Dear Carly,

The new band-aid commercial is pretty cute. It's all about protecting the ones you love by covering them and protecting them. At the end they say something alone the lines of "it's our human instinct to cover." To a point I think that's true. We naturally want to cover our pain and our wounds so they can get better. However, I think that's also an irony. Sometimes we cover up our pain and our emotions so that our loved ones don't see it.  Of course band-aid is talking about physical wounds. Those are the ones we cover up. But I don't think we can talk about covering wounds as humans and not address the emotional wounds that can be left behind. These emotional wounds are sometimes even more harmful than the physical. They say "time heals all wounds," but I think they're only talking about physical wounds. I don't think the band-aid commercial is wrong. I only think sometimes covering ourselves can get us into more trouble t...

There are endless amounts of quotes, movies, books, etc. all yelling one incredibly clear message: live your life to the fullest. We all want our life to mean something, to make ripples in the waves of the world. We want someone to notice us for the extraordinary things that we do. And rightfully so. We should strive for our lives to mean something greater than ourselves, to have a goal that will further influence people for years to come. I think deep down, it's something that most humans alive want to know -- that their life will be remembered by someone. It's scary when we realize that our life is becoming something mundane and boring, something that children write about when they're in the first grade. Get up, go to work, eat, sleep, repeat. So there are countless self-help books telling us to grab life by the bootstraps. To step up and really make our life what we want it to be. To go and achieve all the things that we've been dreaming of our whole life. I thin...

Today, hundreds of man-made bomb-like explosions fill the sky. We strangely call them fireworks. Since it's the fourth of July and all that, I suppose I can forgive it. I'm not incredibly patriotic on the average day, so today is special. Go America, we became independent of Great Britain in 1776. But what if we didn't? All of these fireworks going off just makes me think of the first independence day. America and Great Britain had just finished a terribly bloody war. Instead of fireworks going off, they were actual bombs. There were men all around dying for rights they believed in, even when they couldn't believe in themselves or their futures. I can't help but wonder what being an almost 20 year old women looked like back in those days. Would I have been married? Have children? Or would I be one of those daughters who's impossible to marry off because of her quick tongue? And never mind the fact that I could be raising a family, what about the country as...