"So for those of you falling in love keep it kind
Keep it good
Keep it right
Throw yourself in the midst of danger but keep one eye open at night"

I've learned a lot about the way people interact with one other over the last couple of years. It's funny. We're all desperately reaching out to each other to share and connect, so as not to feel so very alone in this life, but we do so with much reserve and guarded hearts. I admire those that love freely and adapt to the consequences of that freedom later. In general, people are so untrusting of their fellow man that it can be quite disheartening.

One of the things that I love so dearly about Denton is that I see less of this reserve than I did growing up in College Station. I started working at Big Mike's 24 Hour Coffee Shop across from the UNT campus a couple of weeks ago. The honesty and openness I've encountered in this environment offers me a great deal of hope. People in a coffee shop are so willing to offer up their hearts to you in the hope that you will open up back to them. Why does coffee do that?

I've been frustrated into a brick wall lately over money. When you're really forced to think about the system we all live in, it's just sad. Get an education, structured and chosed for you by someone who thinks they know better for you. Take that education to get a job (that you may or may not like) and go to that job every day to make money to buy yourself food and useless crap. Take yourself away from your home for 8 to 10 hours a day to be with people you could probably care less about or who become your family away from home. The system makes your choices for you, however aware of it you may be.

I watched this bright yellow butterfly in my backyard the other day. The sun was shining but it was a little chilly due to the wind. So this butterfly is pollenating a pineapple sage plant we have that's shot out stems with little red flowers on it. It flutters from one flower to another and to another. It attempts a fourth flower when the wind catches it by the wings and pulls it away. This creature tried with all of its tiny might to get back to the flower, but it just wasn't strong enough. I watched as the wind pulled the little guy across my backyard to my neighbor's yard and then across to his neighbor's yard and then disappeared. I couldn't help but wonder at that point how much of our lives are left up to complete chance. That little butterfly wanted to stay where it was, but uncontrollable forces pulled it away to a path it had not chosen.

We've all got plans for ourselves as we grow up, but more often than not those plans don't pan out the way we'd originally thought. We are not defined by the life we choose to lead but the way we choose to follow the path of our lives. I find myself surrounded by choices every day and it is when I disengage from those choices that life slowly loses its meaning.

When I was much younger, I naively posed the question to my friends: "What is the meaning of life?" My dear friend Kiki jokingly replied, "The meaning of life is to give life meaning." I haven't forgotten this since she said it. And this fact really struck me over the last weekend. We make choices that bring more purpose to our lives with each passing day. It's hard to make what we hope will be the "right" choices. But there are no "right" choices, just consequences to deal with at the end of each choice, whether good or bad.

I don't know. I truly analyze things too much.

Well...hello.

I quit my job. I'm just not cut out to be an administrative assistant...or to work behind a desk. So, I'm in "school" to do the one thing I said I wasn't going to do: I'm getting my teaching certificate. Maybe some day I'll get my masters and go on to work at a college level, but I thin I'm really going to like high school English.

My last job was miserable for countless reasons that I've talked about way too much over the last nine months of my life. I've been out of college for over a year and what a shitty year it was. There's no one at the end of college to tell you that the last four years you spent working your ass off, feeling great about your accomplishments, were about to feel like the biggest waste of your life. No one cares that you studied something you really loved because...well, they need experience and you forgot to do that internship between your day job and school.

Everything happens for a reason, though. I ran from the idea of teaching only to be forced right back to it for many practical and emotional reasons.

For now, I'm enjoying some time off and a clear mind. I will be working at a local 24 hour coffee shop when it opens up in the next week or so. Thursday I have orientation for substitute teaching in Denton ISD.

So really I'm just chugging along. I have no idea what the future truly holds and I'm pretty apathetic about it right now. I've got a lot of debt. Our roommates are getting married and moving to Seattle next summer. The garden is growing nicely but the top soil bag experiment hasn't been working out so well.

Speaking of which, does anyone have any idea what causes the leaves of a squash plant to turn white and papery? The only squash plant disease I can find that's even close is a mold, but this is definitely not mold.

I find quite a bit of solace in our yard. We work in it quite a bit. There are plants and plant projects all over. Growing my own food so that I'm not buying genetically altered food is pretty nice, I'm not going to lie. We'll see how well this season's garden flourishes.

