A Little Sunshine

I was reminded twice in the recent past that I haven't blogged in awhile and am severely overdue. I am happy to report that the dismal tone of which many of my posts were taking is now gone and I hope it doesn't return anytime soon. It wasn't so much a list that got me back on track, but it was saying 'get on with it' that eventually sunk in and gave the nudge I needed. I give most of the credit to getting up off my ass and getting my exercise and diet back to where it used to be - even better than it used to be. Ever since I was a senior in college I've had to fight black clouds overpowering my thoughts on a regular basis and I've done a lot of that management through exercise because I can't stand to be on medication. After the spiritual high of Italy, I was already on a downward slide as I came back to my real life and with that came being a couch potato, eating whatever I wanted and drinking far too much. The all out downward spiral resulted as was slightly chronicled in this blog, but to be honest, I kept a lot of it to myself with only a few people knowing how bad things were getting. To those few, I owe a big hug - I hope they know how special they are. Thanks to them and working with a trainer that showed me how to re-tool my diet, I was able to start to feel whole again. It's funny, I was wallowing in self pity for at least three months and it only took three weeks to lose almost 10 pounds and for my ego to rebound. Guess it goes to show that sometimes when you have your mind set on something, you can do good things.
So for the physical aspect of life, I've gotten a big lift. I recognize though that it probably wouldn't have happened quite so easily if I didn't have the job I do. I've talked about the flexibility it affords me, but it became very apparent as I was able to add in tennis drill sessions on Friday afternoons at lunch, workout for an hour on random afternoons with my trainer, and making meals at home that fit my new diet. The culture of the job I have now allows for those things. Granted, I pay for it by having to work later at night and on the weekends, but it's worth it to me. I'd rather have the time to screw around a bit during the week and work a few hours on the weekend then have the 9-6pm locked schedule at an office. The other factor is that I can work anywhere in the world - when I interviewed and got this job when I was over in Italy, I remember talking about how I could move to Italy if I wanted to and it wouldn't matter. While I still have no plans to move overseas, I do have plans to work from Philly while I visit my family for a week. I could go anywhere or visit anyone and as long as I have an Internet connection I don't have to take any vacation. Again, that's pretty amazing and I am hugely thankful for it.
And speaking of Italy, Lucie and I touched base via email and I passed on the news that I will not be making it over there until September. The summers get quite warm there and she highly recommends that I wait until then so that I can enjoy it. I'm going to take the opportunity to work remotely in Philly to show my boss that I can work away from home and have no issues or loss of quality with my work. The thought of being able to work at Lucie's house with the cats roaming all over the place and getting back to feeding the horses in the morning and everything else that was so magical there makes me want to get on a plane immediately. I was thinking the other night about the places that have had the most impact on me just by the air of the location. Lucie's farm is definitely one of them. I will never forget walking back from the barn from feeding the horses and looking onto the house with a thick fog enveloping it, the grass green and wet, and the chickens roaming about. I will also never forget watching the sunset at Athena'sTemple on the Greek island of Naxos. Being able to stand on that hill and watch something so beautiful with no one around will never happen again. And the last place that hugely stands out in my mind is the Black Hills in South Dakota. I haven't been back there since I was in AmeriCorps, which is a huge failing on my part, but it will always be with me as one of the most spiritual places in the US. Everyone has places that stick with them, experiences they carry with them - it reminds me of a toast a friend recently gave this past weekend at dinner. There was much more to it, but the takeaway was this: "Life is a collection of stories". We share in the experience of them, intertwine with them and connect through them. This weekend I added a huge collection of stories to my life and this coming weekend I will add another collection as my friend gets married and moves on into another phase of her life. I'm also observing my 33rd birthday, although it doesn't feel like that is coming up at all which seems appropriate this year. Maybe I just want my friend to have the spotlight for her wedding. Maybe I'm just content this year. But something feels good, something feels right. Finally.

