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Why Baby Mamas Should Love Me and How I Came This Close To My Million Dollar Idea.

The interesting thing about my house, I’ve realized, is that while no children actually live here (except those of the crazy, mangy mutt and the 29-to-30-something-I-don’t-wanna-grow-up varieties), it’s shockingly child-friendly.

I mean, okay.  Kids have to stay out of my office.  Period.  There are dangerous things like books on shelves and a fancy new computer and god forbid anyone but me spills red wine on my spankin’ white desks, and yes, there’s a good chance if you bring your kid here, he might accidentally find himself with a sippy cupful of wine or I mean grape juice with a splash of wine, and that’s only if he’s being a pain in the ass.

And that’s what we’d call a Sippy-cup ‘Tini.

Not that I would ever do that.

Ever.

But sometimes when I see a screaming kid at the grocery store, I’d think of how much easier Mom’s life would be if she carried a flask.  For many reasons.

Don’t look at me like that.

In the early 1900’s, we used to give kids cocaine for toothaches.  And really, I’m not sure why we don’t anymore, because they’d all probably be a lot more fun and grow up to epitomize groundbreaking music genres and write thought-invoking lyrics and die before their time.

Wait, maybe that was heroine.  Which actually used to be sold as a cough suppressant.

And probably not such a good thing.

Except the music.  You can’t really argue that Come As You Are wasn’t a good thing.  A very good thing.

Right, Martha?

Anyway.  As I was saying, as long as the mangy mutts are locked in one bedroom and the office door remains closed and the so-called “grown-up” inhabitants of the casa refrain from giving alcohol to minors, what’s left is approximately 1,300 square feet of veritable playground for the age-impaired.  Well, maybe 1,200 square feet.  Because I’m pretty sure kids shouldn’t play in bathrooms.  Or the fireplace hearth.  So let’s make it an even 1,197 square feet of pure fun.  Which, I think, would more than suffice.

Most of the flooring in that remaining square footage is laminate, which, despite its solid-state appearance, is actually quite kid-friendly cushy as well.  Many a child has stumbled across its slick surface, been told to “brush it off,” and survived to play another day.

Also, it’s quite easy to clean.  Which was exceptionally put to the test this past weekend when my friend’s crazy adorable baby went all Exorcist on us and projectile-vomited everywhere.  Which was awesome and scary all at the same time.  And it made me really, really happy we chose laminate as our primary walking/vomiting surface.  (**Update: I spoke with my friend. She knows I love her. AND her baby. Like… I would throw myself in front of a biscuit-tube throwing Sponge Bob for that baby. So no, she knows I was not speaking ill of her baby while writing those last sentences. Her baby was ill, but I was not speaking ill. Got it? Thank you.)

So.  While situations in which friends with babies are hanging out with friends without babies usually leads to apologies from the friends with babies and feelings of inadequacy from the friends without babies, I want all of my friends with babies to know that it’s okay to take them to my house.  And that, while I’m not positive I want any of my own, I don’t want you to feel weird about exposing yours to me and my childless home.  Because I have laminate.  And microfiber.  And sippy-cup ‘tinis if you’re feeling especially distraught.

For you, not your kid.

Which is why I should be your favorite childless person.

But you’ll have to provide the sippy cups, because I don’t have those, for obvious reasons.  Although maybe I should, because I’ve been known to spill a lovely glass of red all over my new rug, and — oh, wow.  Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  Sippy-cup wine glasses.  For grown-ups who aren’t quite grown up.  They’re sippy-cups with stems, people.  Don’t steal that.  It’s MINE.

Anyway.  I think what I’ve been trying to say is that I’d like to bridge this gap that inevitably forms when some friends from a group choose to have kids and others stubbornly remain child-free.  Just because kids don’t get me doesn’t mean we can’t hang.  And while I might try to talk to them about politics or religion or why Desperate Housewives is so insanely idiotic yet I still watch it, I think this is a good thing when it comes to expanding young minds.  I might ask them about the books they’re reading and then tell them about the books I’m reading, and then after I’ve bored them into a zombie-like stupor, all of us “grown-ups” can pour ourselves some sippy-tinis and call this a parenting job well-done.

It’s like I was made for this sort of thing.

Plus, I know the human head weighs 8 pounds.  Yep.  I’ve watched Jerry Maguire.  I know how this works.

P.S. I’m too late.

P.P.S. If anyone wants to buy me one of these if I ever find myself on the “with-child” side of the family spectrum, I can’t say I wouldn’t love it:

I Can Tell, Because It Doesn’t Feel Like I’m Trying to Push My Face Through A Brick Wall, that Today Will Be A Good Day.

