Friday, May 25, 2018

Draft 156

Being a country girl at heart, there are few things I find more peaceful and relaxing than a windless sunset and the smell of fresh cut grass and wild flowers while listening to the gentle chirp of little bugs and birds. Being a  current city girl, I have come to find the woosh of vehicles passing by and distant lawn mowers buzzing down grass it's own sort of peaceful. Mostly because it is 3:30 on a sunny afternoon and I am outside on my balcony over looking my uneven parking lot and the office building across the way and not sitting in my office and I rarely do get to see the sun much between the hours of 8 and 5.

There were times in college when I'd get out of class at 2pm and the weather would be just warm and sunny enough that I'd fall asleep on the hill on the side of the Pentacrest while watching the CamBuses drive their routes. I don't miss the stress of finals and papers, but I miss the summers, for sure.

Anyways, getting older is a funny thing. I have two wrinkles forming in my forehead between my eyes from furrowing my brow at my computer and squinting in the sun these past couple years. I never considered Botox in my youth, but I can't say it doesn't cross my mind now. I've also got circles under my eyes that no amount of sleep seems to take care of.. so I wear make up now. I mean, I wore eye liner and mascara before, but now! Now I have to put on some primer and foundation and then coverup and blush  and things like that. My husband is constantly telling me, "Honey, you look fine as you are, " Which I believe him for the most part, but we're in a social media world these days, gotta fake it to make it, right?


On top of that, I've ceased plucking my gray hairs, since I'm facing balding as the alternative to gray, and my swim suit has long sleeves and a turtle neck lest my arms freckle any more. Not that I intended to rant about how vain and shallow and self absorbed I am.. I don't care ALL that much, but I am realizing that there is a BIG difference in my now self and my young teen self that started this whole blog.

There's kind of a moment where you wake up one day and realized, "Woah.. I'm a real live adult now." My Husband and I get to pick out insurance plans together and shop for houses and research mechanics and dream of owning a yard so we can push a mower and own a grill. I'm very content with this stage of life. It's predictable and quiet and fairly care-free.

In the 155 drafts that sit in the "Probably will never get posted" section of my blog life, I've done a lot of thinking about life navigating and growing up and being mature. 
 My heart seemed to bounce back quicker in college. I mean, You meet a lot of people in college that you can be your best friend for the tiniest amount of time and then they turn out to be awful people that you wouldn't be friends with now if someone paid you. 

In college it's easy to brush off someone being rude or unkind because you're young and you haven't built your street cred yet and they haven't learned how not be rude and unkind. Now if I meet someone who is rude I just assume they're an awful person in general because we're all at a point in our life where if you're having a bad day, you don't get to be rude to people. If you have any ounce of maturity you put on your big boy pants and make sure no one else has the day you're having.

But there's a lot of really immature people in the world I've found. 


But, I get it, too. Life is full of snow globe moments.. the really wonderful, beautiful happy moments that a picture couldn't even capture so you put it in a snow globe in your heart and sometimes you get it out, shake it up and remember how magical it was. And sometimes the snow globe falls off the shelf and shatters into a million pieces. Out of nowhere someone attacks you with every kind of insult and put down and every good moment you remember with them is just a million shards of glass ripping your heart to pieces. And every good moment you'd imagined your friendship would hold in the future are just snow globes that will sit empty for the rest of your life. 

That's the stage of adulthood I'm in. Draft 156 because in drafts 140-155, I wanted to be transparent and say "Life is really hard and people can be really mean" but you don't get to write a detailed blog about the day the snow globe fell off the shelf.

The glass in my earlobe from a car accident a few years back has recently started to work its way out.  

The tiniest pieces of glass take the longest time to surface and broken snow globes take a lot of recovery time. 

The good news is that there are moments when you stop and listen to the cars and the lawnmowers and birds and the maintenance man on his golf cart and you can breath in the warm, asphalty air and realize it's been over a year and the Lord is still good, and the blessings out number the brokens and for all the snow globes that fell off the shelf, there have been a million and one better ones to take their place.

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