I told my friend to write me a short story, the only prompt being that the events took place within an hour or less. She posted hers on her blog. Here’s mine in return.

drop.

In the same second of the same hour of the same day, everyone dropped what they were holding. It was a second in time, no more, just long enough for whatever anyone was carrying to go crashing to the ground. Only for those lucky enough to be alone in their houses with nothing in their hands did the moment go by unnoticed. For everyone else, it was remarkable. Thousands of people in restaurants dropped their forks, halfway to their mouths, as the trays of food from thousands of waiters dropped onto their heads. Money changing hands fell onto counters, ice cream cones fell into laps, expensive china shattered on floors, touchdown runs turned into fumble scrambles, bullets missed their marks, and marching bands marched over their fallen instruments.

In some cases, it was hardly noticed. A writer dropped her pen and picked it back up. The only customer in the bookshop apologized and put the book back on the shelf, the sound still resonating. In some places it was amusing. A silent classroom burst into laughter as all of their pencils hit the floor at the same time. Co-workers on their smoke break looked at each other in puzzlement when they all dropped their cigarettes. People passing the salt apologized sheepishly. In other cases, the effect was more pronounced. A dog on a leash held by nothing ran away. Bowling balls fell down on to the holder’s feet, or backwards as bowlers were mid swing. A dinner party dropped their expensive champagne glasses full of expensive champagne mid-toast. A best man at his best friend’s wedding dropped the wedding rings. Listeners at a symphony, leaning forward in suspense as the crescendo was building were jarred from their meditative states as all of the instruments fell to the ground with a dissonant crash. A woman walking with her baby to the car dropped the car seat. An old man dropped his cane only to find he could stand without it. A boy dropped the last puzzle piece to his puzzle. Movers carrying a heavy couch dropped it on the new hardwoods. Two lovers dropped what they were holding and bent to pick up that of the other.

The second passed in the blink of an eye, where before the blink everything was one way and after the blink everything was another, the event taking place behind closed eyelids. After the second passed, everything went back to the way it was before, except, of course, for the unusually high number of items laying on the ground.

It’s 3am. I’m up because I got home from work and decided to make a lot of chili. And what the hell, drink a beer. And redesign my blog.

Being an inconsistent blogger is the bane of my existince (hang around me long enough and you’ll learn I have a list of things that are THE bane of my existence). At work I’m being whatever the notch under scolded is by my boss to blog for the department blog I signed up to blog for more than I do. That’s quite the sentence. There’s a lot of blog pressure going around! I don’t do well under pressure. When I’m stressed I blissfully ignore that which is stressing me. I’m quite talented at it. Hence the not blogging since May. It’s not like people are pressuring me to blog for my personal blog. It’s really quite ridiculous. I feel a little embarressed to admit it. It’s that I WANT to be a kick ass consistent blogger but I feel like I haven’t found my blog voice. It’s one of those stupid cycles where I feel like I haven’t found my blog voice so I don’t blog and I don’t blog so I can’t find my blog voice.

I haven’t blogged since May. Guess what one of the main things I think about when I am working and thinking about my trip is? What I’m going to name my totally kick ass travel blog. True story. It’s going to have an awesomely fitting name and be full of present tense, daily posts with pictures and interesting things I did in the interesting city I’m in and fun facts about it and it will be carefree and joy filled just like I will be because I’m on the trip I’ve been working towards for so long.

So I’m totally reading this tedious book that was reccomended to me that I WILL FINISH. It’s called Ishmael (sorry if you adore this book), and I am finding it on the edge of too tedious to be worth it and mildy interesting. One of the tag lines is something like: Teacher seeking student with an earnest desire to save the world. I was thinking a possible blog title would combine that and an E.B. White quote I love that goes something like: I arise each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. So my blog tag would be something like: A girl with an earnest desire to savor the world. Or something. I’ve got until June 2010. Which brings me neatly to my next bullet point. My target leaving date is June 2010! How exciting!

More later. My battery on my laptop is about to die and I’m about to fall asleep. In case you were curious, my chili turned out really well.

Ciao!