I'm pretty all over the place here. I just haven't written in so long that I thought I should, seeing as I have all this down time. I'll come back when I have something to talk about....

"So what's new with you?"
"Well, not much really. I've just been working a lot lately."

"Lately" like things are going to change soon. This is a common exchange between myself and people I haven't talked to in a while. But the truth is, there's a lot more to my life than just work.

We're growing a vegetable garden at my house. Squash in about 4 or 5 different forms including giant pumpkin. Carrots, radishes, mustard greens, bib lettuce, okra, bell peppers, cayenne peppers, jalapeno peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, tomatillos, potatoes, onions, garlic, 3 kinds of beans, snow peas, green peas, lemon cucumber, regular cucumber, and mammoth sunflowers with edible seeds. We have about 40 potted plants ranging from a couple varieties of cactus and succulents to a large fern, a huge mother of millions, annual flowers and perennial bushes, and herbs.

You know that song by Simon and Garfunkel, "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme"? We're growing all of those, plus cilantro, catnip, tarragon, chamomile, dill and basil.

Gardening is really therapeutic. Digging in the dirt is easy and growing things is awe-inducing. All of our vegetables and herbs have been grown from seed in our spare room. It's a south-facing room with a sliding glass door. So everything has been growing in there.


Most of the time I like to just sit and stare at them, gauging how much they've grown in a day.

I have a new job. I was actually at my last day at Mascolo when I wrote the last entry, but it just didn't seem to fit in that post.

I am an Administrative Assistant (big change, right?) at a law firm in Dallas. The firm handles patent law--need a patent on an invention? Have a slogan you want to trademark? Need to copyright a picture? We take care of that. And it makes a crap ton of money.

I love this new job. Love. My boss is excellent. He's teaching me quite a bit about the whole process. After my first full week he said he had a good feeling about me. Asked if I had considered going to law school--he thinks I would do well.

There is a lot of work to do every day, but it makes the time fly and I'm always learning something new. My manager says you never learn everything in this line of work. You learn to figure it out.

We'll see how things go for a little while. If I really like the work the way I do now, then it will be time to think about the next step for advancing my career.

Well, I lied a little. I've decided not to take the antidepressants after all.

I know I've been missing for a while. It's hard to explain. Actually, it's pretty easy to explain but I'd have to go into all of the little details and I guess you're not really supposed to do that on the internet, are you? It's easy to offend people when everyone can read it. But I'll do my best to inform without exploit.

Suffice to say, I'm in therapy again. There are a lot of issues from my past that I've never really dealt with properly because I've always thought, "So many other people have it so much worse." But the fact is, however big or small in comparison with the outside world, these are still my problems and I still have to deal with them within myself accordingly. And on top of all of that, 2008 was probably the craziest year of my life.

The Breakdown:
-In January, I married a stranger. Daniel and I married after knowing each other for 25 days. It has been the biggest roller coaster of my life, but worth every minute. He's amazing.
-Again, in January, I lost my job at Goff Homes because they closed. A week later I started the most miserable job I have ever had with a medical billing company. It was flexible with my school schedule and that's about all that was good. I had to pull my own teeth to get to work everyday, and I didn't always make it.
-In March, I had another bad pap smear. Turned out there was no dysplasia, but that didn't mean I wasn't scared for a week waiting on test results.
-In April, Daniel and I moved in with our friend Alex, and a 17 year old named Brittany. I love, love, LOVE this house that we live in, but getting used to new people took some time.
-Summer of 2008. I don't remember everything, but there were a LOT of good times and a LOT of bad times. July was our wedding reception with my family and August was our ceremony for the family in Port Aransas. I really didn't think that was all going to happen, but it did. We got a lot of free stuff, though. And a lot of love and well wishes. Though I'm sure there are bets running somewhere over how long Daniel and I will make it.
-In August, I graduated from college and began panicking about finding a new job.
-In September, I started working as an Administrative Assistant in the video post-house/production department at the Toni&Guy headquarters. I learned that "corporate" and "family-owned"are not a good combination for a work environment. And I lost about 8 inches off my hair.
-In October, Brittany moved out after much unnecessary drama.
-In December, Alex's fiancee, Jess, moved in with us. This is actually a really wonderful thing that I couldn't be more happy about. But the anticipation of her arrival from Wisconsin just about killed me.