For the most part, I consider myself a fairly healthy person.

I quite frequently joke around that when it comes to my jaded little family, my sister may have gotten the Barbie-like good looks, but I got the health.  Wow-ee.  As a teenager, given the choice, I would’ve taken the looks.  Hands-down.  But now?  I’m starting to realize that health really isn’t something to joke about.  And, if we know what’s good for us (hardy-har-har), we shouldn’t take it for granted when we have it.

My sister was always missing days from school.  Sure, I figured most of the time she was playing up her ailments — electively passing on a trying day of book learnin’ and real-life social networking (back before the days of Facebook, when you really had to work for it), for a restful day of hot soup, soap operas, and sleep.  But me?  I took pride in my neat little nearly perfect attendance record.  Home was bo-ring.

Eventually, however, the person I had pegged for a hypochondriac started showing real signs of body betrayals.  Where my mother suffers from chronic back pain and other ailments, my sister has had to have knee surgery, ankle surgery, a pituitary tumor removed (remind me to tell you about that sometime), and she has a hilarious-in-retrospect-but-so-not-funny-at-the-time habit of cracking her head open.

And yes, that’s what I call it when my body does things that I don’t get — a betrayal.  Like when I come down with a horrible cold or my left knee decides to get extra rickety or my jaw clenches tightly all night of its own accord.  These things slow me down — slow us down — and I don’t understand why my body would do that to us.  So after I mention it to someone else and fail to get any sympathy, I move on and pretend it’s not happening.  And really, this method of denial has worked for us so far, like refusing to back down to a petulant child, and eventually my body and I come to an understanding.  Our agreement is that if I give her some fruits and veggies, exercise occasionally, and don’t skimp on the red wine, dark chocolate, and good cheese indulgences, she won’t cause me any trouble and all will be right with the world.

So it still comes to a shock when something bad happens.  When something, no matter how temporary I know it will be, can absolutely not be ignored.

And last night, I received a tell-tale sign of impending torture.

I’d gotten home from a productive day of getting things done at work, and I was feeling motivated.  Really motivated.  I worked out, showered, preheated the oven for dinner, poured myself a small glass of red (still practicing moderation here, folks), and sat down at the computer to catch up on a few favorite blogs.  Only.  I couldn’t read them.

I squinted at the screen, where I could see the type trailing across the page — see lots of letters where letters should make words, but I couldn’t read any of them.  There were holes.  White spots where letters should be, and letters where white spots should be.  Like a crack in the glass lens of my vision, because I certainly wasn’t wearing my glasses, and oh my god I remember the last time this happened.

I had been just a kid — maybe 5th or 6th grade, the last time this happened.

And I knew what was coming.

It was a migraine, my friends.  And no.  Not just a bad headache that you might call a migraine.  This was a full-on, nauseous, punch-you-in-the-face, can’t-open-your-eyes-because-any-form-of-light-makes-you-want-to-scoop-them-out-with-a-spoon kind of headache.  Like the worst frozen ice cream headache, times 100, that doesn’t ease up for several hours.  And that light — that weird light from the crack in my vision — was my warning.

Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel… is just a freight train comin’ your waaaaayyyyy…..

As Metallica would say.

I tried to ignore it.  To pretend it wasn’t happening.  Because, you see, this was our deal.  We had a deal, my body and me, and it wasn’t supposed to do shit like this.  I couldn’t read, because I couldn’t see, so I turned on the television and tried to watch, although it turns out you kind of need vision for that as well.  You know — television.  And the light from the screen was a little strong, like someone had adjusted the brightness to an annoying level, so I sat on the sofa with my eyes closed, pretending that if I sat there long enough, everything would just go back to normal.

It didn’t.

I called Justin on his way home to warn him that I would need to be heavily medicated upon his arrival, and please hurry, and then proceeded to curl up in a ball in the dark cave of our bedroom and ride it out.  I only threw up once.  He came home with some kind of pill — a magic pill — that eventually quieted the searing pain to warm embers, and finally I could think.

And I could thank.

Because.  As horrible as it is to feel helpless and out of control of your own body, sometimes we need these not-so-gentle reminders of how good it is to feel good.

So thank you, body, for feeling good most of the time.

And don’t ever f*cking do that to me again.

Better Run, Better Run, Outrun My Gun

My coworker has a gun.

She just acquired her license to carry one, ironically in part because I signed her form as a reference, but I only did it because I thought she might shoot me if I didn’t.

Just kidding.

I think.