Voices on Vaca

The beginning of this blog started off with a post about Eat Pray Love, one of my favorite books of all time. Throughout the chapters, the author talks about communicating with God or whatever you want to call the higher power you believe in. I can say that I have tried on many occasions to duplicate this line of communication and have not gotten the same response she has - which is to say that I have rarely had a calm but piercingly crisp and loving voice part the thoughts in my cluttered mind and impart wisdom. However, one of those rare occasions actually did happen the other night and it has stayed with me throughout the days since.
It was the middle of the night around 3am and I was half asleep, wishing I was completely asleep because I had been up late again doing mindless things, like watching TVand playing silly games on my iPhone - all in a consistent effort to not think about the things seriously bothering me. The things bothering me are all the same that have been spoken about before, but at the moment I feel like they are getting the better of me. I've lost my motivation to deal with them, face them, fix them or give them any positive energy whatsoever (negative energy, on the other hand, is abundant). I'm pretty sure it's this lack of motivation that drove me to hear the clear voice in my head earlier this week. And no, it wasn't some booming authoritarian bellowing at me, it was simply, from what I can tell, myself or my subconscience trying to get through. "Get on with it already." Initially I thought it had to do with my romantic life and moving on down that path, but now that I've had time to digest, I believe its meaning to be much broader.
Almost everyone I talk to has a dream that they keep in the back of their mind, wishing there was a way to bring it to the foreground but not knowing how. At some point, the dream gets lost or forgotten but rarely does anyone ever make the decision to say yes or no to it. The whole process is much more passive than either reaching for the stars or gracefully bowing out knowing you're ok with leaving it behind. I think that's what I was trying to tell myself. Make up your mind. "If you want to dream big, then dream big. But for god's sake stop puttering around and whining like a confused child trying to find their mother because I for one am sick of watching it. Get on with it already."
I can't blame my sub conscious, I'm pretty sick of listening to myself too.
Everyone at my age believes that time is infinite for us. In reality, we know that's not true, but we assume we have so much time ahead of us that we feel we can dilly dally about. We treat time as a luxury. I'm pretty sure that's going to come back and bite us in the end, but the alternative - facing the grim reality that our days are very numbered - is too depressing to let in on a daily basis. In my attempt to get a grip on the passing days and my abhorrent way of wasting them lately, I've decided it's time to use my most trusted method of getting me back on track. Making lists. It's the best way to organize my thoughts and get them on paper so I can see them all at once and assess the chaos I've created. I'll come back and post said list when I have it, but right now I'm just glad to be getting my butt in gear enough to blog agin for the first time in weeks. Time to connect back in with reality and shake myself from this lazy vacation I've sent myself on for the past three weeks.   

Hi 2011, Nice to Meet You

Hearing Lucie's voice on Christmas Day was like a breath of fresh air. I'm not sure if it is the British accent or hearing about how the cats are doing on the raw food diet, but the conversation puts a huge smile on my face and lifts my mood considerably. Not that it isn't wonderful to be back in Philadelphia with my friends and family, but it's nice to reconnect with the people in Italy that made such an impact on me.
Philly is then hit the next day with a massive snowstorm that snarls the east coast and cancels the Philadelphia Eagles game my parents and I are supposed to attend (a present I gave my father for his birthday back in June). Most of my well laid plans for the trip home are shot as we hunker in and wait for the storm to pass. In the end we will have had nine inches of snow and as a result, I will only see two of my closest friends, Sweeney and Besters, once while I am home. While once is better than none, it's still not enough time to be with these people. There are just not enough hours in a day sometimes.
After wrapping up my time at home, I head back to Austin to tackle my least favorite holiday of the year - New Year's. New Year's Eve has always been cursed for me in one way or another, ever since I was a teenager. This year turns out to be one of the exceptions though, and surrounded by some of my closest friends we ring in the promise of a new start with a fine dinner and excellent music. I can't say it could have been much better.
Now comes the real test - getting back to the grind. All of the old routines start creeping in, the social calendar starts filling up and the amount of time to just sit and be slowly slips away as if you had nothing to do with the fact that you have now scheduled out your life for the next two months. So while I don't do new year's resolutions - what's the point, I never keep them - I will say that I'll be striving to push against the current that sweeps us up so easily. I don't want to say to myself "there's got to be more to life than this" anymore. If I could do that, I would be a happy camper.

