Road trip!!!

Oh boy! Just waiting for my mom to pick me up so we can get started on our road trip! Woohoo! North Carolina here I come! Thankfully (though not for my wallet!) it is a slow day at work so we get to leave early and break the driving into two days. Fourteen hours in one day would have been a bit rough!

I get to meet my favorite author on Monday. That is so weird to me. You read these words that just speak to you and you feel such a huge connection to the author- will meeting him in person be able to live up to that??

Gotta go. Wish me luck!

cheese

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

-G.K. Chesterton.

So true. There should be odes written to cheese.

When my blood sugar is low I get crabby. When I am hungry I get crabby. When I eat cheese, I get happy.

I think whenever I am mad at someone, I should eat some cheese and then decide if I am really mad at someone or not.

Mike totally went out after work instead of coming straight home. But since I came home and ate some delicious cheese on my favorite crackers, I really just don't care. Had I been sitting here all hungry, there would have been hell to pay.

Cheese just saved my relationship.

Oh, and more cheese quotes because, well, why not?

"How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
-Charles De Gaulle

an ode to rice

Dear Rice,

You are now my most favorite food in the entire world. I'm not sure if I should eat you every day to honor you or never eat you again out of respect for you. Thank you for taking my cell phone, which had one foot in his murky, water-filled grave and bringing him back to life. I owe you BIG TIME!!!

xoxo- Nikki

So on Saturday morning my water bottle opened in my bag and drenched my cell phone, making it go capootsie. I had heard that putting a wet phone in a bag of uncooked rice and leaving it for twenty-four hours could bring the phone back to life as the rice absorbed all the moisture.

And it worked!!!!!

Thank the lord, because with taxes and fees it would have cost me $750 to get a new one! Which is not in the cards for me right now. I was debating between giving up a cell phone all together and getting a super cheap one for the time being.

But we took it out of the magical rice bag this morning and plugged it in and voila! It's back! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

I think it in part has something to do with the magical sandwich I ate yesterday. Seriously... magical. Every single part of the sandwich blew my mind. The fresh sourdough/rye bread that Mike had just baked and then grilled in a pan with some olive oil drizzled over it. Oh my god. And the avocado and tomato that were perfectly ripe. Oh my god. The arugala that we had picked up at the farmer's market that morning. Oh my god. The fresh basil that I picked from our garden. Oh my god. The fancy parmesan cheese shaved on the top. Oh my friggin' god!

Nothing could go wrong when you have a sandwich like that. It was life changing. And when I say that nothing could go wrong... I mean that no matter what goes wrong, it isn't going to get to me because I get to eat a sandwich like that and live with a guy who can make me that sandwich again and again!

So I just want to say thank you Universe for all the abundant blessing you have bestowed on me!

take that, non productivity! I just kicked your ass!

Well now, just one and a half hours and my day went from being sort of productive to being EXTREMELY productive!

I just earned 9 credit hours from taking online courses. I learned information about colon hydrotherapy and about carpal tunnel syndrome. And I didn't have to sit through a long and painful class to do it!

I love school. I love classes. I love taking hands-on massage classes. Taking massage classes where you just learn information though is about as painful as it gets. And I love my fellow massage therapists but let's admit it- we are an odd bunch and the majority of them didn't do so well in school. The questions they ask in class make me want to ram my head against a wall- especially because it is usually something the teacher just finished explaining and they simply weren't paying attention.

The solution? Online classes. I get to read the course material at my own pace and then there is an open book quiz at the end that I need to pass. No stupid questions by classmates. No teachers trying to stretch out the material to make it last the necessary six hours to give us our full credits.

I just spent an hour and a half and earned NINE credit hours. That's a beautiful thing. And it is a major thing to check off of my "to do" list.

So who cares if my writing didn't go that well today and I ended up watching Alice in Wonderland (the original Disney cartoon version which is seriously trippy!) for a good part of the afternoon.

I earned NINE credit hours! I was productive! Go me! Oh how quickly a day can turn around! And I didn't start being productive till after 7 PM! Just goes to show that it is never too late.

responsibility

Holy crap! Emerald Dry Roasted Almonds are amazing! I so was not expecting that. I picked some up because a handful of almonds is supposed to be a great high-energy mid-afternoon snack. I'd been eating the non-salted generic brand before which were fine, but these have some awesome flavorful coating on them and they rock. Yes! That was just what my belly needed!

Do you know what I was thinking today? Yeah? Then why are you bothering to read my blog. Stupid mind readers.

Anyways, I really thought that I'd be more responsible by now.

That's not entirely a fair statement. Because I'm not irresponsible. Irresponsible would mean that I had obligations and was not fulfilling them. (My siblings and my lack of yard work when I lived with them might beg to differ, but piss off, I'm not doing things that make me break out in hives!)