But she giddily informed me yesterday that her paperwork was approved and she was amazed at how simple the actual gun purchasing process was — that it seemed strange you could just go into a store, present your paperwork, and leave with a gun.  “Don’t you think there should be a waiting period?” she asked.  “You know… so that anyone who might be buying a gun because she’s angry at someone has time to cool down before the gun is actually in her hands?”

No, I thought.  Premeditated murder is pretty much premeditated murder, regardless of whether you did it right after driving to a store to purchase a gun for the job or stopped on your way to the victim’s house to have a cocktail and “cool down.”

But I didn’t say that.  I wasn’t sure if she was carrying the gun.

“And they’re a lot harder to work than you’d think,” she went on.  “You know how in the movies they make cocking the gun look so easy… like cha-ching a simple hand gesture and it’s done?  Well with my gun, it takes some muscle.  Like… I’d have to ask someone to hold still for a minute before I could shoot him if he was breaking into my house.”

“Well, let’s just hope that never happens.”  Pleasedon’tshootmePleasedon’tshootmePleasedon’tshootme.

“Yeah…” she said, almost wistfully.  “Well, I really got it so I could carry it to work.”

Excuse me?

“So that I can take it for protection when I go meet with potential clients and stuff.”

Whew.

“The bullets I bought aren’t the kind you normally think of when you think of a bullet.  They don’t have a pointy tip,” she explained, without provocation.

“No?”

“Yeah… the tip’s all concave — it’s called a ‘hollow point’ bullet, so that when it hits someone, all of the pieces just sort of expand outward to tear him up.  You know… because if you shoot someone, you don’t want to just put a hole in him.  You want to cause some real damage.”

I do?

“Yep… I’m learning a lot.  It’s pretty cool!  You should get one and we could go shooting together!”

I honestly don’t know how I feel about guns.  I’m pretty sure I know how I feel about my coworker having one in the office, and that’s nervous.  Whatever happened to the good ol’ days of bonding over cocktails?  Maybe learning guitar?  Starting a book club?  You know, things that don’t involve training me to tear someone up with a shiny piece of metal.

And this is just another check in the “I don’t really belong here” column.  I’d rather be my feeble-minded Northern city self, depending solely on shots of espresso and my own wit for self-protection.

Guns?  Aren’t those little blue and green plastic toys that we fill with water or soft darts and hand to our kids and tell ’em to go nuts?  Don’t they only kill people with those in the movies?

Of course, then I remember my relationship with the military.  I’m married to it, for crying out loud.  I used to work for it.  I hear guns almost every week.  But the closest I’ve ever come to shooting one was in the virtual training lab on base, where they handed me and 4 other women reconfigured M-16’s, told us to lay on the ground facing a screen and to use our instincts.  On the screen, an arm reached out to knock on a door.  We were answering a domestic disturbance call, and before long a young woman with a black eye answered.  She was quickly shoved to the side by a gruff-looking 20-something who was obviously intoxicated.  He slurred some words to us and sat down on the sofa.  There were empty beer and liquor bottles strewn across the coffee table.  “Yo — I said, what the hell are you doing here?”  We’d already identified ourselves and our purpose, but the man was becoming irate.  Then, before we knew what was happening, he was on his feet, pulled a gun out of the back of his pants, and aimed it straight at us.  Five guns went off simultaneously, each sending out 2 or 3 shots before we were cut off.  Guns 1, 3, 4, and 5 were non-kill shots, but they all hit their mark — the man’s groin.  Gun #2, my gun, had the only 2 kill shots.  Straight to the head.

Now.

I feel a little better when I tell myself that I was aiming for the groin.

But I’m not positive that’s true.

And so guns scare me a little.  What they’re capable of doing, in the heat of a moment, when a moment is all you have to make a decision.  I’m pretty sure it’s not like the movies.  Not at all.

In the end, I suppose guns are like spouses or houses or jobs — there are times people didn’t have one but wish they did, and times people had one but, almost definitely, wish they didn’t.

All I know is that I’m going to be really, really nice to my coworker from here on out.

Something You Should Probably Know…

I’m one of those lucky people who has someone who has my back.

It’s easy, when you have it, to take it for granted.  But I have it.  And I’m not trying to rub it in, but I think you should know.  It’s kind of important if you want to know me.

I’m not going to lie and say we always understand each other.

I’m not going to lie and say we’re always on the same page or even, sometimes, in the same book.

But I’m also not going to lie and say he’s not one of the good ones — the kind who calls when he says he’ll call.  The kind who stays sober so you have a safe ride home.  The kind who cooks you dinner and rubs your back and somehow manages to turn you into a hugger when hugging used to make you feel all awkward and gangly and boob-pressy.

