What? No Giddiness?

Something inside me doesn’t want me to be happy. If When I find it I’m going to squish it with an evil smile on my face. Maniacal laughter shall follow. I’ve earned happiness, today especially. Today I bought myself a car - a really nice car, with an affordable payment, a Bose sound system, and a showroom-ready engine…crappy credit and all. I just told the recession to shove it. Strange thing is I haven’t celebrated yet. I’m not currently giddy-happy, which I reasonably should be. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet; tomorrow when I bring it home it will (insurance paperwork is a pain). The part of me that really really hates payments had to bite her tongue. As Honey pointed out in his classic black & white fashion, I’m gonna be paying someone my whole life. Not a single thing is free anymore, maybe it never was. As he also pointed out, I don’t take any joy in my success. Somehow I manage to find something to worry about or pick at and there’s no giddiness. “Thou shalt do the dance” hasn’t happened yet. And damnit, when you make a third of what you once made and just bought a luxury SUV there shalt be dancing!


And it was all me. The angels get their credit too, especially the short one I know personally.

So the morals of today’s story: “in the pits” is partially a state of mind. Widen your view. Sometimes you need to lose to gain. You are exactly where you are meant to be.

Relapse of sorts

I read my latest blog post to my husband the other day and he asked why I've been getting easily overwhelmed lately. And it's a fair question: why am I worried about...anything really? Has worrying ever helped anyone? Does it help you find the answers or make the questions harder? In my case, it turns me into a twitch.

So no more twitching. I know these things, like worrying doesn't help and often makes it worse, that you must show affection or your partner becomes furniture, that your parents don't decide who you are...but sometimes those things sneak up on me and I don't realize I'm doing it. It's frustrating, especially when you know.

I was doing so well.

The morning after Where The Wild THings Are

Life seems strange to me right now. I’m trying to determine what I want, what I really want out of all this, and so far I’m getting conflicting answers. The two sides are starting to argue loudly and making decisions…leaves me second guessing myself. It’s very hard to plan for the long-term while the short-term won’t is misbehaving.

That doesn’t make much sense, even to me.

Let’s try again. I have several dreams, a couple pretty big ones, the paths to which seem to cross, therefore making decisions to move towards one leads me away from another. So the crux is: what do I really want. Or in the have-cake-and-eat-it-too sense, what do I want first.

I want to travel; roam the Earth like a nomad until I’ve seen enough, which may be never cuz I’m an all-or-nothing kind of girl, be free to try anything that even tickles my interest, and effectively escape the mundane 9-to-5 career-based life that works for everyone else. We can start in the States with a travel trailer and graduate to backpacking everywhere else, or vise versa.

AND I want to have a little mini-house out in the mountains somewhere where I can live off the grid, grow all my own vegetables, and embrace the slower, much simpler, rather hippie lifestyle. I want goats cuz I like the milk and I think they’re cute, in a destructive sort of way, and a dog without a lease or a yard. I want solar panels and a wind turbine, a compost barrel and to pay nearly nothing in taxes because I’m self-sufficient.

Hence the inner struggle on what to work towards. Then of course there’s the issue of logistics. Even when the dream is to live simply it requires funds of some kind, funds requires a job of some sort, and I’m generally against those, for one because I hate paying taxes, and for two because you have to devote 40 hours a week or more to earn scraps. It’s defeatist from my point of view.

So how do I have the dream of being a nomad while being tied to a job in order to pay for it? Short answer is I need to work for myself, doing something that’s not truly based anywhere, or more directly, is based wherever I am. I haven’t got one of those in my back pocket, not yet anyway.

So all that is battling on the inside. On the outside I’m dealing with life in front of my face, which includes “biding my time” at a job I’ve been at for nearly a year, tire issues, trying to sort my life out of the many boxes Honey haphazardly packed it into, and needing to buy my own car soon, which is a whole other tangle – do I get an economy car for in town or a truck to go camping/fishing with even though I no longer have the boat, how am I going to afford it, how much do I have to put down, is there any way I can avoid going through a dealer and still get something decent that won’t break in 3 days????

There’s not much room left upstairs for anything else, so please don’t ask me anything hard. You’ll likely get a dumb stare.

We watched the movie Where the Wild Things Are last night, which struck several sensitive nerves. I cried for far more of it than was probably necessary or normal and had very confusing dreams I don’t remember on top of that. None of which is helping me get oriented or going this morning. A dream interpreter would need therapy after a week with me. Anyway, I’m gonna get some food and try to roll with the many waves instead of fighting them all.

Plan? There is no plan.

I’m surrounded by boxes. I had to move boxes to get into this chair, but I have no idea what’s in them. What is all this stuff? I know I don’t have this much stuff!


The boxes say otherwise.

In the midst of all this chaos it has occurred to me that for a very long time nothing in my life has gone according to plan. I’ve gone from having the plan that covered my whole life, or what I thought was my whole life, seen in terms of a career and not much else, to shorter and shorter mini plans as events continued to do other than I expected. Life deviates and after awhile I just got tired of rewriting the script. To those who say “life is what you make of it”…I obviously have no idea what I’m doing. On the up side, I’m getting more comfortable with the randomness of things and just treating them all as a sort of ongoing surprise. It keeps it fresh, to say the least.

Being a sales clerk at a lamp store wasn’t real high on my list of life goals. Neither was falling madly in love (at the time when I bothered to have a list of life goals). There are blessings in both. Finding love brought my face up off the books and made me realize I’m my own person before anything else, especially a mindless drone of the career-only mindset or someone's puppet. It completely changed my perspective and my path; so did quitting a good/bad job just in time for the economic downturn.

Its funny how all your decisions lead down the path you’ve walked and yet you feel as though you’ve had no say in your life. I don’t feel that way – I’m not in control of much, if anything, and I’m sure all the decisions I’ve made, big and small, have lead to this moment…just don’t ask me which ones.

Two days from now we start again. In a sense it’s a new life. Enough things will be different I couldn’t reasonably call it a continuation of our old life, but its still us living the best we can, so – your call. I hope things will change for the better, that we make progress towards our dreams, which is all I really go for these days anyway. Know what you want (that’s key) and work towards that dream, hold on to it like the shining sun on the horizon, something you can see even in the darkest dark or deepest pit, and always maneuver towards it. The journey will be amazing and one day you’ll reach it.

Or you won’t. Sometimes you can’t have what you want. But better to spend your life pursuing a dream than not. :)

Quickie Update

Ok, here’s a quickie update, cuz the madness has reached a new level of fever pitch and the next post may be a while…

We went to an MMA event at the Orleans Hotel; all amateur bouts. Honey got to be ring side; I sat in the back row – it would have been nose bleed seats if there was any elevation. There was a lot of blood – see below – and during the one heavyweight bout, the guy who'd been easily winning for the first two rounds got his arm broken in the third. Good times.


We attended the St Baldrick’s charity event hosted by Circus Couture at the Palms Hotel. There was a bidding war over a carved block of Monterey jack cheese and a Beatles painting. The majority of the donated art was purchased. There were fashion shows and circus acts. A girl shaved her head on stage (St Baldricks has shaving events where they donate money for every person who shaves their head) and there was a dwarf: a very small he-man in a speedo and a shoulder harness/feather collar thing. Awesome.


The after party at Ghostbar was…intresting. The dj was awesome and then the music would die for the live band – it wasn’t a good transition. I found a place to sit on one of the speakers closest to the wall. Lemme just say…anyone who’s seen the movie Private Parts…the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia…yeah. I didn’t get all spread and leaned forward or anything, but I couldn’t stop giggling. Enough said.

The next ten days are going to be a free for all. Wish me luck.