Every few weeks, I find myself doing something extra frivolous in my free time and stop to think how pathetic it will sound in my biography. "There really isn't much to say about January 2013. Rachel spent every waking hour alone, camped out by a virtual pool in World of Warcraft trying to catch a virtual fish for a virtual character whose achievements mean nothing in the real world." It's a harsh game I play with myself, and I rarely win.

I just don't want to get to my 80th birthday party and think, What have I been doing? It's too easy for me to flip on the cruise control and just coast through my responsibilities and routines without thinking about the connections or experiences I'm missing or destroying. I want to be intentional about saying "yes" to the right people and things, and putting them in the perspective of a non-existent biography is how I remind myself that beating the next level of Candy Crush is not what I want to be remembered for.

Looking through my summer photographs and ticket stubs, I see a lot of good progress. I've spent more time with friends and family, visiting waterfalls in Tennessee and getting lost in corn mazes and bonding over My Little Pony marathons. (Let's not forget my amazing performance in Dragon Age: Origins, working with my brother to bring Skirts the mage and Alistair together in a virtual love that will forever alter history.) Just last weekend, I marked two things off of my bucket list with the help of my lovely cousins, Jenna and Sandra.

Related note: macarons are even more delicious than I expected.

There is no fabulous conclusion or rally cry or royal decree here. I just want to take a moment to note that I'm proud of myself for a few choices and see room for improvement in others. I hope I can continue to be honest with myself about what my priorities are. And maybe eating a few more macarons will help me recognize my successes and my failures along the way, right?

"Two slices of ham, three slices of cheese, and a partridge in a pear tree."

1. It was turkey, not ham.
2. That's not how you do a countdown.
3. What happened to the two rolls and the one bottle of IBC root beer?

This has been sitting around as a draft for like six months now, and I'm only posting it now because I think it's great that I felt this was worth saving as a draft for like six months.

For years, I would beg my dad to let me tag along with him when he had to work on the weekends. His corporate office building was amazing, and I loved every sight, smell, and sound. I would visit every cubicle and just dream of the day I could have my own to work in and decorate. My favorite cubes had Dilbert comic strips under the name plates. That was a pretty good indicator that someone cool worked there. Sometimes, my dad would take me on a tour and tell me facts and stories about each of his coworkers. The one thing they all had in common was a shelf full of large, labeled binders, brimming with hundreds of pages of probably very boring documents.

No one else was ever working on his floor on Saturday, so my dad would set me up at someone's empty desk, turn on their computer for me, and let me play—usually solitaire or one of the old Linux games. After an hour or so, he would ask me if I wanted a snack, and we would venture off to the vending machines on some other floor. That's where I first fell in love with the smell of elevators. (The staircases in the building were sleek and gorgeous and also a cherished part of the adventure, but they only smelled like cleaning products.) The vending machines all stood in a row: one for candy bars and chips, one for cold beverages, a very impressive one that spit out disgusting hot chocolate (and probably disgusting coffee), and one with a fancy spinning racks that held a pitiful variety of yogurts and stale sandwiches. I always asked for a Twix and a Coke the first time around. On extra long visits, I would go back later for a hot chocolate on my own.

After the trip to the vending machines, we would go back to work, my dad doing something important while I read a book in the conference room and wrote meticulous notes on the white board. Occasionally, he would ask me to fetch something from a printer in someone else's cubicle, a responsibility I took very seriously. Long before I was ready, he would announce that he was done with his work, and I would pout a little and then gather my things and follow him back to reality.