Sometimes I think I don’t know who he really is, and that scares me.

But it also keeps things interesting.

He’s my rock and my hard place.

Infuriating sometimes, because he can’t read my mind and I don’t know why.

All I do know is that 31 years ago, the world was graced with this:

Tile Buddy

(This side isn’t so bad, either):

And those of us who get to experience him, no matter how brief or how long, should consider ourselves pretty damn lucky, indeed.

Happy birthday, Justin!

Let Me Tell You About This Bird and How He Helped Me Get Over My Fear of Commitment.

You know that feeling you get when things just work out?

Like when friends come over to visit and they all want wine and you happen to have exactly the right number of unbroken wine glasses so no one’s forced to drink cab from a highball.

Like when you suddenly crave “Shit on a Shingle” for dinner and you just happen to have enough milk in your fridge and dried beef in your pantry to make it.

Like when you finally decide to wash your pillowcase and you’re so careful to set your pillow in a precise location so you can keep track of that special soft spot where your head always fits perfectly and then some reckless person (most likely yourself) thoughtlessly moves your pillow to another location and now usually there is no way to detect that spot until you actually lie on the pillow in every configuration imaginable and you know you’re in for a long night, except — wait!  There it is.  Your spot.  And you got it perfect the first time.

It’s that feeling.

That feeling that comes when you think you’re in for an ordeal, but instead the process is relatively effortless and surprisingly stress-free.

And that is exactly what happened when I emailed my boss to decline is offer of a full-time position.

I thought he might be upset.  Or worse, disappointed.  But instead, his reaction was one of relief.  See, as a small start-up business owner, he wanted to do what it took to keep a decent employee (one who actually shows up and does her work) on board.  In my case, he thought that required offering me a full-time position.  Even though, it turns out, he had the minor problem of not knowing whether he’d be able to afford me.  So he was actually relieved when I declined, and he may have let slip a note of envy.

See, when I explained to him that a full-time position is no longer my primary goal because I’ve realized now I have more time to do some other things that I’m passionate about, he replied that one day he hopes to be in the same position.

Now.

Does anyone sense the irony here?

My boss is a self-made African-American male with a wife and 2 very young sons who runs a very successful small business, and he happens to be 2 years younger than me.  And yet, for some reason, he thinks I’m the one in the position to which he should aspire.

Okay, not entirely.

He drives a very nice car.  I drive a 12-year-old Tracker.

He wears very nice clothes.  I still wear things I owned in high school.

He owns his own business.  I work for an hourly rate.

He has 2 happy, healthy, and dare-I-say adorable kids.  I have 2 dogs who once swallowed an entire bag of chicken bones and I had to feed them cotton balls to ease the sharp passage of shrapnel through their intestines.  True story.

I’m sure he doesn’t go home at night and wish that he was me.  But.  There’s something here.  An affirmation of sorts, that tells me I made the right decision.  That tells me when I cut out the shoulds, good things can happen.

So this is good news, right?  I celebrated by hanging item numbers 3, 4 and 5 on my walls.

If you recall, I’ve only had one thing hanging in my house for quite some time.  In the laundry room.  Where I maybe spend 0.00001% of my time.  Makes sense, right?

I think it has something to do with my fear of commitment.

So, in light of my goals for the new year, I hung some stuff.

Three things, as a matter-of-fact.

I hung them in the guest bathroom.  Approximately 6 feet away from the one other thing hanging in my house, and yet where I spend a significantly longer amount of time.

(Please ignore my unpainted trim.  That’s still on the 2012 task list for this money and time-sucker of a house.)

Let me tell you about the bird.  The bird is special.  My friend Alaina’s mother, Jan Krebs, is an artist.  She’s my adoptive mother from back in our college days, and one of the first people to teach me that life should be reserved for doing things you love.

I’ve always wanted a Jan Krebs original, and as of Christmas this year, that wish came true.  It’s not a painting, but some type of carved ceramic that has a rough texture and looks fabulous in person.  I knew that this couldn’t just be something I let sit around on my console table or propped up against my backsplash like so many other pieces of art I have around.  Not this time.  The bird would be the start of a movement.

And I didn’t stop there.

The tea light holders were purchases I made on a trip I took to Europe in 2004.  I bought them in a tiny shop in Strasbourg, France.

Well?  What do you think of my progress?

First, the bathroom was a paisley-infested crime scene:

Kate's Guest Bathroom Crime Scene

Then, it was naked:

Guest Bathroom After

And now, we have life:

Yep, I now have bathroom art.

This must be what it means to feel grown-up.

