progress

Week two finished on a high note: my only true day off all week. Five 6am wake-ups, 4 days of work, and two 6-hour days spent in a tutor certification class at the Rochester Hills public library. The class proved to be a happy risk as it called up all my instinctual excitement over the prospect of teaching language. And so, I've since reconsidered my whole life, as happens so often these days. Suddenly, a few more years in the classroom and $30,000 doesn't seem like so much, especially considering what I'd be trading in: life at a desk and a head full of thoughts wanting to be spent.

Other things this week:
1. The cold won't end. The schools are closed again tomorrow for wind chills in the negative thirties.
2. We finally have books again. I started into two other novels this month and couldn't commit. Behind the Beautiful Forevers seems to have stuck.
3. I cooked a true down home meat-veggie-starch meal this week, and I really felt like a grown up.
4. We are balancing friends-time and us-time, even though I get greedy, wanting to dance around the living room with him all night long. I begrudgingly gave in to a drunken game night which turned out to be fun for the whole family.
5. Funny how the moments build on each other, forming a story, though you only see it looking backwards. First is me crying, scraping pizza sauce off my plate into a sink of dirty dishes. Second is the decision to take a risk, take the class, become a tutor. Third, my tutor teaching telling me: "you're so good at this." And now, making plans for more classes, to stand at the front of a classroom one day.

living together

Lessons from the first week:
1. Survival demands a lot, including: buying food, cooking food, cleaning up food, dirtying what you've just cleaned to clean it again.
2. Learning how to cope with the work week monotony, after two weeks of sleeping in, can lead to tears and irrational thoughts of: what am I doing with my life?
3. Morning light can save you. Making coffee, making the bed, making up from last night's frustrations, it all feels better with snow white sunshine pouring in.
4. This place remembers a lot. I uncovered the grandparents' wedding album from 1960 and was uplifted by the simple black and white portraits of the small, conventional ceremony. This morning we watched his parents' 15 minute wedding video, recorded on VHS.
5. I need more hobbies. I've pledged not to reach for my phone while I'm not at work. Therefore: more photos, more working out, more cooking, more cleaning, and knitting.
6. Yoga is saving me from otherwise impenetrable blue moods. My teacher-- the leotard-clad fifty year old on the "Yoga For Beginners" DVD-- is convincing me that "connecting with my body" and finding "inner peace" may not be mumbo-jumbo after all. All day long my brain runs wild but for twenty minutes I can feel at ease.
7. Ups and downs, ups and downs. We are never in one place, not living in the highs or lows forever. We are just living and trying to stay sane. Good talks this week about indifference, that gray area of not feeling much, and how that is a more than okay place to be. Passion all the time is impossible to sustain.  Pleasure feels good but joy lingers everywhere, even in the dark places. Just waiting.

Go to work

The other day I posted a Facebook update asking my collective newsfeed to stop picking on the women who choose to be engaged before 25. I received a lot of feedback, some supportive, some confrontational. It got me thinking about my own selfishness, how easily I pick out the faults of others without considering how I might be guilty of the same transgressions. I constantly think in terms of "they" or "people need to" and when I say "we" I don't consider enough about "me." What am I putting out there? Am I being kind enough, am I giving everyone a fair chance to be a complex, faulted, human person?

For example, I've spent years believing that I am not part of the "entitlement" generation. I've read countless articles about how people my age believe they deserve certain things-- the killer job, the house, the car, the life-- but are not willing to wait or work for them. Pffft, I'd think to myself, those people are just awful.

Running parallel to this belief is my own anxiety over my, so very important, existence in this universe. What am I doing, I think (every day), and where am I headed. Should I go off to graduate school? My job is so bland; I'm so smart. I'm bored and I deserve to be challenged! And so I'd go on and on, thinking myself into a huge stink, while sitting around, eating pita chips, rolling my eyes, and doing absolutely nothing else to change the situation or the thoughts themselves.

I deserve? I deserve!? I deserve nothing! Sure I worked hard in school, I got good grades, I played the game and got by with a really good reputation. But, the truth is, I don't try very hard. And considering the extremely privileged life I was born into, completing college and getting good grades is hardly anything to go crazy over. I did what I was supposed to. And now I deserve whatever I want? I'm totally guilty.

It's time to start working hard. It's time to shut up about my incredibly decent job and go to work. It's time to stop thinking "I deserve." People don't just stroll into museums and universities when they're 22 and get all the jobs. People don't just have the money to buy awesome little houses and awesome little dogs. Just because my dreams are simple doesn't mean I don't have to work to make them come true. 

