As much as I’d like to be one of those laid-back people all the time, I’m not. And as much as I wish it were okay for me to just sit back and take everything with a grain of salt, that doesn’t come easily to me. Partly through training and partly through being the daughter of the most energetic woman on Earth I have learned that the only way to go is ALL THE WAY.

I know I’m not the only person like this, I have met people that cannot even slow down when they’ve purposely scheduled a week of their lives to do just that. While I don’t go that far, I do think it’s hard for a lot of people like this to maintain some perspective. Always going and wanting more and more leaves little time for appreciation. Yes, you appreciate things in your mind and you’re happy when things work out well, but before you know it you’ve moved on to the next goal (washing the car, acing your test, whatever) and short of someone reaching out and smacking you, you have no reason to stop.

Luckily, I have people in my life that will reach out and smack me when I need it, which I usually do. Last night, with plans to meet a friend for dinner, I was smacked. The day leading up to dinner was packed with meetings and driving and all the things we do that keep life going. The have-to’s, you might call them. Nothing extraordinary, but nonetheless work. After all the have-toing, I drove nearly an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic to meet my friend, who is in town for training. We met in a very nice area of town because it was close to her hotel, no other reason.

[Sidebar: These people, this area of town, they are out of control. I mean, who goes to all the effort to get dressed up, made-up, bears the cleavage, dons the spikes just to go out to dinner at a chain restaurant at 7:00 on a Thursday night? I wanted to ask them if they knew where they were? This is Denver, Colorado, people. Chill out on the body "glow" powder and the hoops, for crying out loud.]

The hostesses immediately put me in a bad mood, acting like they were too good to actually tell us how long a wait for a table would be. I finally asked and, I could not make this up, she looked up at me from her ever-important task of erasing marks on the reservation book and said “oh, there’s no wait.” I thought I might throw up on her, just out of pure stun. We finally sat down, and had a great waiter. The night got better from there. Half-way through our appetizer and sake, I calmed down a little.

It occurred to me that with all the “important” things I did all day, I hadn’t really stopped to appreciate dinner with my friend. I needed to be smacked. Here I was, having dinner with someone I don’t get to see often, talking about everything from men to sports bras to school and work and my mind was racing so fast I wasn’t even aware of how special it is to spend time with people. And how special it is for people to want to spend time with you. In the movie Knocked Up there’s part of a scene where Paul Rudd’s character talks about how sometimes he’s shocked that anyone wants to be around him at all. While I wasn’t as moved by this movie as a lot of people, I really appreciated that. I know we are worthy of friendship and companionship, but I think it’s all to easy to forget that it’s something that is earned.

People choosing to be with you, wanting you around, needing your company is not just an accident of life. It is not just an extra on the gravy train ride. It is a blessing. And when you realize it, when you’ve been acting so crazy you need to be smacked, I’ll go so far as to say it’s a miracle.

My lands, am I tired!

I don’t really know what “my lands” are, or where they are, for that matter, but it seemed appropriate. Today I had a midterm. Hoo boy, did that bring back some memories. Mostly of taking a test early in the morning and wishing you were still in bed.

College, with maybe the exception of organic chemistry (what in MY LANDS was I thinking on that one?), hardly goes on the list of most difficult things in my life. Maybe it’s because I had a younger brain or easier courses but I found myself to be capable in just about every class. That and I was a Liberal Arts major which meant more writing than tests and though I may not always prove it here, I can pretty much write my way out of a fifty foot hole before you’ve stacked the hay, as they say. (They totally do say that. Seriously.) I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of my ability to make something out of nothing, which is why, in short, I will say that studying was not my number one pastime in school. Sure, sure, I guess I’m glad to have that nice G.P.A. now but then, I just did not get that.

Now, though, it’s oh-so-different. I sit down, and I read and I study. I care. Which is not to say that I didn’t give a hoot* in school, but there were just so many other things. Distractions. Like clothes and boys and those cafeteria grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches that, I kid you not, I would give up a kidney to have on a plate right here in front of me right now. But the truth is, those days are better off where they are because when I walked out of that class today, confident that nothing on that mid-term surprised me, the difference was clear. I spent that first time in school just trying to figure it all out and I’m spending this time in school feeling comfortable with the idea that I probably never will.