Today I come home from a very busy 9.5 hour shift, working 3pm to 12:30am without a break, and all I can think is how this is absolutely what I want to be doing right now. And how lovely is that. The purchase of a *ahem* quite uh, high quality guitar (that means expensive), along with a car repair (expensive), and some other necessary things (expensive), left my bank account drained in the most discouraging of ways. 2 weeks of very successful monetary lock down (eating out only 1 time each week, and no extra purchases), long hours at both jobs, 2 pet sitting jobs, and 2 babysitting jobs (thanks McVeys!) finds my bank account refilling slowly but surely. The horizon looks promising–Little Car’s check engine light is on again, but feel like I’m getting in the groove of really watching my spending, and feeling really motivated to, and the pet sitting is coming pretty steadily.

Music is going well on the artistic end. I’ve been writing a lot of late–but it always comes like an ebb and flow. I’ve been called prolific twice in the past 2 months by 2 different people, which is an encouraging thing to hear. I don’t necessarily think of myself as a prolific songwriter, I’ve never really thought about it I guess. The whole music thing has always been sort of mysterious. It’s really hard to judge these sorts of things about yourself because there’s no real standard to measure yourself against, and it’s been interesting unraveling the picture bit by bit. Like, when I was little I thought that everyone wrote songs. It’s like thinking thoughts. It BLEW my MIND when as teenagers my brother told me he had never written a song. And I’m sure other people experience that with other things–the way you perceive the world is “normal”. Normal is completely subjective.

Anyhoo, on the technical end, I keep putting off calling this new recording contact I have. The whole picking a place to do my recording is very daunting. Because I want something really good. And when you get into the music circle, everybody knows somebody who has this friend who does recording. Everybody. I swear to God. And I hate to be a snob (but I’m totally a snob), but I honestly want something that looks legit. Like hardwood floors and grand pianos and leather couches and lava lamps and a huge mixing board. Things that studios that charge you way more than your friend’s buddy with the studio in his basement have. Things that these studios put there to make you feel like they’re legit. I want those things. They comfort me. Like, look! Obviously enough people use us or how else would we afford these legit looking things? We must be high-quality! And, yes, these places cost way more. Like tons more. But honestly that comforts me too. But, a coworker gave me a contact number for this musician who is in a pretty popular band around the NCs, and it might be a good deal. Plus, once I saw this band live before he told me about him, and was totally BLOWN AWAY by one musician in it, and it turns out that it’s this dude. But I’m putting off contacting him. Because I deal with overwhelm by avoidance. *Pause in blog writing to email music man*.

So, on my way to work the other day, I was driving behind a Lexus with a personalized licence plate that said, “PD4BYGOD”. And unless I’m completely missing something, I was actually very pissed off. Not to be all judgemental and all that, but there are starving children in Africa and you think God bought you a Lexus? Come again mother fucker. And even if dude man considers every dollar a gift from God, which I totally respect, it’s so completely asinine and pompus to claim that God bought you a Lexus. I cannot even think of a scenario where I would be ok with someone putting that licence plate on a Lexus. If it were a beat up old thing, then it would be totally cute and heartwarming. But, for. serious. God did not buy you a Lexus. Any other takes on this? Am I being completely judgemental and nearsighted?

I’ve pretty much accepted that I’m an inconsistent blogger. But, to my defense, I’m a busy mofo.

But! being a busy mofo pays off, even if it leaves you no time for blogging. Going over my finances a few weeks ago, I realized that I was a fourth of the way to my financial goal for my big trip. This was a Big Deal to realize because all my money making felt very abstract. I knew I was working for something, but before it built to anything, it just felt like working. And then I was like, “Holy shit! I’m a quarter of the way there!”

At work that morning after I realized this, I excitedly told my friend who is kind of in the same position, where she’s saving up her monies for a big change, her ETD being a year from now. She asked me when my ETD was and I realized I hadn’t really thought about it, but kind of assumed that it was two years away. Then all of the sudden I realized some things:

1) I started at my 2nd job on October 3rd, with the announced goal of saving $1000 a month
2) As of April 3rd (the day I realized all of this, and 5 months later exactly) I had over $5000 saved
3) To get to my target goal of $20,000 at this rate, I’d need to work for 15 more months
4) If I increase my saving by merely $250  a month, I could have that in 12 months.
5) I can leave in a year.