So it isn't exactly that I am irresponsible. I pay my bills and I get up and go to work and do a good job. I write my grandma letters and make time for my family. My apartment stays (fairly) tidy. My checkbook is balanced.

I just don't happen to have kids or a car or a house. Which apparently are the signs of being responsible. At least in my mind. I don't think of my friends who don't have these things as irresponsible, just myself. That's what it will take for me to become a "grown up." No matter how old I get, until I have those three things, I will not consider myself a grown up.

But I'll let you in on a little secret... not being a grown up is pretty damn fun! I look forward to the day when I become one but until then, this doesn't suck. :)

CTA

People who talk about how much they love the world and how much they love their fellow man, are obviously people who don't have to ride public transportation.

Just sayin'.

Now it's true that I do see good things while on public transportation on occasion. I do. There are things that tug at my heart strings and there are things that open my eyes.

But there are also things that make me want to ram my head into a wall, repeatedly and forcefully.

Today was one of those days. Have you ever noticed that when someone doesn't have a very strong argument, they resort to yelling their stupid opinions louder, as if more volume will give them more validity?

There are times when I hate the world that I live in. Because the world that I WANT to live in is a place where I see the good in everyone and realize that everyone is a human being with wants and desires and fears and who is just trying to make their way in this hard, confusing world. But the world that I DO live in, is a place filled with crazy people where you don't have the time or opportunity to get to know them and instead are focused on self preservation and survival. I don't want that to be the case. And when you deal with people one on one, that isn't the case. You see one homeless person on the street in a small town, you can help them. You get on a bus full of crazy people, you just try to make it to your stop without dying.

So I get upset when I ride public transportation because I have to deal with angry and ignorant people for starters, but because I am also not being the person that I want to be- someone who helps the situation get better.

Today an overweight hispanic woman and a young (not very good smelling) black man were SHOUTING back and forth at each other. It started innocently enough. The black man was hitting on some woman (this was before I got on the bus) who wasn't interested in him and asked him to leave her alone. He persisted. The hispanic woman jumped in and told him to leave the woman alone because she obviously wasn't interested.

Simple enough, right?

And you have to commend that woman for trying to help a fellow passenger/woman from being harassed.

However, she broke cardinal rule number one: never initiate conversations with crazy people on public transportation.

It of course ended, as it always does, with him threatening her with bodily harm and them yelling insults at each other, him getting out his mace and telling her that if she touches him that he will use it and her taunting him for being worthless and not having a job.

It was ugly.

It was loud.

It broke my heart.

It also made me think that "conflict resolution" would be an EXTREMELY beneficial thing for them to be teaching in school these days since people's only current solution seems to be shouting their opinions and repeating them over and over again over the other person's talking.

There are so many facets of my life that I have control over. I can make my relationships with my family and friends and coworkers and clients be beautiful and wonderful and fulfilling things. I can create beauty. I can strive to help people. I can listen. I can love.

And that's all well and good.

But I want to do more.

I want to be the voice of reason that calms people down on the bus. I want to be the girl that helps that boy see his true worth. I want to be the girl that helps him see that harassing that girl is not a good thing. I want to be the girl who helps that hispanic woman have compassion for the young man who doesn't have that much going for him at the moment.

Instead, I'm the girl who avoids eye contact and breaks out her headphones because the yelling is giving her a headache.

I often do a self-reflection type thing before bed. Usually I will ask myself what I am thankful for that day. I think maybe I need to start asking myself, "Was I the "me" that I want to be today?"

Today I give myself about a 75%. I avoided any and all conflict on the bus (which, in my defense, had I tried to butt in, would have just led to more fighting and yelling) which I am not proud of. But I did get some good writing done and I did make my best friend laugh and I did volunteer and give a free massage to a woman with cancer.

Not a bad day. But not 100% either.

I guess I have a reason to get up tomorrow- there is more work to be done!

heat wave = me not doing a dang thing

Okay, for real, how do people that live in hot climates get anything done?

I haven't even been outside yet today, apart from opening the window to water the plants, and I am about to pass out from the heat. Yes, I say that non-ironically while sitting in my pseudo air conditioning. I say "pseudo" because it doesn't work that well. The heat just makes you tired. So tired. So very, very tired.

I did about an hour's worth of writing and a few loads of laundry and I am feeling okay with calling that a day. That's pathetic!

At least I KNOW it's pathetic and am not walking around saying, "Whoa! Look at me! Look at what I got accomplished today!" Eating shelled peanuts and watching Field of Dreams does not a productive day make.

Oh well, I guess there's still time to change that. Let's go do something!