I recently became vegan and I'm obsessed with trying to lower my negative impact on our planet. I'm going to try to blog regularly about my thoughts and journey.
I have been a fan of Ryan Buell and his team since Paranormal State premeired on A&E in December of 2007. Being 17, almost 18 at the time, I was the typical fan girl, drooling over how attactive he was but as I've gotten older and have a better understanding of the paranormal world and have started to form my own opinions and belief's, I have a respect for what Ryan does. The fact that he actually helps his clients as well as the spirits. He doesn't taunt and harass the spirits like they do on Ghost Adventures just to get the views and be in the center of attention.
A few months prior to Paranormal State airing, my cousin, Shirly, learned that she had pancreatic cancer but unfortunantly passed away in 2010. Shirly was like a 2nd mother to me and if anything happened to my parents, her and her husband, Mike, would have taken me in within a heartbeat. So, when she passed away, it was difficult.
When I learned Ryan pancreatic cancer, it came as some what of a shock to me. I don't claim to know Ryan at all but I understand the struggle that he himself, his friends and family may be going through and my heart goes out. I have always sensed that Ryan has a strong will to live and help others and I will continue to pray for him and his loved ones during this time.
When it comes to what I think and believe about the paranormal and my own spirituality, what I know of Ryan's work, has infuenced who I am today and I thank him for that and I hope that he comes through this stronger than ever. So today, in honor of my cousin and ryan, I'm wearing purple. Granted it's a pair of purple PJ pants but it's all I have in my closet! Happy 30th birthday, Ryan!
Watching youtubers online and meeting some of your closets friends via the internet can be an amazing thing but imagining them more than a 2nd moving picture, or words on a screen can prove to be difficult. As John Green said in his book Paper towns, “Imagine others complexly.” Which was difficult for me to do, until I got to meet several of my friends at Vidcon this year. As well as I felt I knew some of them, it was hard to imagine them complexly, until I could physically touch them, hug them, talk to them face to face and interact with them more deeply.
As huge and as vast as the online world is and as much drama as it can cause, it can bring a community of people together, introduce people from entirely different countries but for me, I have found it more profound to meet these people face to face and it has helped me Imagine other's complexly.
Who is there to thank? There are so many people that led me and my youtube family together, that I can't thank just one person.
I just got back from Tampa airport from Vidcon 2012 and I have to say
that it was an absolutely incredible experience. I know I won't be able
to express in words how much it meant to me to meet some of my
#teamregulars and hanging out with Tony and Sebby, as well as meeting so
many amazing youtubers. I cannot describe the love, friendship and
community I experienced the last few days, even more so than last year.
When I left tampa airport, I was incredibly anxious about getting there and it didn't help that I spent a majority of the day in Chicago because my connecting flight was canceled and I was given another flight for the following day, which wasn't going to work. I managed to get another flight for that day and get to John Wayne airport. Granted it was considerably later than I had originally planned, but I got there.
Vanessa, Lauren and Rachel came and picked me up from the airport, which was amazing. Then when I checked in and went to see everyone in the other room we had, they all surprised me with birthday cupcakes. <3 It honestly made my day so much better, and I have to thank them all for that. It was such a simple thing but gave me so much joy!
After I had dropped my stuff off in my room, we all headed over to the vidcon pre-party and hung out for a while. Later in the evening, Tony and Seb showed up. Tony was so funny, he was epic fan girling that we were all together in person for the first time. It was so amazing. I wish I had gotten it on camera. Once we were all kinda done at the previdcon party, we all went to denny's and this happened. Watch the video!
Disney Land was allot of fun as well. I initially wasn't too thrilled about going and thought about not going because my thought process was "I've been to Disney World, how different can it be?" I have to admit, it was far different. Sure it was just as exhausting as any other park but it was so much fun! That's to Tito, who gave us some passes and just being a great friend.
For me, I think the most significant part of the trip was the night we did the live stream on youtube. I think they were calling it "talking to the dead." Tony had brought in a medium. Granted, I think this medium was simply just empathic and was just pretty good at reading people's body language. I don't think she was necessarily a full blown medium. Anyway, that night had really got me thinking and I looked back on some stuff that I had written and thinking about my future but that's another blog post altogether. Several inside jokes came out of that night as well. ^_^ The medium gave me her e-mail address, so hopefully she'll get back to me soon because I would like to talk to her more.
I am so glad that my team regulars, tony and seb along with some of the Black Box TV behind the scene's peeps were able to get together VidCon
and get to know eachother better and hang out! The experience was above
and beyond what I expected it to be. I think our friendship went to a
whole other level, now that we know we're all actually real! I still can't really describe the experience at all and it's something that I'm going to remember for the rest of my life. It's also helped me with some huge life decisions I am going to be making here soon as well.
I will be posting pictures and videos up on my facebook and on youtube here in a few days. Just follow me on twitter and on my vlog channel and "main" channel as well as my facebook. :-) Next year, I'm going to try and post daily blogs for sure. Hopefully I'll have a laptop by then!
