to avoid looking out the window at the beautiful weather, i'm staring at my drawing of wilford brimley wearing a tutu juggling cats. thanks jeremy.

i have once again been struck with a profound sense of motivation and by that i clearly mean i have been lacking motivation for about an hour now where i can't seem to get my mind to cooperate with the idea that it is still the work day and it is ill spent by screwing around on the internet. to be fair, i did have a very productive morning and neither my co-worker or boss (for my department) are in the building today so it's really hard to summon the desire to start a new project. so instead, i have had several glasses of water, to afford myself the time to pace back and forth from my office to the kitchen, i've done the mail with our office manager and i have considered how badly i need to paint my nails. while considering what color i would paint my nails this week (this is a saturday activity for me lately, not sure why) i was perusing a former friend's* flickr account, hoping that i might find a new picture to use as my profile picture for this blog or on my twitter account. *this former friend was someone who i used to be particularly read: very close with once upon a time in our lives and she is now quite a talented photographer. i mean, she probably was when we were friends too, i just didn't know that; 13 year olds are more interested in talking about a lot of other things that burgeoning artistic abilities. it is one of her photos that serves as the profile picture for this blog.* upon examining through about a hundred photos, i found myself realizing that everything that she snapped a picture of was something that was an experience. even something simple, like an afternoon snack of wheat thins, kiwi and a clementine was aesthetically organized in a way to be pretty. i, on the other hand, would eat that kind of snack, sitting at my desk and not think for a second to stop and look at how it looked all together in a bowl. there was a photo of a recently emptied plate with a fork and knife left haphazardly upon it and one of a crosswalk in detroit on her walk to work. it makes me think a couple of things. i am slightly jealous that i am not so creative. i wish i could look at something and just visualize how to arrange it or shoot it or whatever to make a creative and interesting image. i can't do that. my brain simple doesn't accept it. second, i think that this is kind of like the modern day equivalent of stopping to smell the roses. stop and take a photo. at least that lasts longer than a rose.

i mentioned yesterday that if given the time i would discuss my thoughts on wanting to be a robot, vampire or super hero and considering that i find myself without any other engagements for the next little while, i thought i would document those thoughts while killing time. that's right, i'm a multi-tasker. i have, for a long time, had a fascination with the idea of being able to do well everything. and the problem was, i was good enough at doing everything that i wanted through delicate juggling, excellent scheduling, not sleeping and consuming obscene amounts of coffee to get everything i wanted done. work, school, friendships, boyfriends (one at a time, for the record), leadership on extra curricular activities...you get the idea. in addition to this rather extreme desire to be able to do everything, i also fancied myself to be a person who was cold, unemotional and accordingly rational enough to always make the smartest decisions. again the problem was i became so good at this too that it became very difficult to try to convince me that i was wrong or that my approach to facing the world was at best sad. i think that part of this desire came from the early lessons that i learned quickly from my mother which can most easily be summed up like this: always do the best you can, don't accept anything less than that from yourself and understand that sometimes in life you are going to get hurt. well, when you find out at age 9 that your best is all a's, you feel a kind of pressure to keep that going. when you watch those behaviors carry over into other areas of life, you make a mental note and before you know it, it is an adult behavior that can't be shaken easily. it only took me one try of getting hurt to realize i didn't want to do that again so i carefully constructed a wall around myself to keep a distance from everyone. really. there are a good number of people who met me around my sophomore year in high school who don't know a damn thing about me but if you asked, they would say we were close in high school. i was just passing time until i got to college where i assumed i would find people that didn't seem to waste my time. because the people in high school that i did trust were the ones that hurt me, it was easier to just shut everyone down. so i did.

it was lovely for a while. lonely, yes but wow. such a wonderful feeling of safety. no one could get in, no one could hurt me, i had control. but that can only last so long, especially if you expect to grow as a human, have new relationships and so on. this was a horrifying prospect. and the very few close friends that i chose to discuss these fears with all said the same thing; they made it their business to remind me that i am not a robot. they reminded me that i'm human and therefore will experience emotions, both good and bad, and if i keep myself from some then i'm going to miss everything. yes, this makes logical sense now. at the time, you could have just as well told me to go take a long walk off a short bridge. it took a lot of undoing to get me to wrap my mind around the concept that it is okay for me to just be human.

i understand that this should not be difficult but this learning came after lots of work, visits with friends, old and new, visits with therapists (even though i never let our conversation get here, i think they did something to contribute), a failed experience with anti-depressants and lots of personal discovery. i want to be clear. i'm not good at this. i'm working at it, i've been working at it for a lot of years now and i think i'm getting a little bit better at it. but this in no way stops my desire to be a robot, vampire or superhero. i feel like you can probably deduce why but here's the bottom line: they aren't human thus don't have to deal with human emotions and trivialities. that is marvelous, i think. maybe in my next life i'll be better at this emotional stuff.