One of the Things I Learned When I Was 3, But It Took Me to 29 to Realize It.

When I was a kid, I used to fall out of bed.

Not just occasionally, but every. single. night.

You’d think my parents would have put one of those attachable crib-like railings on the side of my “big girl” bed because clearly, a big girl I was not, but no.  I suppose they figured the best move was to leave me free to fight my monsters of the night without first making me launch myself over a barred piece of metal.  Because, you know, concussions are so much better when you don’t have to work for them.

Not that I was ever concussed from the ordeal.

In fact, I never even actually woke up.

Nope.  I just rolled on out of there, landing with a muffled thud on the (presumably) orange shag carpeting, and continued right on sleeping.  I honestly think my parents did nothing to stop my nighttime base jumps because they enjoyed coming into my room in the morning to see where their toddler had ended up in the night — curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed, or sprawled out like some sort of beached squid, my limbs all knotted and contorted, jammies unshamefully bunched up to expose my baby pot belly and white little calves, the epitome of nonchalance and innocence and bendiness — all the stuff it is to be a toddler.

Then, one night, all of that changed.

One night, I woke up.  It was pitch dark.  I was lying on my stomach, on what I knew wasn’t my bed, so I pushed myself up.

Or at least, I tried to.

But I couldn’t.  Thwack!  The back of my head struck metal, just inches above where I lay.  I scootched up onto my elbows, chin tucked down, and tried to raise my tush.  Thwack!  My bum hit metal again.

As an adult, my reaction in this situation would be, 1) What. the. f*ck.  2) Sheer panic.

As a kid, my reaction to this situation was, 1) Sheer panic.

I screamed, I cried, I yelled for mom and dad with such urgency that I’m pretty sure they must have thought someone was trying to kidnap me in the middle of the night, especially when they barged into the room, in panic mode themselves, and couldn’t see me anywhere.  I could hear their terrified voices yelling, Katie? Katie?!, but they sounded so far away and muffled by the walls of the wormhole into which I surely must have slipped.  The carpet turned soggy with tears below my cheek — carpet? — and suddenly, there was light.

My dad had lifted the bed skirt, took one look at his terrified daughter lying helpless under the bed, and started laughing.  My mom’s face popped into the window he’d created, and she joined in.

Now.  If you’ve ever asked yourself whether toddlers can feel embarrassment, believe me when I say that they can.  And to this day, I’m pretty sure either one of them would react the same way if they woke up in the dark and couldn’t move.  But my humiliation didn’t stop me from reaching my arms out to them so they could drag me to safety and place me snugly back in bed.

After that, I stopped falling out.

It’s like the inner workings of my unconscious little mind said, Enough.  We can’t handle this kind of stress.

Just one little scare is all it took, and my nighttime antics ceased.

But I think, ever since then, a little part of me has missed the unleashed feeling of the free fall.

Skydive Hawaii

And I think that maybe, many of us spend our adult lives trying to get that feeling back again.

But, really.

Is that so wrong?

Today I Will Take My Coffee With A Shot of Cojones.

Does that title sound as gross as I think it sounds?

Good.  Then I have your attention.

Some of us have a time in our lives when we have to take a stand.  When we have to say, from the gut of our gut (because just our gut isn’t enough), and with as much confidence as we can muster (which usually isn’t nearly sufficient), “I may not know exactly what I’m doing, but I know it has to be done.”

And some of us have to do it twice.

God help us.

But since God (or whatever superior being to whom you might occasionally make a plea for help) likely has more important things to do, like end world hunger or help Tebow win a football game, we’re usually pretty much on our own.

And that can be a pretty hard thing to do.  It’s a tough call — to go against the grain of you feel you should do, and instead choose what you want to do.

The super enlightened among us might call this “living our truth.”

I call it “throwing out the shoulds.”  It’s less mystical sounding, and a little more self-explanatory.

After all, if you’re unhappy, it’s likely the shoulds that got you into this mess.  You should go to college right after high school.  You should land a stable job and start a retirement fund and have medical coverage.  You should buy a car.  You should buy a house.  You should water your lawn and wear nice clothes and attend company holiday parties and smile, because you just got a promotion which pretty much guarantees that you now get to spend even more time each day in this place that’s not so bad, but it’s not, somehow, where you know you’re supposed to be.  It’s not.  But you feel stuck because you should be happy.  You have all of these things, and everyone else who has these things is happy, right?  And if you change, you might lose these things.

So you should stay.

And you should learn to love it.

And you should spend the rest of your days trying to hypnotize yourself into this trance known as the American Dream that seems to come so easily for everyone else.

