Ahh, Monday’s. Nothing good can come from a Monday.
Today was supposed to be a good day. I was supposed to accomplish a couple school assignments, publish a couple blogs on my Philly blog. I was going to hook up the Blu-Ray DVD player I received for Christmas. It was going to be an easy going day.
Of course, that’s no what happened, well, kinda’.
My day was perfect from 5 a.m. until 3:58 p.m. At exactly 3:58 p.m. I received an email from the basic go to girl at the blog network I write for, 451 Press.
The email began with:
Happy New Year from 451 Press. We know the last few months we’ve been a little hard to reach, but we are looking forward to 2009 bringing improvements to the network.
I’ve just come to notice that we’ve been here at omigod.net for over a year. Truthfully - I didn’t think we’d make it this long. Previous blogs I’ve run were lucky to be up for over three months. There’s something different about this one though. Something that makes me want to keep it alive. And I do have to say, without you this whole experience would be boring. To this day I’ve really enjoyed running this blog and I hope we progress even more through this up-coming year.
Now - since I haven’t quite been able to sleep yet (long story), I thought I’d post my just thought up New Year’s resolutions.
1. Stop self sabotaging myself.
2. Read more fiction. I’ve loved political humor and non-fiction too much to give it a chance.
3. Drink more water.
4. Use my time a little bit more wiser when it comes to work. Typical, yet true.
5. Pen pal with some kid outside of America. Will make me think and it will give me a chance to get back into writing on actual paper.
6. Learn to like people a little bit better.
7. Budget, budget, budget.
8. Look into taking a cooking class, and then maybe actually take it.
What’s your list of resolutions? Share links in the complaints.
Do you hear that? [Silence] The house is empty now for the first time in three days. My parents are out and about, taking care of various errands of their own, and I have the entire place to myself: all its creaking walls, cold floors, and softly lit windows are mine to embrace. Thoughts start to fill up the spaces in my head. . .
“The holidays are always hard.” I hear this a lot. I hear it from friends, I hear it from family, I hear it from acquaintances at the gym, I even hear it in passing from perfect strangers on the street and at the cafe: everything has been really hard this year, harder than previous ones and we’re feeling it. It’s been an echoed sentiment everywhere, and I feel partially the same way too. It’s not just the cost of living, or the work hours people are enduring, it’s the emotional grinders we’re putting ourselves through. It’s the stress that isn’t being attended to the way its always been attended to when we realize there’s stress in our lives.
Now, we’re even putting our stress off. Is that even possible to keep up long term without having it drastically affect our environments and personal relationships?
I don’t think so. Really (even though I’m guilty at times of this very same thing.) Which is why I decided several months ago to start to make serious changes with my environment, with my stress and how I handle it, even with my personal interactions. It’s a slow process, it takes a lot of personal investment with little to no visible or tangible return at first. You have to put the hours of personal work in, in order to see the results. I’m just starting to see them, or their surface, in the relationships I’m fostering with others and with how I perceive myself as an individual and as an adult in this world (this imperfect place.)
Last week some friends and I took a trip up to Koziar’s Christmas Village. I heard a lot of great things about the place from friends and the @comcastcares guy on Twitter. From looking at the website it seemed like a great place to go and spend the night. Only what I didn’t really think about before we left was that this Christmas village was located almost exactly two hours away from where we live, and how cold it would be the night we decided to go.
We left around four p.m. The first half hour in the car was fine. Normally to get to any decent place where I live, you at least have to drive thirty minutes. After we hit the hour mark everyone became anxious, especially me, mainly because I’m not at all patient. Luckily I had brought my Zune so I had weeks worth of music with me.
After we ran out of things to talk about it started to seem like it was taking forever, and we had another forty five minutes still to go.
Finally - we see Christmas lights from over a hill. Everyone starts to get excited and comes out of their droopy state. I look past the main barn and there is hundreds of people. About twenty five people standing in line, and more cars then I could ever count (or bother taking the time to count). The guys handling the parking (the men in space outfits, seriously, what they were wearing looked exactly like an orange space suit) directed us to the very, very, very back of the parking grounds. We all huff and puff because now its going to take us another half an hour to get to the main line and when we leave it will take us another half an hour to get back to the car (clearly I’m exaggerating).
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