All of this was stressful. Some of it was really great stuff--like getting married and graduating from college. The problem is that I never learned how to properly deal with stress, so it all built up over time and I created this pattern of anxiousness in my head. If you've met me, you know I'm a control freak. I don't mean to be, but if I can control a situation then it will come out the way I want it to and I won't have to deal with the stress of it going another way. Unfortunately, life doesn't quite work that way, and when it doesn't I get frustrated. This, of course, leads to anger that is then directed onto whoever is closest. I apologize to those who have felt the brunt of this--I know it's happened a lot over the years. But as the frustration built up, so did the tears. And before I knew it, I was crying every morning in the shower because I just didn't want to go to work. I've had to hold back tears in department meetings and rush to the bathroom so as not to cry at my desk. And then there were anxiety attacks that prevented me from going to work, twice within about three weeks of each other. That's when I knew it was time to go back into therapy.

Now I'm gaining the tools to deal with my pain. I'm slowly learning that I can't control everything and that life happens the way it happens. The things in my past that I've been trying to fix for so long just aren't my fault and I really have to work towards accepting that. When there's nothing you can do, you grieve your losses and let it go. I'm still working through the grief part. I have a lot to let go of, still. But it's getting easier and I'm feeling so much happier than I have in a long time.

I've been avoiding the blog because of all this. It's been easier to hole up in my own head than to express it outwardly. Expressing the pain meant dealing with it and I just didn't want to for way too long. I'm going to try to change that this year. I'd like to keep the blog updated because I really need to be writing and it's an easy way to do that.

Here's to 2009. I can only imagine what's to come.

To You:

I give up. If I'm never going to feel good enough for you, I will never be able to feel good enough for myself. So let's go ahead and keep up the silence--forever. I'd like to get on with my life. I'm hoping the anti-depressants will help.

From, Me.

So, I have graduated. I am now 22 years old. I am a married woman and a college graduate. What does it all mean? Well, not a whole lot, really. Just that I’m growing up. I guess I’m sort of what you’d call an adult now. Whoa.

Every day becomes another reason getting married was the best idea I’ve ever had or been apart of. It’s incredible to see how it truly is possible to learn to love someone more and more with each passing moment. Destiny got something right when it put us together.

Daniel is often the first thing that comes to my mind when I sit down to write. Well, Daniel is often the first thing to come to my mind whenever my mind has a free moment. I have a lot of faith in us and I am certain that we will do amazing things in our life together. The potential is just too great.

I have to remind myself of that, sometimes—that I have potential. The job hunt isn’t easy and is most certainly completely frustrating. But, things may be looking up soon. I had an interview yesterday that was very promising. We’ll see.

When you graduate college—scratch that. When I graduated from college, I think I expected more from it than what really happened. It’s not like there is a defining moment where it really hit me that I accomplished something. After all, I didn’t graduate with honors even though I was so close. I do not have a job 21 days out. It was sort of like another birthday. Come and gone without a whole lot of fuss in between. Your family tells you they’re proud of you, but it’s sort of anticlimactic because they expected it from you the whole time. And they all want to know what you’re going to do now. Some of them tell you, well if you had only worked a little harder and listened to them more you would have made honors—even though they themselves didn’t make it through their second year of college. It makes me feel a little worthless.

In life you always expect certain things to change as you go along. Incorrect courses of action will eventually correct themselves, you hope. You fight against them for a long time. You try to instigate change. You try to ignore the things that hurt you but really it just makes you bitter which in turn causes a lot of anger. Eventually that anger stacks up too high and it explodes or implodes and it affects you and others around you in ways you don’t realize until the damage is already done. But you go back every time in hopes that maybe this time it will be different. But it never is. It. Never. Is. Every time you convince yourself: it really does seem different this time; its change in a way that you’ve never seen change before. But under the surface you can see their resentment because even though they’re trying to change for you, they still don’t like the person you are. They still feel like they should have more of an influence over the person you are—like there should be more of them in you. And because they will never truly accept everything about you the way you are, you will never truly have a relationship. You’ll just be forced to fake it until one of you can’t take it anymore.