And that, my friend, is how you waste years.  How you brush them into the dust pan, one by one, and throw them out with the trash.  Because if you really feel this way (and believe me I feel you if you do), it’s not just going to magically get better.  Because if you’re not happy, you’re missing the things you already have in your life that are wonderful.  You know you should love these things, but you can’t.  It’s like you’re not even present.  You’re watching your life through a telephoto lens, and you never really even experience it.

So.

I didn’t intend to get all deep and philosophical on you this morning.  But I’m going to assume you needed to hear it, because I needed to type it.  What I actually intended to tell you is that I need to do it again.  I need to make the difficult choice.  And while I know, in my gut of guts that the choice is already made, sometimes a pep talk is necessary to do the deed.

You see, if you’re fairly new here, you might not know that I quit my job back in August 2010 in order to go make hot sauce in Costa Rica for a couple of months.  I had intended it as a jumping-off point — a type of cold turkey shock therapy to push myself into figuring out what, exactly, it was that would make me happy.  The plan was ill-conceived, at best, and when I returned home my depression was at its peak.  (I know, lucky Justin.)  Instead of focusing on building a writing career, I let people should all over me.  I had no job.  My marriage was in a state of limbo.  My self-esteem was lying somewhere along the side of that lonely stretch of road that took me to that lowest point in my life, and I just didn’t even know where to begin.  So, by August 2011, I took a part-time job as a real estate assistant.  The job market was horrendous, and, if you want to know the truth, that is the only interview I could get.  Even though I’ve had some baby-step success at getting my foot in the writing door, I lacked gumption.  And now, here I am, nearly a year-and-a-half after the epic quitting event of 2010, and I’m scarily close to where I first started.

My backyard view in Costa Rica.

And now, I find it’s time to make another choice.

On New Year’s Eve, my boss sent me an email.  A very nice email.  A complimentary email, on how he appreciates my hard work and dedication to the team.  And he extended me an offer.  A very nice offer.  An offer to work for his company full-time, to become an integral part of the team, and to devote myself to this career path.  To his career path.

The money would not come close to what I was making in 2010, but it would be better than where I’m at now.  The job is more stimulating than where I was back then, but I still know that it’s not where I’m supposed to be.  At least, not full-time.  Because, if I choose that path, I know I won’t dedicate the ambition I need to fulfill my goals this year.  It feels wrong, so wrong, to turn it down.  And yet.  If I accept, it will mean I’ve learned nothing in the past year-and-a-half.  That it was a waste.  That I’m destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.  Turning down an opportunity that would put us in a better financial state feels wrong because that’s how we’re trained to feel.  But, if I remember how I really felt in August 2010, I remember very clearly that money was not the issue.  Not even close.  So, I’m going to politely decline his generous offer, as soon as we’re done here.  And hope I’m not making a huge, huge mistake.

Something tells me I might need something a little stronger than coffee this morning.

But you know, so far, all I can figure is that we need to make a series of difficult choices to start taking back control of these limited and precious lives that we have — choices that feel right, even if they don’t look right.

Obviously, I can’t tell you if this is really the way because I’m not there yet myself.

But.

You can be sure I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Seriously, for the Leaps I’ve Made Today, It May As Well Be March Already

I’ve already run through the gamut of extreme New Year’s emotions this morning, so I’m feeling way ahead of the game.

I woke up feeling hopeful — hopeful that the new year would bring a sense of clarity about what I’m doing and where I’m going and how I can manipulate and pinch and twist the world like it’s my personal ball of Play-doh to get it to do what I want.

Hope, of course, immediately turned to anxiousness.  What ifs came barreling through my mind — What if I don’t do anything significant this year?  What if I spend this next New Year’s Eve as disappointed in myself as I was this year?  What if I still haven’t learned Spanish, started that book, toned up my arms, published my first travel article, taken a cooking class, or remembered that it’s possible to change my ISO setting on my camera every single time I use it?

Fortunately, instead of swirling down the rabbit hole of self loathing or panic that can follow anxiety, I have the innate ability (probably derived from my pot smoking years) to stress about a problem for a few minutes, then get over it and move on.

It’s really kind of wonderful and has probably saved me from the straight jacket on more than one occasion.

So move on, I did, into the pep talk phase of New Year emotions.  You CAN do these things.  You just need a plan.  You need to set goals.  You need to fight every. single. go-with-the-flow urge in your body to avoid letting another year just slip away into a mushy pile of 9-5 workdays, should we/shouldn’t we have a kid conversations, and hours of online curtain shopping.

