This is why still I keep Skippy with me: What teddy bears really do for you.

It's one thing to learn to live without someone. It's another thing entirely to get over someone.

I hate that you won't hold me tight
And that you make me hollow
I hate the way you say you care
I hate that you will not follow

I hate your stupid Wawa snacks
And the way you said my name
I hate South Park and Family Guy
I hate that there's no one to blame

I hate your balanced perspective
I hate how you made me feel
I hate that you taught me how to love
And now I don't know how to heal

I hate the way we said goodbye
And that you let me go
I hate the way you fill my brain
And that time moves so god damned slow.

Who feels like this post breakup? I can't figure out if it means that the breakup was the right move, or that the universe is planning great things, or both. Or...what. Because I feel so peaceful. So zen. So calm and collected and solid. It's the very last way I expected to feel.

Let's play a game where I post pictures that reflect how I feel.

I believe that the universe is conspiring to give us presents. Thing is, the universe has a whack way of handling itself and our lives. For instance, one could think of a gift from the universe as being something like your gym teacher handing out clothespins to all of your fellow students rather than telling you directly that your feet stink. Once the clothespins are out, and everyone has one but you, you have to isolate the issue. On the one hand, it's an insulting gesture. On the other, if you take it for what it is, without making it personal, it's a gesture that nips a problem at the bud. Okay, so it's probably not the best parallel in the world, but hopefully you get what I'm saying.

Lately, it's been feeling like I can't quite catch a break, like the universe has started throwing curve balls and yelling, "GO! GO! GO! Catch as many as you can! GO!" all the while aiming for my head and my heart. It's a little difficult. But also a little invigorating and a lot strengthening. For a while, I've felt like I've simply been traveling through a series of rooms, each room containing one door. My choice consists of either staying inside the room, or going through that door. Suddenly, though, I'm standing in a ballroom whose walls consist of nothing but doors. My choice is now to stay in the ballroom or pick one of a 101 doors to enter, but I can't preview any of the doors ahead of time. My choice must be based on clues I retain from the rooms that I've already been through - my life so far.

Here's the thing. Being a naturally cautious person in life, I try to play it safe. All the time. This entails not making decisions until I think that I have mapped out all possible futures and am okay with any of them happening. It's silly of course, and purely psychological, because as cracked.com explains, science has come up with this little thing called the Copenhagen Interpretation which basically means that anything is possible at any moment. Meaning, I can't pretend to anticipate all of the outcomes of my decision. Sucks to be me.

In recent days, through a series of different occurrences, I've come to realize that I hedge my bets. I am a bonafide bet-hedger. Which is altogether not a good thing to be and sits dangerously close on the shelf to the intent to "have one's cake and eat it too," and we all know that that simply doesn't work out too well. When you try to have your cake and eat it too, usually your ass catches on fire and everyone hates you. (That's barely an exaggeration). Now I find myself in a situation akin to straddling a spreading fault line that's spreading at an alarmingly rapid rate. I have a very small window of time in which to jump to one side or the other before I fall down into the crack and both options more or less disappear. Thanks, universe. You're a pal.

I'm scared of large changes. Adjustments have always been difficult for me. Any of you who have read my other posts will know this. Transitions are the bane of my existence. I'm getting better (thanks again, universe, for making me move 3 times in a year), but am not all there yet. So even when I know what I need to do. What will, on a fundamental, gut level, be the best option for me. I balk. I want to have a preview of all of those doors in the ballroom, just to confirm that what I think is behind the one that I want, really is behind it.

Here's to improving, and improving soon!

It's hard to fully comprehend just how tricky and frightening the world gets once you leave the academic chute until you suddenly find yourself swimming in a sea of adult concerns and responsibilities. And you haven't got a flotation device. Or a study guide. Or a list of expectations, a check-list to help to make sense of the many things required to successfully navigate the ofttimes muddied waters of life.

I didn't actually expect life to  beat me up the way that it has. And saying that is rather like saying that I experienced starvation after eating 3 meals in a day because I'd been used to eating 6. In other words, 97% of the people in the world are getting beat up much worse than am I. But my point stands. I found myself confronted by challenges that were outside the realm of familiarity. Sometimes it felt like I was scrabbling around on a slippery wall, grasping for handholds.

It's been as much of a refreshing and invigorating experience as it has been an exhausting and troublesome one. The scariest thing is coming to the realization that to live life, you do have to be truly brave. To get up every day, thinking about not only your work, whatever it may be, but also about your interests, your goals, pursuits, and about your responsibilities. What doctor's office to call to complain about tests being run unannounced. Which bank teller to ask what to do after an ATM failed to provide the $40 taken out. When to take the time to write a scathing indictment of your apartment's poor customer service skills and blatant attempts at screwing its residents. How does one not lose oneself in the avalanche of "must dos?"

