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The day after Christmas I leaped up from my aero-mattress at Sarah's house to go swim with her team @ 5:30am. I swam 4 miles (my longest swim to date.) Happily exerted, showered & fed by 8am, I shopped at Stanford mall with Lisa next, where wealth & style abounded. Beautifully fashionable families strolled by baby Gap & Crate & Barrel. It felt so different from my life (where Zoe wrote her name on her plain felt stocking with a black Sharpie marker.)
As I drove out of the mall, a guy riding an older mountain bike with a happy grin nodded at me. His helmet was warped blue plastic with a white Styrofoam base protruding around his head, he wore a fitted long sleeve olive color wool v-neck sweater, OP running shorts & knee high socks. What a sight for sore eyes, he was just what I needed - I smiled back REAL BIG!
I started mountain biking again & I've been having bike envy of all my friend's newer bikes. My 16 year old Trek 850 
doesn't have adjustable air shocks or lightweight titanium sprockets. I started to think I needed a more modern bike to keep up with current styles & my own derived social pressures. But then I looked at this random guy, having a great afternoon with an old bike & old gear.
Biker guy made me smile, reminded me of all the great memories that went along with my old bike & made me want to keep using it. I'm so used to a 2-3 year life for electronics, I lumped my bike into that category. Now that I have renewed faith in my purple Trek, I'm excited to share some smiles. I've got it on my car bike rack heading up to Mendocino right now & plan to cover some serious ground the next few days! Thanks biker guy & happy trails everyone!
At 1:40am presents were wrapped & tagged (forged creatively from Santa)... only bows to go. Who KNEW trying to peel the thin clear backings OFF of the Kirkland bow bottoms would be the most anxiety producing thing of the night??? My heart palpitations & shortness of breath increased off the charts. I'd get half of the clear plastic backing peeled off & it'd flick back down 5,6,7 times back onto the bow or the plastic piece would only peel 1/2 off jaggedly & I'd have to work harder to find the other stuck part. They weren't the easy 'peel off & slap on' chore I had expected. There it is again, that damn word, expect.
I guess everything would be better if I could just stop my brain from forming an expectation. Every day I fight the mental battle between accepting that everyone needs expectations to function in this world & trying to not have expectations so I'm not frustrated when they aren't met. I guess what rings true is that I could be happier in life's moments by slightly altering the expectations: Instead of "I want to be done by 1am" think "I'm going to work as fast as I can".... and then the KICKER IS I need to let GO of the results.
Finding my lavender eye mask & inhaling the aroma was the only solution for the result I got ending at 2:10am.
"We read your 'blog', do you really have that much free time to write?" my parents commented. "Actually I lost sleep staying up to write it, but I'm enjoying the writing" I replied. "Well we'd say you should take the sleep, it was rambley & do you really think people want to read about you cleaning your house?"
After breathing in a few long nostril breaths of acceptance, I wondered why I emailed them a link... I remember thinking "surely THIS will be the time I'm understood by my mom!" But they do have a point... why am I compelled to tell my story? It's pretentious. I didn't think of it as self-promoting but it is.
I guess I like feeling the emotions that arise when I think of writing... mainly scared - since it's posted publicly & being public definitely helps me write better. I'm scared not to try blogging, since I hate feeling regret more than scared. The excitement of trying something new is worth it EVERY TIME I do something I'm scared of. I want to have stories to tell my kids when I'm old & forget everything. Or if I die next week, I want them to know what their mom thought of, get a glimpse of my head. That way later in life if they have similarly active, fearless (yet in retrospect self doubting) minds they wont think they're crazy, it's just my genes.
The biggest reason I write is to figure shit out for myself. So, this is my journal.
What is ringing true as I write this blog? I'm not sure, but I guess it's acceptance. Acceptance of this phase of my mildly creative mind, that's not creative or confident enough to write a book, so it just dabbles. That my parents don't find humor in me. That I appreciate how my parents raised me, that I do love them & that I can also be annoyed & unconnected with them too. When I accept who I am & where I am, I am liberated.
Today I went to Costco & when I got home, I had to fit 24 rolls of paper towels into my disorganized pantry. I grimaced, remembering that I had stuffed glitter, paint tubes, brushes, glue, Popsicle sticks & googly eyes into the back corner because there was a more pressing daily goal that day. So, right then I dove into the pantry. I switched a few shelves around. I got the shop vac out & sucked up oatmeal flakes, chocolate chips, mini marshmallows, cereal bits, craft residue, dog hair, spiders dead & alive.
Each tid bit of trash took me back for an instant (except the spiders, I just felt brave when I dealt with them) - the handful of cereal I snacked on while standing in the pantry gazing up at the boxes of Joe Joe's deciding how many vanilla or candy cane cookies I would take out, the homemade chocolate chip cookies I baked with Zoe, the mini s'mores I made with Nate in the toaster oven, the oatmeal I make for my kids most mornings. I was engrossed & teary eyed. Then there were the art projects & supplies spanning 4 shelves. It was time to purge. I have a box for their art but it's filling up & I can't save everything. So, I tossed adorable drawings & old clay sculptures. I had to let them go, it was so hard, I cherished the memory that went with that silly little "thing" & if I didn't see it, I feared I'd lose the memory & feelings of warmth that went with it.... I needed music.
Creed's new song, "Rain," got me singing loudly. I slowly relinquished trying to solve a mystery that I'm part of & remembered to just honor all the minutes, hours, days, weeks, years in life as they occur; this was another cluster of minutes that I would label "pantry purge" for reference.
I decided to make extra room on the cookie shelf by finishing a box of Joe Joe's.