I'm sad to admit that this is a breakthrough. Oh, I guess I have to work to get what I want. And, I have to be patient. And sometimes, life is going to be really sad and/or boring and/or frustrating. At least now I know that it's okay. And I know there's something I can do: I can work. Work at work. Work on my writing. Work on my brain thoughts. Work on my hobbies, my relationships, and my savings account. I need to go to work and never stop.

So this is me strapping on my work boots and turning off that pitiful whiny voice that keeps telling me what I deserve. This is me getting up in the morning and earning the life I work for.

technology diet: it's over.

Well, it didn't take long for me to give up on my cold turkey technology diet. But even a week's worth of deprivation taught me a few things, particularly how often I habitually check certain platforms. I've started posting less to Instagram because I now acknowledge the unhealthy satisfaction I get from likes, views, comments, etc. I want to live my life, not post about it. I think the other important message is, if I'm not trying to think of how to make my life look a certain way, I have to grapple with what I actually, truly want to do. What am I interested? What are my goals? Especially now that I've hurdled through all the pre-planned pitstops in my young life. I'm done with high school, done with college, and not planning on chasing after any monumental career goals just yet. I'm realizing that knowing what I want isn't as easy as I thought, especially with no giant arrows pointing me in the right direction. It really is the little moments, the sometimes painful monotony of everyday that slowly reveals where to go and what to do next. I'm exploring every nagging interest, making notes, and trying to take more risks. Not knowing what comes next or how to avoid making a big mistake makes this one of the most terrifying times in my whole life, as cliche as that sounds. But every time I feel fear I try to turn it on its head, spin it positive and smile.

I think social media provokes this discussion because it is so comparative and performance based. As embarrassing as it is to admit to myself, I think I did (and sometimes still do) believe that if I could make life look good then life would be good. Which, of course, isn't true. However, the other, more optimistic look at the tremendous amount of postings I take in every day is that, to an extent, they are inspirational. When I logged into bloglovin' this morning I had 368 posts in my feed. Clicking through and reading about these various womens' lives I had the occasional moment of "damn, why am I not doing that?" But mostly I found myself smiling, my brain whirring. After a few minutes, I opened up to a clean page in my battered notebook and jotted down "Good things: plans, dreams and positivity!" In read through just a small portion of missed posts, I got the idea to run a 5K, make homemade soup, support small business, and set 4 simple goals for myself, including to blog once a week until the new year.

Following through on this inspiration rather than getting swept under by the exhausting current that is my 9-hour a day, 6 day a week work schedule is another story. But no matter how many times I have an inspirational idea and don't follow through, I'll still be glad for that momentary spark that reminds me of the creative, colorful, vibrant person I really am. And if that spark comes from a blog post or a half hour browsing Pinterest before work, so be it.

Day 3

On Day 2: entertaining the possibility of moving to Alpharetta, GA.
Day 3: Still pondering.

*Stalking celebrity IG accounts is surely not good for the tech diet but how fascinating...

day one: #mrmrspaul

Day One of the Technology Diet is/was successful with the exception of an hour's long fangirling over Aaron Paul and his (Alanis-voice) bee-u-tiful wife (isn't it ironic... no it's not). Looking at their lives (holy crap they're rich, had to cut myself off when my ipod died but got far enough back into IG history to see her engagement ring the size of a literal dime) was quite the contrast to my other current distraction, Tina Fey's memoir Bossypants. After a decidedly serious and depressing weekend, I needed some humor and sunshine in my life. Tina's (feels way more normal to call her by her first name) book actually feels like it was written by a "regular" woman, exposing the glamour of celebrity to reality. Surprise! They're humans after all! Which, weirdly enough, was what I was ultimately thinking about #MrMrsPaul. Despite all the glitz and unbelievable beauty (of their faces), they really are just human people living human life which is repetitive and normal most of the time. People live lives on different levels but ultimately life looks the same whether your diamonds are big or small or non-existent. Everyone eats, loves, sleeps, gets sick, goes to work, has good days, has bad days, laughs, cries and dies at the end of the story. So, instead of looking at these celebrity lives (or IG projections of a life) and envying them, I thought: "I already have that." I'm alive and money doesn't matter, so really nothing separates me from them. Not to mention, if I spent so much time and effort into making my life look so glamorous, who knows what kind of celebrity I could appear to be in my own right. This whole tech diet is an effort to get away from comparison, but today I found a beautiful truth in comparing myself to someone very different from me: we're all the damn same.

6/365

There's no excuse for this other than that I forgot my memory card at home. This is bedtime. Stepping out of B's house tonight, the sky and air were this pasty white-orange. It was sort of science-fiction-y. Then, driving home, the cloud cover faded to purple and the spaces between revealed an orange and red setting sun. More rain.