Then, zen.  Of course, that’s not really the point.  Life IS your daily activity.  Your job.  Your conversations.  Your curtain shopping.  You should learn to enjoy these things rather than wishing them a speedy passing, otherwise your whole life will be a speedy passing.

And finally, indifference.  Whatevs.  This isn’t any different from any other year.  What’s going to happen will happen, and what doesn’t, doesn’t.  There’s no sense in trying to control it.  The world is not your Play-doh.  Just stop.

Stop.

So, already this morning I’ve managed to do what takes most people 2-3 months to do — stop stressing about the new year and all of my big, big plans for it, and just let it happen.

And no, I haven’t forgotten about my word for 2012.  Ambition will hopefully still play a role this year.  Because that, I can control.  And I’m pretty sure if I can conquer that, everything else will just automatically bend to my will.

Right?

right?

Here’s to Making the Most of a New Year and to Trying Our Damnedest to Not F*ck It Up.

Well, it’s about that time.

You know what time I mean.

That time.

That time when we’re supposed to get all reflective and introspective and think about everything that happened (or didn’t happen) during the past year — about all of the goals we accomplished and how our lives changed because we achieved said goals and how we’ve miraculously become these emotionally centered, successful, zen-like people because we perfected the art of meditation somewhere in the time between attaining all of our hopes and dreams (which ironically isn’t the goal of meditation but just work with me here), and now, finally, we can enter the new year with a sense of peace, contentment, and, most important, sans resolutions.

Right.

Because that’s realistic.

Sadly, if the psychological distance on the self-satisfaction scale I’d hoped to travel during the last year was a mile, I’ve managed to physically propel myself forward a foot.  Maybe two feet, if I want to account for the fact that I’ve mostly emerged from a pretty uncomfortable bout of depression.

And why wouldn’t I want to account for that?

But still.  That means I fell 5,278 feet short.  I’m not disappointed, per se, because I’m not surprised.  I mean, it’s me we’re talking about here.  I frequently quote the Gin Blossoms in saying, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.”  Genius.  Or demoralizing.  But whatever, it’s true, and it applies to me, too.  If *I* don’t expect too much from myself, I can’t let myself down.

…right?

If I were to look back on 2011 and come up with a single word to describe it, there’s really only one obvious choice:

 

 

 

anticlimactic.

 

 

 

I mean, really, Katie?  2010 was an all-around shit year, which lead to you losing your shit, quitting your respectable, well-paid job, and moving to Costa Rica for 2 months to make hot sauce.  Oh yeah, and to find yourself.  But really, all you found was the first decent tan of your life and the fact that you have to first know yourself in order to find yourself.

And what do I know about myself?

For starters, I’m happiest when I am traveling and meeting new people.

I have a passion for writing.

I like learning my way around a camera.

So, after a brief bout of the fire-under-the-ass kind of inspiration which led me to vehemently absorb a zillion books and articles on freelance writing and photography, submitting exactly one super professional official travel article pitch, receiving exactly one acceptance  after multiple follow-ups only to learn of an 80% decrease in the original advertised pay, and then working in a bar for a few months, I’ve settled, once again, into a job for which I have exactly zero passion except now my income is significantly reduced and my co-workers aren’t as fun.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  My co-workers and I are getting to know each other, which takes time, and my new job does allow me some of the freedom of creativity I lacked in the former — I do get to write, take pictures, and mingle with the townsfolk, which is a vast improvement from sitting for 8 hours a day in front of a computer monitor.

But this is not, to say the least, where I’d hoped to find myself with just a few days left in this 11th year of the new millennium.  I mean, it seems like just yesterday we were partying it up like it was 1999 because it was 1999, dammit, and we had all this time to become more awesome than we already were when we were only 17 frickin’ years old.

So.

It appears as though I need to take this goal thing a little more seriously this time around.

I’m not going to call them “resolutions,” because that has all kinds of negative, clichéd connotations about not following through or only lasting until the Christmas lights finally come down, which will probably be sometime in February, much to our neighbors’ dismay.

(Our Christmas lights, in all seriousness, are the most hideous display of half-assedness we’ve publicly flaunted in a while, my friends.  The thing is, after Justin finished installing new floors, smoking a turkey, and baking 2 cheesecakes for upcoming holiday festivities, for some reason he didn’t have the energy to commit to professionally stringing outdoor lights. Yet he still insisted on doing it.  And all I have to say is that the drooping, scalloped string of white lights hanging from our front porch — only our front porch — look something akin to a melting frosted gingerbread house.  But I didn’t have the heart to tell him.  At least, not until guests were arriving and I’d already had a glass of spiked cider and it was finally okay to just relax and laugh it out.)