Dew Point

I'm not sure when it happened, but it happened. I worked so hard to try to cement the things I learned in Italy into my brain, but it all seems to have evaporated. The lofty goals for myself? Haven't been able to accomplish any of them. And it's my fault, no two ways about it. I get back into my "American" habits and find myself depressed and back in the same spot all over again.
At work, I am now surrounded by completely new people with a whole new realm of politics to maneuver. And while it is a vast improvement over my last position, it is still sitting in a cube making a big corporation more money. At the end of the day, all I can think about is that humans were not meant to be like this. I miss moving like I did naturally with my chores in Italy. I miss so much about Italy, it's painful.
With the evaporation of yet another relationship, I am once again, alone. In Italy when I was alone - which was very often - I knew why I was alone. I was in a foreign country, my friends and family no where to be found. I had no roots there to grow from, no ties to the area to build off of. I had a an excuse to be alone and that was manageable. Here, it's a different game. Everywhere seems to be a reminder of that void. And while I am the one giving this panic energy, I still have a hard time stopping it.
In an effort to divert some of my obsessive nature, I have decided to take up training for a rookie triathlon. Maybe I can take all the negative relentless pounding I do on myself about my personal life and turn it into something positive. A fit body and a sprint triathlon to add to my resume. I hope to god this works, because the alternatives are not so positive. I find myself back watching TV more than I would like to admit in a way to make the hours go by faster and without me noticing them quite so much. And while I still (thankfully) do not have the tolerance for alcohol that I once had, it still creeps into my social life with alarming frequency and with a promise every time of making me forget that I am not happy with where things are. I can't control it. I can't control my love life, that's obvious. I can't force someone to walk into my life. I can control my career and while I still want to give this new position a chance, I know it is not my dream job. The problem is, I don't know what I want to do. This whole writing thing is awesome and I love it - when I have something to write about that interests people. Some people kept up with my blog and I am happy that I could provide some entertainment for them in that way. Coming back was quite  a different experience and I didn't prepare myself for people not really wanting to hear about all the cool things I did over there. Of all the culture shock I experienced, that was the worst and by far the biggest disappointment and left a quite bitter taste in my mouth. So again, best I just write about it - assuming "it" is happening. Do I send myself off on another trip? Do I somehow do travel writing? I'm not sure, but writing about my everyday life isn't going to intrigue anyone. And then I end up right where I started - what do I do with my life, my career. I have no more of an answer than I did before I left.
At this moment, right now, other than the friends I made in Italy, it almost feels like it never happened.

A Christmas Carol

Over the weekend I caught a glimpse of Bill Murray’s version of A Christmas Carol called Scrooged during one of my rare TV sessions these days. It’s one of those 80’s flicks with terrible action shots and way overdone hair and makeup, but it did get me thinking about life perceived through the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. Mostly the past is nothing but looking down memory lane, remembering the highs and the lows and seeing how far you’ve come since that geeky kid in high school. You remember lessons learned, love lost, the thrill of that promotion or a good friend’s baby being born. It’s remembering how you got to the here and now.

And if the ghost of Christmas present were to visit me today, it would paint a much different picture than if it visited me last week. Today is a day of firsts. A new job. An updated wardrobe. A clean(ish) slate. I look at my present and can only marvel at how pretty darn awesome it is. And although I have recently lost my best friend, I have five other good friends and an amazing family waiting in the wings to be there when I need them. I have a cat that runs to the door as soon I put my key in the lock as I come home and a stick shift car that I absolutely adore. My shower has water pressure, I have heat without throwing wood on a furnace and I don’t have to worry about where next month’s mortgage payment is going to come from. I have nothing to complain about.

I have no idea what the ghost of Christmas future would show me. A different career maybe, a different city. A husband and family – but maybe not. The thing about walking away from any relationship or friendship is that you are walking away from a life. Birthdays not celebrated, trips not taken, forgone late nights out and about, bitch sessions about this or that not held. That future that once had a framework is blank yet again. A new job where I have general expectations but am not entirely sure of produces about the same sort blank page. It takes every ounce of me not to flat out panic at the lack of structure of things to come. All I can do is take a deep breath, remember the horses grazing in the pasture, the peace and quiet of the farm, the warmth of the house after the wood stove is stoked and hold onto the calm I found in Italy. As the weeks go on, I think I’m going to be surprised at how much of an impact that trip had on me. And that I am really looking forward to.