And then my mind was totally blown. This whole time I’ve been thinking about this trip so abstractly, something that was going to happen sometime in the future and be totally rocking. Now it has a time frame. I am leaving next spring. Everything feels so different. I’m so much more motivated at my jobs, because they are now very directly for a purpose, for a tangible goal that is with in reach and sight. I feel simultaneously thrilled and scared shitless, which I’m taking as a good sign. Like that’s how you should probably feel at the precipice of a big life change.

I also realized that this whole blog is basically a two year plan that I made without even thinking about it in those terms. I used the words, but didn’t even think about in the context of an official “two year plan”. It was just going to take two years to get to it. And I’ve basically stuck to it, with some very necessary and expected shifts and adjustments. I’ll be 5 months or so off of an exact 2 years, saving twice the money than originally thought.

So right now I’m working 7 days a week, Tuesday-Saturday at the museum and Saturday-Tuesday at Goodberry’s, averaging about 70 hours a week between the two. It’s a really doable schedule that leaves plenty of time for music and friends. I’m finding that the less free time I have, the more productively I use it. I’ve also upped my savings goal to a lofty $1,750 a month. I want to have a good guitar by the end of May and something lined up for a professional demo by then also. Those are my two main goals–after that it’s just trying to get as many shows/festivals as I can get with those two tools (a faithful instrument and a faithful representation of the music I make).

Woot! Be prepared to attend what will surely be a very rocking going away party for me next year!

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

One: There’s a man standing in our kitchen talking to my parents about car debt–how an awesome car is awesome except when the housing market is in the tank and the economic situation is rough and uncertain.

Two: It was 3 in the morning the other night and I was on the couch still in my Gladnaggies uniform and boots finishing an application for a music festival. And I thought: This is all I have to do. No school. No debt to work off. Just saving money and singing songs. And those things are easy and good and things I want to do.

Three: A co-worker is in a similar place where she is saving her money so she can take a road trip and move to a cool city. We talk about our trips a lot, and the other day she was saying how she couldn’t wait and wishes she were there already. No no, I said. This is it. Enjoy the process. You have to enjoy the process. And I keep thinking about it and I’m thinking that it’s really much more important than that. Because here’s what we’ve got: if you aren’t enjoying where you are now, even if it’s a period of waiting or hard work or both, and you’re thinking that if you can just get to that point/move to that place/make that amount of money then your life will be totally more enjoyable then, my friends, you have “greener grass” syndrome. And I hear that never goes away. Because we are always and forever in periods of waiting, hard work, or both.

So here’s what I’m thinking this week. One: I love my little scratched up car with a sun-roof that I have to talk into closing, AC that doesn’t quite get to that point that most people call “cold”, and speakers that only work on the right side– a car I own and bought with cash. Two: I am happy with my status of college drop-out Animal Keeper/Custard Flinger/Money Saver Extraordinaire. No sorry, I’m thrilled with it. Three: I love the process, the anticipation, the early-morning commute and the late-night paperwork because it is all going towards something worthwhile. Not that I think my life will be better once I have enough money to embark on my trip, because I have good things now that I won’t have out on my own: the comfort of seeing my family and friends all the time, a warm bed that is mine, consistency, and a warm cocoon of constant affirmation. Seeking my for-tune will be scary and risky. And totally kick ass.

So enjoy the process because This Is It. Life is a process, and that’s all it is. There is no magic point of arrival. Walk the half mile to this:

Beach Camp 08/08

But you still have to walk the half mile in the hot sun back. Process.

Where I’ll be when I’m not here this month.

Where I was last month when I wasn’t here.

Here’s why.

There are so many things I want to do.

There’s this quote I like from the Feminine Mystique (which I have yet to get all the way through) that really struck me, and I think about it a lot. It quotes a 17 year old girl saying this, “…only sometimes I wonder how it would feel to be able to stretch and stretch and stretch, and learn all you want, and not have to told yourself back.”