________________

*I have no idea what’s with all the back-woods phrasin’ today. I must be in a good mood.

Todd Helton and Troy Tulowitzki

Colorado didn’t have major league baseball when I was a kid. But it seemed like everyone had to pick a team. Sticking to some of my Northeastern roots and having no choice but to believe my grandmother who claimed (read: warned) “you have a lot of family in Massachusetts, you know,” I became a Red Sox fan. And a Red Sox fan I stayed. It’s a special affiliation, if you can call it that, and something I was proud to be a part of before everyone and their brother was a Sox fan. I was brought into it the right way, not by the bandwagon but by fear and pressure.

All that said, it sure feels good when your home state wins.

That’s the power of sports, I guess. Especially a winning team, a team that’s been around for fifteen seasons and rarely known for stirring any kind of major local interest. Now though, it’s stirred. And it’s a pretty cool thing to watch, when a community, a state, has something to talk about. People have something to get excited about, and something to cheer about. Like every generation, I know this one feels the strain of it’s time. Sports, baseball in particular, have always been the break from that strain. The thing that can bring people together in uncertain times. And even though I feel long-time affiliations elsewhere, it’s good to see it happening in my own backyard.

Go Rockies!

And now I have to go repent to the Fenway gods… or something.

Over the weekend my sister and I were shopping and while standing in a check out line, an elderly woman collapsed. It wasn’t a dramatic collapse but more like she felt weak, leaned into someone’s arms and they slowly lowered her to the ground. Several people gathered around her and for some reason I felt as though I should be one of them.

At this point she was on her back and as I knelt down next to her, placed one hand on her shoulder and reached for my phone with the other, she began to stiffen and sort of arch back. I was certain she was having a stroke. I dialed 9-1-1 on my phone and looked up to see if anyone else was around. People had stepped away, I guess not knowing what to do. Not being someone who panics in emergencies, I am always surprised to see people freeze up. And, much to my dismay, people that just carry on as if nothing is happening. This is where I’d embarrass my sister by yelling at a woman who managed to step right over me and the elderly woman on the floor because she was in a hurry to make her return. I may have said something like “could you be more self-absorbed.” I don’t remember this but my sister does and I know I must have felt justified in yelling it at the time.

As I spoke to the 9-1-1 operator, I asked one person to make sure to hold the woman’s head still and I felt her wrist for a pulse (hi, no formal medical training since college here). At this point I noticed her eyes were starting to look more normal and she was breathing more regularly. Apparently whatever had happened was coming to an end. Someone in the store managed to get her a pillow for under her head and just as they brought it over, the woman began to talk. She told us she was eighty-nine-years-old. That was probably the best thing I’d heard all day, because just twenty seconds before I was trying to remember if I knew how to perform CPR, or worse, if I did and it didn’t work.

I know that’s morbid but I think part of not being someone who panics means being able to quickly prepare yourself for the worst. In my mind, I was already thinking a) that this woman might not make it and b) who would we call to tell. My body was still holding her wrist and talking to the 9-1-1 operator, but my mind was already searching for how I was going to deal with the after effects. All but one person had stepped away from her by then and I felt this immediate sense of responsibility to her. It didn’t feel like a choice at that point. Something had put me there.

As the elderly woman was coming to, another woman, probably in her 50’s, came over. “Mary. Mary!” she said, and I knew she knew this woman. I asked if she was her daughter and she said no, she was just a friend of a friend that had volunteered to take her shopping. I asked if anyone else was with them, or if we could call family.

“No, there’s no one.”

Those words hit me so hard that I wouldn’t regain a normal breathing pattern for what seemed like hours afterward. The paramedics arrived and I stepped back and just stared blankly. They asked me some questions, which I imagine I answered, but mostly I just stared. Hearing that woman say “no, there’s no one” resounded so deeply in me I could think of nothing else. When my sister and I got in the car, I just started tearing up. All the thoughts in my mind were piling up. No one. No one to call.  Alone.  All alone at 89. How long has she been alone? Does she have friends? Is she a widow? What if something would have happened? Oh God, that could be me.

