Good ol' days

I found this when I was cleaning out my closet last weekend. Along with it were probably a hundred notes folded perfectly into little squares addressed to "ASHLEY ONLY."

I randomly opened one here and there and found words about petty arguments, crushes, and sometimes nothing at all. Some were crafted carefully with each sentence written in a different color gel pen, while others were simply written in black ink. Then there were the ones with the code names we had for each other with words like "bubbles" and "Virgy" a part of them.

But the thing about them that I found most appalling was the vocabulary -- apparently we thought that "coolio" and "kewl" needed to be used as much as possible. Oh, and we can't forget about "wazzup?"

It's a crazy thing to be able to look back on who I was and how I acted when I was 13 or 14. The things I found important or detrimental are silly to think about now. And then it makes me wish that things now could be as easy as things were then.

You never realize how good you have it when you're a kid until you grow up. And how funny it is to think that growing up was what I couldn't wait to do.

So, here's the thing

Hey, hi, hello!

For those of you that don't know me, I'm Ashley.
For those of you that do -- can't believe you're here, but awesome!

I wasn't really sure what to do with this first post -- whether it should be an introduction or if I should dive right on -- but I'm going with the former (in case you hadn't noticed). I won't go into a slew of details about myself because that'd be boring and I'm hoping my personality will come through on its own through this whole thing anyway. So instead, I suppose I'll explain my goals or purpose for this thing.

Ever since high school I've been really involved with writing. Whether I was updating my Xanga (remember that?!) with drama-filled posts or writing a poem about my latest heartbreak, I was writing. I honestly feel like I was a better writer then because I just always went for it; I never stopped myself in the middle of something and reread what I wrote so far and then deleted it -- I just wrote. I guess it all started to slow down when I started college and I began using my free time for alcohol and shenanigans in the city (Philadelphia). I've tried to write literally anything since then and for some reason it's now so frustratingly difficult for me to do.

And that's where this blog -- Less Cute -- comes into the picture.

I want to use it to simply express myself in any way I see fit. The majority of the time it will be based in writing, whether it's a short memoir on my elementary school days or a poem that just randomly fell out of me or the introduction to a young adult novel, I just need to write something. I've literally felt this intense yearning inside of me for the past year where my arms start to tingle at my wrists, just begging my fingers to type something, and I'm hoping this effort will help rejuvenate my creative juices and get me writing freely again.

Photography is also something I've had a passion for recreational since high school so I'll probably be using this to showcase some of my favorite photos as well. And they could be anything from digital to instant film to shots I've taken with Instagram -- if I like something, I'll share it.

So there you have it, a basic idea of what I'm going for. If you read all of this, you're beyond awesome. If you didn't, well it wouldn't really matter at this point anyway. Hopefully something I post at some point in the future will catch someone's eye and I'll feel like my writing is meant for something, no matter how small that is.