Avoiding the Blue Screen of Death

Well now that certainly didn't go as planned.
Coming back to Austin certainly had a rocky start at Polvo's. I was slammed with a lot of news and events that I had missed while I was gone, some good and some not so good. And, to make matters worse, the margaritas didn't even taste good! My favorite drink in all of Austin and I can barely stand the stuff anymore. I have found that with several food items now - my taste buds seem to have done a grand 180 on me when it comes to very sweet or very spicy foods. The margaritas taste incredibly tart and artificially flavored (which they are) and salsa that I didn't even used to blink an eye at now have me downing water and flagging the waiter for a glass of milk (ok, so maybe it's not that bad, but it certainly feels like it). My tolerance for alcohol has also gone down considerably. Where before I left I was known to be able to hold my liquor quite well, now, if I have two glasses of wine, you might as well put me in a cab because I am down for the count.
These are actually really good things and I hope they stick with me. Pants fit better now. Blouses button a bit easier and I feel better about myself than I did before I left. But then again, there is the slide. The slippery, slippery slope back into what was my life before. It doesn't take much. Saying 'yes' to one or two more parties than you planned on, going out for lunch a little too regularly or allowing a friend to buy you just one more drink. There is also the more treacherous slide of slipping back into other far more damaging emotional habits, which are the demons I'm trying to avoid most - and doing quite poorly at, I might add.
I can beat myself up all I want. Call myself all the names I can possibly think of and have people poke holes in my personality and habits all day long. It's not going to change anything. All I can do is present the best version I can of myself and count on the bolstering of others to lift me up when that version just isn't available at the moment. And really, that's all any of us can do, take charge of and handle with care the things we hold in our control - and let the rest be what will be.

Coda (For Now)

The flight from Rome to Philly is one of the easiest I have ever encountered. I usually take a strong sleeping pill or drink a vodka tonic or two in order to deal with the fact that I am 40,000 feet in the air, pushed along only by these two engines on either side of me. But this time, this time is different. I decide early on in the flight that I'm not going to drink. I'm not going to take those pills. I can handle a flight, ten hours worth, without that stuff. I also surprise myself by how happy and grateful I was to be on the plane. To have made my journey safely, to know I was coming home to my parents and a huge hug from my mom at the airport, for the experiences I had and the friends I had made aboard. I wanted to write all of this down and because we were still were not allowed to get out of our seats, the only paper I had was the last page of Eat, Pray, Love, which I had at my feet to finish up reading. So I jotted down all the goodness I was feeling, all the joy, and I noticed that by using the last page to write this down, I had made a sandwich, so to speak. The first page of the book is signed by Liz Gilbert, saying may all my travels be blessed. The middle is highlighted and noted by my mother, who's copy of the book I now owned. And the last page contained my thoughts on the trip now complete. It's funny how things sometimes just come together.
I have to say, I was a bit nervous about going through immigration and customs. I had 13 bottles of wine, a lot of gifts, and while I had not been on a full out working farm, there could be questions about what exactly I had been doing or exposed to. All of that worry was, as it usually is, for not. We arrived at the gate 45 minutes early, I flew through immigration with two questions from the officer, grabbed my two pieces of checked luggage in less than twenty minutes and wasn't stopped by customs. I was outside, curbside, waiting for my mother to pick me up at the same time I was scheduled to be arriving at the gate. Smooth as silk that journey was.
Beginning in Philadelphia to wade myself back into the water of my life was a good choice. The people here have known me for decades and the connection that we have will never fade, never extinguish - it may morph into different shapes as we go through various periods in our lives, but we will always be connected. These people are the ones that keep me grounded, that make home, home. And it's a valued aspect of being back in the States because otherwise I think I'd be in a constant state of culture shock. Food is an especially big disappointment. No one knows where their food comes from, or even worse, they don't even care. It's something I'm going to struggle with a lot being back and it's going to take a lot of energy to make sure that the food I eat is something that is actually good for me and well raised.
Being here is also a way to test out my old skin and the identity I left behind when I flew over the Atlantic. Overseas I could invent myself in which ever way I wanted to. Not to say that I did, but there were no expectations as to how I should act. Everyone was meeting me for the first time and had no idea who I was. Back here, everyone knows who I am or was. Something has changed about me, but I'm not sure what. I think that will take several weeks to decipher as I get over the jet lag, see through the culture shock and settle back into a routine (which will be fairly difficult with the holidays). The best way to put it, as a friend succinctly summed up after hearing about my experience and purpose of going abroad, was that I basically defibrillated my life. Everything was out of rhythm, nothing felt right, and something needed to happen to get back on course. For me, this trip was it. This was the solid and sometimes not so gentle shock to the heart I needed.
And with that, I gather up my things, stuff them in ziplock bags and fill my pack up for the last time. It's time for my final flight back to Austin, Texas. I don't expect this to be easy. I can already feel the post-vacation depression sinking in, and that's just something I get every time I leave home for a week - imagine what it'll be like after ten. But I know that as soon as I step off that plane and grab my luggage, people will be waiting for me to whisk me away to our favorite restaurant, Polvo's, for our favorite frozen drink, the elusive (in Italy) margarita. And really, there's nothing in life that can't be solved with good friends and a Polvo's margarita.

Andiamo.