Prioritization is hard. It's become very easy to see why youth are idealists and the older are downtrodden and cynical. How are you supposed to pursue those ideals when you're also worried about sweeping up dog hair every single day when you get home from the office? Where is the energy supposed to come from? I have it easy, comparatively. The latest that I have stayed at work is 6:00pm. That said, I have approximately 6.5 waking hours every day not spent in the office to myself.

I'm trying to study for the LSAT. When I'm being rigorous in my studying I try to study for 2 hours a day. I'm left with 4.5 hours.  In the morning, I spend half an hour getting washed-up, dressed, and doing my crunches and push-ups. I spend another half an hour making coffee and eating my breakfast. Then I go to work. I'm left with 3.5 hours.

3.5 hours. A day. No wonder the adjustment is hard. It takes practice and stamina to learn how to use the little bits of free time every day wisely. Efficiency is a hard mistress to master.  And I need to learn how to do it.

More to come.

Life is really terrifying. Well, time is. Life itself isn't actually all that scary, and if time didn't exist, it might be a lot like wading in the kiddie pool, lukewarm water lapping below your knees. But time. Time is the monster in the closet. Time makes for urgency, and urgency, if disregarded or handled poorly, makes for regrets. And life is often full of regrets; and regrets' close companion, what-if.

Holding patterns feel safe and are easy to slip into. They are also treacherous. The perfect intro to forever. The wrong kind of forever, though. The kind of forever that's more purgatory than heaven, more assembly line than innovation, and more suburbia than outback adventure. It's the kind of forever that I don't want. I haven't quite figured out how to get the forever that I DO want.

I spend a lot of time casting about like an idiot. Sometimes I feel a little like I'm doing the equivalent of walking into walls, even though I know they're there, just to sort of...see what happens. And a bruised nose isn't enough of a deterrent to keep me from continuing to do it. Or maybe I'm like a bat with a defective sonar. Either way, I get frustrated a lot these days, wanting to go in so many different directions that I wind-up stuck in stasis, a frozen lump. I should probably make a list of the various directions in which I wish to go. But when I try, I get overwhelmed and thus, stuck again.

I have used-up a lot of life being stuck. I still had training wheels on my bike long after everyone else was whizzing by on their two-wheelers. I made myself feel better by pretending that my bike was a horse (remember? I wrote this in my last post). Metaphorically speaking...I'm still having to go through the different stages of my life with training wheels. That's frustrating as well.

I don't know what I want.

That is the crux of the issue. To evolve, extend, and move forward, one has to know what one wants. I envy people who are already there. Who already have the vision, the drive, the lifeblood of a wish, to propel themselves through their lives. I get worried that I was born without proper passion, with a lack of motivation, and a predisposition for laziness. Except I know that that's not true, because when I get fired-up about something, I will tear apart the world to get the end that I want. So it's in there.

Time to figure out what I want, and to lose the wheels.

1) I am bad at multi-tasking.
2) I am easily distracted.
3) I am very good at coming up with ideas and very bad at implementing them.
4) If I am going to get where I want to be, I am going to have to overcome the previous 3 points.

I've decided that it's time for me to stop half-assing my way through LSAT studying. I'm not going to get anywhere at that rate. I very much like to think of myself as someone who does everything perfectly on the first go-round. And when that doesn't seem to be happening, I'm prone to give up and leave.Unfortunately in life, one is rarely able to do everything one tries perfectly on the first attempt. This is a bitter pill for me to swallow.

As a young person, this aspect of my personality caused trouble.
1) I was slow to learn to read because the black symbols on the page didn't make sense to me and I already knew the wonders of reading from having been read to and the effort didn't seem worth it. It shouldn't have to be that hard to get to something I loved that much.
2) I avoided letting my mom teach me how to cook because I KNEW I wouldn't be able to do it right the first few times and I couldn't stand the criticism. This has left me only able to make biscuits with any degree of certainty.
3) I had training wheels on my bike for about a year longer than anyone else my age. I made myself feel better about this by pretending that, with its extra appendages, my bike was actually a horse.

You get the idea, I'm sure. But this means that I'm going to turn on the parts of my personality that SHOULD counteract the parts that are being lazy and frightened of initial failure or lack of success. The stubborn, focused parts that hang onto their goal the way my dog hangs onto her rawhide chew toys. They're very good at coming out when I'm mad, but less good at coming out when I'm settled. Time to practice!

When you do what you love, the seemingly impossible becomes simply challenging, the laborious becomes purposeful resistance, the difficult loses its edge and is trampled by your progress. -Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)

On my way to work last Tuesday, I decided that I walk strangely. Of course, I can't tell for SURE because I can't see myself unless I watch my reflection in building windows. I try to refrain from doing this because I'm concerned that the people around me will think that I am checking myself out rather than worriedly attempting to diagnosis my mobility issues. But the flip side of that is that they already think I'm strange because I walk oddly.