My sister tried to reassure me, saying that the woman who told me that could be wrong. The elderly woman’s family could just live in another state or town. She had friends, and she was shopping. She was enjoying life. As I slowly decompressed from the situation, I realized my sister was probably right. And even if the situation was how I imagined, it didn’t mean it was bad. This woman had someone who cared about her, and she was 89. I’m sure she has led a very full life. And what’s better, it looked like she was going to be okay. She was coherent and talking to the paramedics, I even remember her saying she was on no medication. She was likely very healthy.

But to say that I wasn’t still thinking about that today, about the “no one”, well that just wouldn’t be true.

I have not ever been very good at counting out the miles in a run. I am better off not thinking about it. If I watch the miles tick by, it doesn’t feel as good as the “surprise” I get when I’m finished and think oh wow, ten miles. Nice. Lately, and part of this is because I’m preoccupied with thoughts of injury, I have had an especially hard time letting those miles go by. I can’t occupy myself for one mile, much less ten. If there ever was a “zone” to get into, I sure wouldn’t know it. I have Running Attention Deficit… Issues. It is not a disorder, oh no. A disorder implies that there is a reason for it. Issues, well issues are what we call it when you are THISCLOSE to jumping out of your own skin.

I woke up feeling like this. I woke up feeling like the day was already hovering over me. I walked out the door feeling like there was more to do than I could handle. I could safely say that right now, these days, I am so up to here I can barely stand it. So when it came time to run, getting my mind around it was difficult. I was one heavy sigh away from eating a cheeseburger, coming home, putting on my sweats, crawling into bed and gladly spending the next eleven hours in the dark. But I didn’t. Crawling into the dark isn’t who I was today. So I ran.

It was hard. I had to count the miles, and all the steps that made them up. I had to dedicate parts of those steps to all the things that I’d rather be doing. And all the things that I do not want to do. Mile one contained a lot of thoughts of my mother’s kitchen table, eating stuffed tomatoes and her letting me talk it all out, because I’ve done that before. Mile two was more about getting away, because when I get like this getting away is all I want to do. There is a beach with my name on it and here I am, working twelve hour days and studying for a mid-term. Mile three, or at least we’ll say mile three, was all about complaining. I get that way. Bratty. I want to complain because I’ve worked too hard, because I can’t find another way to say the same thing. Because NO ONE GETS ME. Let’s be honest, mile four was a lot about that, too.

But then, mile four was over.

None of it is gone, really. I still want the cheeseburger, I still want my piece of beach under my feet, I’m still questioning if anyone gets me and I still want to tell my mother all about it. It isn’t gone. But because of the run, I think it’s all a little bit better. A bottle of wine and my bed could very well have done the same thing. But not today.

I genuinely recommend all of the above. The bed, the running, the mom, all good. Just know what you need. Today, when the only things that sounded good were a cheeseburger and paradise, I chose to run.

When I was seventeen, I got into an argument with a classmate because he made fun of me for talking to a certain kid in the hallway. In my classmate’s mind, the person I was talking to wasn’t popular (or cool or socially acceptable or some other word or phrase that means we’re judging someone when we use it). At seventeen, I didn’t likely take the time to realize that some judging is natural, I just defended my actions. What felt natural to me was to protect this person, and my choice to talk to them because some other person, some superior-acting jock guy, thought less of them.

I didn’t understand this then, and I don’t now. I never really spent time in cliques; I was involved in sports, did well in classes, worked part-time and had plenty of fun and plenty of angst, probably just like everyone else. I never felt like there were limits, though, and I never acted like it. So when people put limits on other people, like my classmate did, it makes me angry. No, we cannot all do everything equally, but we are not diminished as people because of that.

The part of this I struggle with most is that it still happens frequently in my life today. And I’m not talking about those natural ways we judge people because we all have the right to decide who can and cannot fit into our lives. What I’m talking about is when those judgments cross the line from deciding if we like someone to deciding that we’re more than someone. This is not okay with me. Superiority for the sake of feeling more than, and subsequently rendering another less, is wrong. And judging someone’s worthiness based on your perception of what they are and what they do is wrong. Of all the things we may question our entitlement to, worthiness is not one of them. In my mind, there is no question. If you are here, you are worth it.

