Time doesn’t actually exist. Maybe this is why it feels like I moved out of my small town and into Tallahassee, like, two months ago when, in fact, it actually happened almost four years ago in 2017. It seems next-to-impossible that I’m only a month away from walking across a stage and accepting my diploma, right up there with the fact that I’m moving across the country afterward.
That’s the kicker though: My fiancée and I are planning to move halfway across the country at (hopefully) the end of a global pandemic after we graduate. We’re going to stick around in Tallahassee over the summer so that we have time to rest and figure everything out, hopefully, get jobs, and then jet up to Washington D.C. or New York or wherever the world decides to take us. But we don’t want to leave Tallahassee with only a few diplomas and your stereotypical Florida State experiences. Yeah, we did what every college kid does: We went to The Strip and we swam in the fountains and we visited Wakulla Springs and we tried all these things that are on every “Top 20 Things to Do If You’re a Florida State Student” list.
It didn’t feel complete, though. We had lived in this town for four and five years, and it felt like we hadn’t experienced any of it. We wanted to see everything that this weird little town had to offer before we left, probably for good. So, we did what anyone does when they’re stuck; we turned to the internet.
The jar was kind of between a Christmas, birthday, and a just-because present to me. My fiancée, Elese, had had a list of things she’d wanted to do in Tallahassee saved on her computer for half of our college careers, but we had never gotten around to doing almost any of them. So, she had made it into a kind of game. She took a jar we had lying around and wrote on little strips of paper everything that we had wanted to do and put them in the jar. It was like a bucket list raffle. Every week, we would pull out two strips of paper, and those were our plans for the week (budget and weather permitting). It’s only been a few weeks, and we’ve already been through quite a big chunk of the jar. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to get through it all, but I’m a bit more hopeful now.
Here’s a little inspiration from our own jar to get you started:
– U-pick blueberry picking
– Dine at Cypress
– Take a walk in Southwood’s “Central Park”
– Visit Riley House Museum
– Take a cooking class together at Publix Apron Cooking School
– Visit Torreya State Park
– Tour the historic grounds at Pebble Hill Plantation
– Get massages together at Chelsea Salon
– Visit Providence Canyon
– Have a d*mn good time at Bullwinkles
It’s easy to get stuck in the mundane motions of everyday life, honestly. Before we made the jar, I was just doing what everybody else was doing; going to Midtown Caboose, going to Landis, going to class, going to work. However, after four years of doing the same things over and over, you start to want something more, something exciting. I wanted to experience what Tallahassee truly had to offer before I left it behind. If you feel stuck and bored, especially with COVID taking over our lives, I would recommend making your own bucket list raffle jar. It’s fun and refreshing and will take you to places you wouldn’t have thought of going otherwise.
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