the everyday life of the average human being. I want to teach music all around the world to people who wouldn’t normally have the chance, thus spreading the love and wisdom that music’s brought to me. That’s when I decided to major in Music, and then Music Education for graduate school, which led to my attending the College of Charleston. Anyways, now back to food.
In Australia, I passed up ostrich, kangaroo, and fried guinea pig. There were so many different cultures, that my mom and I encountered, that had so many different things for us to explore. By far, though, food was the best. I learned how to roll my own sushi, create my own guacamole and make homemade spring rolls. I made my first homemade brick oven pizza from scratch, and I learned how to make peach cobbler, which wasn’t that big of a deal, seeing as we as Americans in the south make a lot of delicious sweets like that.
One thing that I had never heard of in Greenville, South Carolina before though was this soup I had. I’m not quite sure if it was squash, or pumpkin; I can’t remember. It was literally the best thing I’ve ever had in my entire life; almost. We had a huge family dinner and engorged ourselves in bowl after bowl of this soup. Our friend, Miss Jo, who prepared the meal, served it with milk and freshly baked bread with butter. Dipping the bread and butter into the soup was literally like an orgasm in your mouth. That’s how good this soup was.
Coming back to America, senior year, band captain, show choir captain, lead role in three plays, still vegetarian, I was thrown obstacle after obstacle. Being vegetarian is hard work! When your schedule keeps you constantly on the go and doing things, you tend to just ‘swing by’ a fast-food joint, which leads to a lot of temptations. I’ve done pretty well with sticking to said vegetarianism. However, this past Christmas break, in 2011, I ate chicken twice. I don’t know, maybe things are changing, and maybe one day in the near future, I’ll be biting into a nice, juicy, medium rare steak. Maybe, it will just be a Boca Chikin’ Patty, or two.