My legs just feel like they don't want to cooperate in a smooth fashion when I move around. They seem to prefer a jerkier, slightly lopsided motion, potentially exacerbated by the fact that I walk about 3x faster than the normal person, as it is. This is something that I cannot help. When I try to slow down, I am faced with a sensation that feels like what trying to stop a very heavy wagon from rolling down a very steep hill feels like. I have to concentrate really really hard on moving my feet more slowly. Usually, I just give up and speed back up again. Because, actually, my walk gets even more awkward when I attempt to reign it in.

The other day when I was walking home from work, an older businessman with a briefcase in hand actually commented on it.

"Must be those Chuck Taylors making you walk so fast," is what I heard as I zoomed by him.

"Haha, could be! Or just the cold!" And, with a good-natured smile, I kept going. But seriously. I must look...irregular. I blame my New Yorker mother. As a small child, I had to move my little stubby legs at double-time to keep up with her purposeful stride, and, as I became accustomed to moving at that speed, proportionally, I continued to move that quickly when I got older. That is my thinking.

Things are far worse now that there is an irritating amount of snow on the ground. Now I wobble on top of moving strangely. On Friday I almost careened into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Such is my life.

Today, as I sat in John's car at the Bryn Mawr train station, I was struck by the thought that I really ought to make a concentrated effort at self-improvement. When I said this thought aloud, I was met with a look that made me think he was thinking that I was a lunatic. Which was nice, for all intents and purposes (assuming he wasn't thinking that I was so hopeless that working towards self-betterment was a fruitless endeavor), but which didn't change my mind.

I too easily give myself a lot of leeway when it comes to figuring my shit out. "I'm young." "There's time." "I've got a lot to get through first." Yeah, sure. Excuses. It's not like I am suddenly going to hit a place in my life where things are suddenly smooth sailing and I can kick back and hone whatever skills I think that I might have. If I keep giving into those excuses, letting them ultimately direct me, I'm going to wind-up as a very boring and very unaccomplished person. Just like most everything in life, self-direction and self-knowledge take effort and work. But I'm fairly certain that it is well worth it. In the end, I'll know exactly where I stand. I don't think I'd ever quite realized how exhausting leading an interesting and full life really is. As far as I can tell, society does a bang-up job of wearing us all down to little nubs of the people we are by telling us what we "should" be doing. To live to the fullest takes a kind of courage and a kind of independence that I hadn't really considered. Life is too short to stay safe and to put off exploration and development. I have to work to get where and what I want. And now is the time to nail down exactly what it is that I DO want. Period.

"420. Don’t be sorry for speaking your mind. It’s like you’re being sorry for being real." (Thanks, Leo)

 

This is a good thing to remember. We are so often frightened of getting a load off of our chests that we forget that evasion, avoidance, and misrepresentation are akin to saying, "My thoughts aren't good enough" or "My thoughts are wrong." It's too easy to fall into that trap. It makes you wonder how many thoughts worth hearing are lost in the shuffle because the thinker is too afraid or too ashamed to give them voice.

 

I'm in a funny mood today. Sad. A little. Pensive. A lot. I sat in front of my computer trying to come up with a post that would center around something light-hearted or funny, and I came up blank, so I decided to go with reality as opposed to vignette. I blame this state partially on the blog that I have been reading (click the link above) because never in my life has my little brain been flooded by so many beautifully simple pieces of wisdom in such a short period of time. I'm realizing that someone, somewhere, at one time or another, has created a quotation that encapsulates literally every moment of every life. The magnitude is frightening and awe-inspiring.

 

It also has me convinced that I have to read more.

 

The other part of the blame rests on this song:

Between the two of them, blog and music, I have been reduced to small, emotionally fraught, body. And let me just tell you, it blows popsicle sticks to feel like this and to have to pull together some semblance of productivity while I am work. Tongue depressors might be more on point than popsicle sticks, actually. Like the big kinds in the jar in the doctor's office that always used to be really scary because, as a kid, you never knew if the doctor was going to come at you with one of them and attempt to jam it down your throat.

 

I picked this particular quotation because I'm starting to get the feeling that it's going to be representative of the theme of my 2011. I have this sense that it'll be a year for journeying and growing. I also picked it because speaking my mind was something I was amazingly good at as a small child and something that I was equally as bad at once I got older. And let me tell you, being challenged in that particular area is anxiety-inducing. And also character-splitting. Two bad things that could get pathological if I keep it up until I'm old and grey. Which is not how I want to end up when I'm wizened and grumpy, zipping around in my little motorized chair. I'll probably already be running over people in grocery stores, I don't need to be fighting panic attacks and dual personalities while I'm doing it.

So here's to speaking my mind, being honest and upfront, confident and sincere, and here's to strengthening relationships through doing it.