Last week I spent all day Monday and Tuesday helping one of my friends move into and clean her new house, and yesterday I helped a different friend paint some of the rooms of a house she just bought. I really enjoyed doing both things, not only because I was helping out my friends, but because I am excited about this thing for them. Because it is a thing that I am going to want someday, and someday it will be something I’ll do. I’ll save up enough money to put down 20% on a simple one story house in a good location, and my friends will be helping me move in, and coming over to help me paint my rooms in the colors I pick. This is something I want, but not yet. This is something I want now for my future self. One day I will stand in an empty house that I own wearing overalls and a bandanna and listen to loud music while I paint my walls in my colors. This is a want, and it might change, but it’s a future want.

Last week, due primarily to hormones, I was very sad. I also really wanted to quit my 2nd job, and thought seriously about it for a while. Luckily, the hormones resolved themselves, and I had a very positive 3 nights at work in a row. I am burning with excitement about this road trip. Tonight I took the wrong way on the highway while I was returning home from a friends house, and it was a portion of highway where the next exit wasn’t for another 10 miles, so I had to drive 10 miles to turn around and drive another 10 miles to the exit I needed. I imagined that I was on the highway in the middle of America with no particular attachment to anything but the thing I was doing right then: driving on a highway to wherever I cared to go. I thought about the freedom that I am working towards, and how I’ll pretty much be free to do whatever I want to. I am saving up enough money to be attached to nothing but my whims.

Tonight Morbo was explaining bits of the housing market to me, and related opportunity cost to real life stuff, which I thought was a brilliant thing. The opportunity cost = the cost of what you are missing out on by choosing this particular opportunity. This is great. I should be thinking about everything like this.

Let’s do some now:

Thing: Blogging
Opportunity: getting all these thoughts out of my head, documentation, processing.
Cost: loss of sleep.
Thing: working at Goodberry’s
Opportunity: making money so I can be attached only to my whims
Cost: missed family/friend time, attachment to job responsibilities, mild job discomfort.
Thing: Watching mindless T.V.
Opportunity: zoning, relaxation, family time
Cost: going to bed later, feeling/being unproductive, cuts into book reading, songwriting, journaling
Thing: Road trip
Opportunity: Adventure, music exposure, sightseeing, stretching
Cost: $20,000

Various assessments: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, suck it up pansy, watch less T.V. because you don’t have time for that shit, your 2nd job is fine and soooooooo worth it and you know it, stop writing midnight blog posts because you need your sleep, and find out exactly how it feels to stretch and stretch and stretch and never hold yourself back.

I have a perfect Sunday morning. I’m a few weeks into consistency, and I’m well on my way to habitizing it (I just made up that word. Spread the wealth.).

I wake up early and meet with my friends for breakfast and updates on our week/life/goals/struggles. I head off to church with my peoples, less than 5 minutes away. Straight away after church I drive to the gym–right down the street–for a blessedly, blessedly long, leisurely workout with no time box. Then after a shower and a change, I drive right up the street to my favorite health food store, Harmony Farms. It’s a deliciously quaint place. Locally owned and operated, on top of selling a ton of vitamins and supplements, it also sells a fine array of hippie groceries, including organic, local produce. It’s that type of store that punches you in the face with that strong, healthy herb smell when you walk in. It’s a check your expiration dates, not many people shop here type of store.

It might have been those extra sit-ups I did, but today I was in a particuarly chipper mood when I went to HF. Rather than go straight for my usual of an after workout banana and 5 high-protein faux jerky snacks for the week, I did a little perusing. I picked up a grapefruit for some fresh-squeezed juice for Tuesday morning (which is my Monday morning), a bag of vegan granola with chocolate and peanut butter, an expensive vegan burrito with roasted veggies and white tuscan beans for dinner tonight, an allergen-free, vegan chocolate bar with rice crisps (!), an on sale mango smoothie, and my usual 5 faux jerky snacks. Looking through the isles, I felt again that feeling that I haven’t had for awhile, that I haven’t pursued.