But to say I’m surprised that people, grown adults, will still act like my seventeen-year-old classmate is pretty useless. What will be more helpful is to try. I can try to be sensitive to what’s going on around me. I can continue to make the decision that, while there are many, many battles to get caught up in every day, some are worth the effort. I can do that. We can all do that.

Never one to let a day pass without at least some introspection, let me be the first to say that sometimes it’s just a good idea to let it all go. You can only think so hard about something before that something is going to start to seem a lot less important and another something is going to take it’s place or, at the very least, distract you.

Rather than fight the distraction, though, I think it’s a good idea to welcome it. There are two ways to catch a break in life and while I believe a lot of it has to do with effort, there comes a point where you have to sit back and let things be. What comes into and out of our lives does so for a reason; and there I go getting all introspective again. These things though, that come into our lives, well sometimes they are just that: things. And these things, no matter how superficial they may seem, have their place in making us happy and acting as a distraction that is not so much pushing aside something more important but rather providing a balance that we may need more than we think.

In an effort to not analyze what’s inside my head more than what’s in my house (/car/office/gym bag) I’m going to share some of my “things” that I adore most. While they are not likely to reveal the answers to my deepest questions, they do hold some secret to happiness.

No matter where we live, or what we find comfortable, it can be very important to like what you have to come home to. I think it’s really important to make the space you call home a place that makes you feel good.

For me, I’ve always wanted a home that feels welcome. I want it to be like a place you can come into and feel like you’ve left a little of what burdens you outside. A lot of my friends would say I do this not so much by furnishings but rather by way of the Great Margarita, but that’s only partially the case. I like to think that people can drink margaritas anywhere, what they can’t do is walk through the door, take off their shoes, sit by the fire and pet the dog while they have that margarita. Or coffee. Or chai tea.

The above sign as well as the candle (below) are both from the Sundance catalog. And while I like to believe that Robert Redford personally gift wraps every thing just for me, what I like more about Sundance is it’s Western-but-not-too-Western feel. Maybe it’s because I grew up out here, but I find myself liking Western-inspired decor more and more. Just, you know, not so Western that you feel like you’re a saloon door short of living in Tombstone. Modern Western, if you will. I’m also not a theme kind of person. I like finding a way to incorporate what you like, maybe things you find while traveling, with realistic accessories. It suits me better to have an influence around me rather than a place that screams “hey, how about a lasso with that?”

It’s hard to decorate a home, though. Not only can it be difficult to decide what exactly your tastes are, it can be expensive. And though I love a nice home, I’m not about to give up weekends at the lake or days on the beach in order to get it. I like $600 mirrors but that is not realistic for me, at least not at this point. Which is why I’m glad there are other places that will accommodate the budget of someone who wants nice looking stuff, but doesn’t want to max out the AmEx. This is why I like Pier 1. Yes, that Pier 1, from the olden days, when you’d be dragged around by the hand and told to “absolutely not touch anything, or else.” Or maybe that was just me.

What I like about Pier 1 is not only can you go on a bit of a shopping bender and not feel like you broke the bank afterward but you can find a lot of different things and put them together with things you already own (or buy elsewhere) in a way that looks like you tried. There are a lot of unique things, that if you pair them with your every day $15 throw pillow or $10 rug, can actually make you feel like you don’t just have stuff lying around the house. You can sit down with your book or your remote control ready to watch Rock of Love and look around at your complete room. Complete is a good feeling in a room, and in a home.

Speaking of complete, part of the reason I don’t like to spend a lot of money on some of these little things is because you’re going to use them. I could never be one of those Museum House people where there are things you cannot touch. First of all, anyone that lives with a dog and/or allows children into their home (either their own or someone else’s) will tell you that things, no matter how obsessive your cleaning may be, will be used. And after a while, they will likely start to look that way. I’d rather have a $10 rug the dog can sit on while she barks at invisible cats on the patio than something that costs much more and, let’s face it, all looks the same with dog hair on it anyway.

So if you’ve made it this far, what are some of the little things in your home that make you feel like it’s really home? How do you decorate in a way that incorporates your personality?