 

 EDIT: Look! Images from my blog are showing-up on Google Image Search!

Don't tell anybody, but I usually spend the first half hour of my workday screwing around on the internet and being unproductive; this is mostly because I am always the first person into the office every day and because mornings tend to be slow (probably because everyone else is screwing around on the internet, too). This morning, I got an email from my mom that included this: Crow and Cat

Unbelievable, right? It sort of throws a wrench into the nature vs. nurture debate, or at least adds another element to it. Anyway, I just wanted to share.

***

Have you ever been someone who was scared of everything that was, or could be construed, as even a little off-kilter? Like wearing plaid socks that might end-up being visible when you sat down? Or like having parents who implemented a 10pm curfew when you were a a senior in high school so you pretended that you just didn't actually WANT to be out late anyway? That's how I was. I also embarrassed really easily, which made me less than open about just about everything.

Like sex and anything related to it.

I was still scared of penises when I was a senior in high school, and I was utterly convinced that if anyone was going to be the victim of immaculate conception ever again (no offense intended), it was going to be me. I was equally convinced that the first time I had sex I would get pregnant and they'd put me on one of those trashy MTV shows about good kids who managed to somehow fuck up big time. Sometimes, when I was feeling especially masochistic, I would play out a scene where all my family's friends were gathered around, shaking their heads, and saying, "She had such a bright future...I just didn't see this coming. She was always such a smart girl..." I also figured I'd have to move far away and not talk to anybody I knew ever again. Looking back at my youth now, and seeing how many complexes I gave myself, I'm shocked that I'm even half as well-adjusted as I turned out (which is not extremely, but I do all right).

Most of them came from being frightened of everything but my shadow, and maybe even that at night if I were half asleep and trying to stumble into my bathroom. I made it worse by never actually owning up to being frightened of everything, and I'm fairly certain that that misstep is what gave me complexes. I used to work very hard to put up a facade of suave, untouchable, coolness. I tricked most people with it, because I was a control freak and kept myself in an iron-tight grip, but I was stressed-out all the time. It was a tough existence! I constantly had to anticipate and predict any bumps on the road that would force me into patch-up mode so that people didn't actually figure out that I was a huge, lame, weenie. This made me every girl's best friend in high school and an enormous bitch to just about every guy. Which somehow managed to work out for me, anyway...which still puzzles me enormously.

That is why, with the dawn of 2011, my biggest goal might just be to be open and up-front about myself with myself and with other people. (Can I get a "HELL yes")? So far, I'm doing pretty well.

Now that it's the new year, I'm going to kick into high gear with respect to studying for the LSAT. And I really mean it. The tumultuous romance between me and my study aids wore off about 3 weeks after I received them in the mail, but now it's time to settle into a comfortable relationship with them and learn them inside and out. I plan to do this in several ways, including but not limited to:

1) Make a schedule. Withhold things that I want from myself until I stick to said schedule. This means no tv show binging on my computer, no Starbucks, no friends, etc.

2) Reward myself when I succeed. Could occur simultaneously as studying (see number 3).

3) Bring the romance back. Study in public (like at Starbucks). Look studious. Attractive. Smart. This can be done by carrying more books than I actually need, plugging into my iPod so that people think I'm divorced from my surroundings (when I'm still probably people-watching), carefully choosing an outfit that looks effortless, yet good, and arranging my materials so that at least one book's title regarding the LSAT is visible to passersby.

4) Get my roommates to guilt-trip me if I don't seem to be studying enough. Rubbing in the fact that I might never be able to effectively handle idiot corporate bureaucracy like Park Towne's if I don't go to law school might be a good starting point.

I think there are probably more. Besides the LSAT, there are other things that I want to do in 2011 (I recently came to the abrupt realization that this is the first year of my life in which school is not a player at all. It scared me).

1) Come up with a backup plan if law school doesn't pan out; maybe just a plan for 2012 pre law school if it DOES pan out: move to Chile and do something that doesn't count as this, move out west and work on a goat farm, work on a cruise ship, team up with Mike and drive around a country - doesn't have to be the U.S. - in an RV.

2) Learn how to cook.

3) Stop only grocery shopping once a month because doing so means that I have at least a week where my diet consists solely of rice and beans and pasta with garlic and olive oil. And maybe some leftover frozen veggies if I'm lucky. Hello, scurvy.

4) Be more honest with myself. Own the person I am.

5) Write more frequently, both blog and otherwise.

6) Finish Shogun. Finish at least 10 other books over the course of the year. This means less brain-dissolving online tv watching. And normal tv watching. Also read the NY Times more regularly.

7) Make good use of my art museum membership. Go on more tours.

8) Be better at staying in-touch with my parents. We have a 5 minutes a day rule for a reason!

9) Don't forget how to think critically sans the help of school.

10) Live more. Make memories!