Anyway.

This year I’m going to stick with the term “goals,” instead of resolutions, because it sounds more political and serious and spreadsheety.  There’s a sense of accountability, if you know what I mean.

And I’m going to follow these guidelines as written out by Nicole, from NicoleIsBetter.com.

Except maybe… not so anally.

And maybe… a little less intensely.

And probably… a lot more half-assedly.

Because that’s how I roll.

But I kind of feel ahead of the game because I’ve already done Step 1 and Step 2.  Step 1 is to make an “Eff Yeah” list for 2011.  That’s easy.  I survived depression, I went to Spain, I threw the best baby hot tub party ever, and I didn’t die.  Eff-to-the-Yeah.  Step 2 is to come up with a word or phrase that best represents my hopes and dreams for the coming year.  Again, that’s pretty easy.  If the word for 2011 was anticlimactic, especially when it comes to finding a sense of purpose, then there can only be one word for 2012:

 

 

 

ambition.

 

 

 

So.  We’ll see if I can actually make that happen.  Not that it will matter since the world is supposedly going to end at the end of the year anyway.

But, if I follow the steps, at least I’ll be able to say I tried, right?  And in the end — the real end of the end of the end of the world type end — that’s all that really matters.

Apparently My House is the Island of Misfit Toys. Just Don’t Send Me Any Creepy Jack-in-the-Boxes.

If you celebrate Christmas, you probably fall into one of two categories:

1. Those who honor family tradition, cooking the same meals, drinking the same drinks, playing the same love-worn Harry Connick Jr. Christmas album year after year, and taking comfort in the thought that while everything else changes — people grow old, babies get born, the ovens are stainless, not avocado, and presents arrived pre-wrapped at the front door — these other things, the ones we can control, will stay the same.

2. Those who forego tradition and family gatherings to sip mai tais on a tropical island somewhere and forget that the world even exists.

Me?  I’d say I actually fall somewhere between the two extremes.  When I was younger, my family did the whole gathering thing.  We baked, played with cousins, sang carols, annoyed each other in that hate-you-yet-love-you way families do… the works.

Then it fell apart.

And I started moving.

And my sister started moving.

And we eventually came to learn that while some people really can go home again, it becomes a little impossible when home no longer exists.

When most of your belongings were sold while you were away.

When someone else is living in your room.

Sliding down your stairs.

Playing your sheet music like it’s theirs.

And we realized that traditions can break — will break — if the people you counted on to keep them going are no longer on speaking terms.

Then I met Justin.  The first year he invited me to his family’s Christmas gathering, I felt all crumpled.  Broken.  Out of place.  How come they could hold it together?  How could they be so happy?  Every year 40+ people, related by blood or by choice, all gather in a single house to eat Grandma’s famous lasagna, play a detested (yet loved) family trivia game, watch the children take turns opening gifts one-by-one, exchange white elephant gifts and laugh, once again, when the 20-year-old cousin tries to grab the one with the beer, Mom shakes the shake weight, and Grandpa wins the coveted gift card to Omaha Steaks.

Rinse, repeat.

Sure, there’s gossip.  There’s bickering.  There’s family tension.  But, in all of its stagnant predictability, it’s all kinds of wonderful.

So I started to love it — to look forward to hanging out with the “outlaw” aunts who speak my language, to see how many cousin’s names I could remember, and to absorb through the pores of my skin whatever the stuff is — egg whites, perhaps? — that makes his family stick.

But sometimes we don’t go.  Whether we can’t afford the tickets one year, can’t muster the energy for holiday travel another, or “accidentally” book a trip to Hawaii instead, some years we just don’t go.

And inevitably, we miss them.

I miss them.

Family via osmosis, not marriage.

But, for the years we’re not there, we’ve started our own tradition of sorts, maybe in honor of my own crumpled history.  We invite all of the misfit toys — those who can’t travel or have nowhere to go or just haven’t gone yet — to our house for a little dinner.  Only this year, it turned into a big dinner, where nothing was traditional:  The turkey was smoked, the lasagna was vegetarian, the potatoes were au gratin, and the stuffing was German.  There were meatballs.  And hummus.  And peach something-or-others.  And white chocolate cheesecake.  And mulled cider spiked with Southern Comfort.

And a new kind of family.

Not one we were born into or chose through marriage, but one we made on-the-fly, built purely from us leftovers who somehow managed to come together to make something worthwhile.

So, thanks to our motley crew of misfits on Christmas Eve and my friend Alaina for inviting us to her family dinner on Christmas, it felt, strangely enough, like ours.