It was almost a year ago that I decided to do this whole vegan thing for real. I remember going to the health food store, starving hungry, buying a mango smoothie and a bag full of veggies, and driving home with an inflated chest, full of resolution. This feeling of walking down the rows of a health food store and seeing tasty thing after tasty thing that proudly boast “vegan” on the package, or finding product after product of things I haven’t tried that I can eat is one of my favorite feelings, odd as that may be. It fills my chest with resolution, reminds me of what this all means. This is something I think is important, and look, these people think it’s important too, and they are making products for all of us so we can all help each other do what we think is important. It’s that feeling of solidarity. I am not alone, there is a goal, a purpose, a reason, and other people feel this too, and this is what they have built and done and accomplished to prove it. Here is this health food store, here is this organic vegan burrito, here is this organically grown grapefruit. And it’s not necessarily a big thing, or the most important decision one can make, but it’s something, it means something. Eat like you believe it.

So I feel this whatever it is: resolution, solidarity, in my chest now and think about how often I used to go out of my way to get it and how I’ve fallen out of that. The joy I get from finding delicious vegan foods is essential to the health of my veganism, something I can’t lose.

Then I drive home with the window down, going out of my way to take the scienic wooded road home, driving in silence, writing a blog post in my head.

After an amusing mis-communication, and a good chat with a co-worker, I felt the desire to write a blog post. Because it’s been forever, or something.

It’s interesting the way everything ebbs and flows. Everything. Goals, relationships with people, desires to write blog posts, songwriting, crush intensities, moods, confidence, the feeling of being wanted, strength of resolution. Everything. And I’m just now catching on. Anticipating it. Like, it’s ok, it’s just an ebb. This will be back. With intensity.

Just pretend like the ebb is a flow and it will be, eventually. Work out anyway. Don’t eat the damn ice cream. Write bad songs for awhile. Keep working your two jobs and sticking to your budget, because you still want this. It’s still going to be ok if she doesn’t want you, you can get over this. Things like that.

Things also evolve. Like relationships and confidence and strength of resolutions and goals. I am working on accepting evolution of goals with confidence of purpose. Allowing for adaptation and growth without feeling like a flip flopper.

Evolution: Music before Europe.
Plan: Continue current saving plan. Buy a professional guitar. Get a professional demo and a hearty car, and cross country road-trip-tour my heart out.

Evolution. Change. *Confidence*.

A little over a year ago, hyped up on caffeine, I sat in my living room late late at night shivering slightly writing a blog post about how I was done settling. How I knew what I wanted but was tired of being scared of it because it’s different than mainstream. And at the time that was a really big thing–really big and really scary. Now a year later I’m looking back on that post and the things it says still resonate with me, and it’s interesting to see how time passing makes a different, scary decision seem completely normal. Like, how could I have ever thought to settle? How could I have ever thought that I didn’t want to pursue my music career? But it makes sense. Sometimes it is necessary to go through struggle to find the things that are true about yourself. Sometimes you can only know what is when you know what is not.

It’s exceedingly encouraging to see how my plan is progressing somewhat divinely. In my very first post I proposed a plan. The Year One goal was to finish up with school. While that did not go exactly as planned (i.e. getting a degree), I am done with school. So that’s checked off. The Year Two goal was: get a full time job, preferably at the Museum. This is where things get interesting. A month ago, it was looking very unlikely that a position would be open in my department any time soon, so I went and got my job back at Goodberry’s. Then, a week later, and exactly one year and two days after I wrote my blog post containing the words, “Year Two: Get a full time job”, I was told that a full time position was opening immediately in my department, starting at the beginning of the month. It’s a perfect position–it’s an addition, so none of my coworkers are leaving, it has full benefits, and I was just about to buy my own health insurance that week, and it’s probably a two year temporary position. My dad and I worked out the budget, and with this job and additional work at Goodberry’s, I’ll have all my trip money saved up in 2 years.

Oh yeah, and that’s the only thing. It’s more like three years of a fierce heart, because I decided that I wanted to travel longer and to more places.

Things are looking good. More to come soon on other thoughts about Future.