from the girl who's kind of hoping to meet edward cullen to be turned into a vampire

until next time...

you're doing well, superman does good. check yourself.

there are some things in life that i am fairly certain about. first, coffee is better black. second, none of the books in the twilight saga needed to be as long as they are. third, i am crappy at writing blogs with any kind of regularity. fourth, it is pretty tricky to be a girl. there are lots of things about being a girl, eye lash curlers, high heels, the dynamic between friends, frienemies and enemies that require very delicate balance. and as it was, we don't really get a lot of formal training in these areas. in fact, we hardly know that it is happening because for the most part, it is a very natural part of our being. that last thing anyway, high heels and eye lash curlers take some getting used to. we girls are very competitive with each other. i think there is some very backwards logic that if we are better than someone else, than we succeed and they fail. and i understand that isn't nice and it shouldn't be the way that i or anyone else should think, but the simple fact of the matter is, sometimes it is. a lot of the time too. to be fair, it works to the contrary as well, where we judge ourselves against someone else's successes, even if they are things we don't want yet. i am particularly guilty in this area. i often look at friends (via facebook, aka the best device for destroy or unjustifiably boosting self-esteem ever) from high school or college who are my peers that are engaged, married, have children. i find myself immediately feeling like i'm behind the game even though i don't want to be married or have children...yet. this being the case, if you didn't already know, being a girl is a lot harder than it might look.

now i know that there are many paths in life that we all stumble down that make up our lives and that is what makes us, as humans relatively interesting. it has been my experience that most women, particularly in my generation and the one or two before me, we are obsessed with doing the best thing, being our best, always having the answers and being able to do everything. this, of course, is an impossible task. and even though i wrote that statement, i am still guilty of wanting to be able to do everything (there is an appeal i can't explain here to being a super hero, robot or vampire. maybe some day i'll explain my thoughts on that topic.) here is a giant problem with all of that. i would say that most women when confronted with a problem they don't have an answer to, they opt for what they think is the correct answer. usually this results in women making choices that don't make them happy but what they think will make other people happy, hoping that they might become happy accordingly. simply put, this plan is a fail. i could probably expand but i feel like you get it. what happens next? experience has also taught me that the people who try this method of happiness are also the kind of people who enjoy reading self-help and self-help like books that make them feel better about their lives or will serve as some kind of guide to help them better their lives. so they read books like "who moved my cheese" and "eat, pray, love" expecting some kind of gps device to make life easier rather than a crypic roadmap that still tells you the same lesson you weren't listening to in the first place.

believe it or not, the whole reason for the post is to talk about eat, pray, love. i saw the movie. *sigh*. it was a very long film and the whole time i found myself thinking, 'this is why the world hates the united states' and 'what happens when she goes back to new york at the end of this?' i find it to be a horribly childish notion that if you run away from your problems, they will go away. this just in, problems don't move on their own. it's a lot of work to get passed them. if you leave, they will be waiting for you when you get back, having grown impatient in your absence, which makes them so much worse to deal with. something to consider. i also have this suspicion that she didn't actually learn anything. my proof? it's like this. she left to go to italy, india and bali to learn how to connect with the world and like find her true self or something right? maybe i took too much away from this but to me i thought she would also be trying to live her life, as my friend shelby would say, as a strong independent woman of the 21st century. read: this does not mean go to these countries and find men who will tell you what to do, how to do it, how to feel and how to live. liz gilbert found herself a male tutor in italy who showed her around and helped her feel at home, she found that guy from texas who flat out told her she was doing the whole praying business wrong and she met that one guy from who played the creep from "no country for old men" in bali. now at least that one i can understand. you really don't fall in love by yourself but still. come on, liz gilbert. let's give these ladies whose lives you are now impacting some hope that they can be strong and stand on their own.

i'm not going to say liz gilbert is without any insight. i liked this quote: "happiness is the consequence of personal effort. you fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. you have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. and once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it." i just believe soundly that that realization could have been made anywhere in the world, not necessarily by travelling the world. the realization that you deserve happiness doesn't need to take place on a beach in bali or at an ashram in india any more than positive changes to one's life need to be vowed on new years day. if you allow the people in your life to play a role in helping you realize what you deserve, it makes it a lot easier to work towards that end.

so i guess the bottom line is this, live this life for yourself because it is the only one that you have. if you want to eat ice cream every day for a week, do it. if you need to see a therapist because you can't figure out why you don't smile, do it. do whatever you have to do to be happy because you deserve it. i'm not saying i have all the answers or that i can even do this but i do know that i can try. that is what counts. just sayin.

from the girl who probably should have never seen eat, pray, love

until next time...