Category: Life Lesson

Don’t get lost. Learn to compromise. Watch bad reality TV.

posted 3rd May 2012    Written by: Rachel    CATEGORY: Inspiration, Life Lesson, Love/Relationships, Quarterlife Crisis, Rachel, Season 6

I used to be scared that I would get lost in a relationship, and that I would have to be the one constantly compromising my dreams. I don’t know where this fear came from, yet I held so steadfastly to the fact that I had to be in control, to make sure I didn’t lose my way or have my dreams derailed. It has taken me 30 years to really figure out who I am and what I want. In the past few years, I have found my calling and comfort in my skin. I don’t want to lose that or the momentum for the big dreams I have.

One of the biggest hurdles that I had to get over to be with Mr. Paul Child, was learning that I won’t get lost in OUR relationship. He’s great about keeping me on track and sitting me down in front of my computer to write, or work on each aspect for my business. He values who I am as an individual, and is willing to support me in all my endeavors. I spent so much time worrying about getting lost, but the funny thing is, I don’t feel lost, and if anything, I feel more myself. I also feel supported and cheered on, at every turn and set-back. And there are a lot of set-backs.

In turn, I’ve had to make sure that I’m supporting his dreams and desires. Embracing the things that he loves to do. Which currently includes searching for a new job for him in a yet unknown location. Building his career. Camping. Jeeping. Off-roading. Traveling to all the national parks. Cue compromise.

This weekend, Mr. Paul Child and I went to the sporting goods store to look at tents and air mattresses. He loves to camp and well, I don’t. My idea of camping is Hampton Inn (no room service? Shut the front door!). It’s great that he wants to include me in the decision of the tent, but honestly, the only opinions I can offer is, “It’s cute” or “I love these little pockets inside.” While he chatted with the sales guy, I ran around the massive store, playing with camo vests, fishing nets, and duck calls.

 

Mr. Paul Child picked out a tent and an air mattress, and we arrived back at my house. With two camping trips on the books, he set it up in my living room for us to sleep in, to ease me into camping. Oh, dear. I stuffed the tent with pillows and made Mr. Paul Child angle the tent so I could see the tv (Pretty sure that’s not going to happen in the woods.). We slept two nights in there, and it wasn’t too bad. I know the woods will be different, but at least it will be reasonably comfortable. I’m accepting this probably won’t be my dream way to spend a weekend, but I will be with the love of my life and it will definitely be a new experience (Plus, excellent time to roast up some of my delicious homemade s’mores).

I’ve been trying to be as giving and open to new things as possible. How do you balance taking care of your needs and continuing to be open and giving to your partner? I honestly don’t know the answer to this. It’s something I think about and I’m pretty sure it’s not formulaic.

Our weekend ended back in a comfortable bed (YES!) watching one of my favorite reality shows. Mr. Paul Child hates these kinds of shows, but he did lay there watching many episodes with me (thank you Netflix streaming!), and didn’t complain. Compromises are little and big. We’re trying to find a balance that makes US both happy.

 

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The Dreamcatcher in the Rye

posted 2nd May 2012    Written by: Jill    CATEGORY: All Posts, Jill, Life Lesson, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 6, Spirituality

Dreamcatchers were the go-to craft for all of my summer camps, art classes, and rainy days.  I amassed quite the collection; all of which lived their elementary art project lives to the fullest before finding their way into the trash.

Maybe the lop-sided strings and broken feathers didn’t have the longest lifespan, but I still haven’t forgotten what dreamcatchers symbolize.

They catch good dreams in their web, and allow them to slide down the feathers to the sleeper.  They trap nightmares, and hold onto them until they disappear in the daylight.

Overlooking the multiple interpretations (and tradition defying commercialization), they’re beautiful little things, aren’t they?  I feel like Camila has one or twenty.

Filtering the good from the bad, they give ease to the sleeper before and during their rest; they savor those good dreams.

I have good dreams.

I dream that I’ll find my niche in the world.  I have a career that is fulfilling, creative, and altruistic.  I’ll look back on my fresh-out-of-college self and laugh; I wish I could tell her to keep her head up, to keep pushing, and to stop wearing sundresses on cold days.

I dream that I’m happy and fulfilled on my own, but am so lucky to be in love (preferably to a boy bander).  I celebrate one of those thirty-something birthdays, and I realize my maternal clock has finally kicked in.  Then, I say  silent prayer of gratitude that I didn’t have a “whoops” incident before this moment (knock on wood times a million).

I dream that I’ve stopped taking things so seriously, and spring for venti (!) soy lattes because life is short!  I say things like “Life is short!” and “Of course we’ll have another round! It’s girls night!”  I enjoy more girls’ nights.  And girls’ days.  And more girl time in general.

Unlike the lucky sleeper with the dreamcatcher above her bed, I also have bad dreams.

They’re nightmares that my little bouts of “the blues” will get out of control, and I won’t be able to handle them anymore.

They’re nightmares where I resemble one of those cinematic stock characters of a middle-aged housewife who drinks too much in the middle of the day and lets her kids play with broken glass.

They’re nightmares that I am alone in an apartment that has a weird smell.  I have too many tchotchkes that remind me of moments I should have enjoyed but didn’t.

It’s a battle between faith and cynicism.

Unfortunately, my cynic is reigning supreme these days.  I roll my eyes at the monotony of another hourly job, and resent how it seems that everyone else is getting their footing in these life-skates.  My good dreams have stopped sliding down my feathers, mostly because I’ve stopped catching them.

Because optimists are annoying.  People who believe that all their dreams can come true?  People who think that life is just rainbows and Hanson concerts? They don’t get REAL life!  AM I RIGHT?!

…said the cynic.  The optimist is cowering in a corner somewhere, nervous that no one will like her.

Maybe it’s less about the black-and-white “cynic” and “optimist” labels, and more about what we visualize, and which dreams we catch.  Those happy optimists are  just catching more good dreams, and putting a little more blind faith in the future.

I have good dreams, and bad dreams, all while I’m awake.

When I’m awake, I’m my own dreamcatcher.  I’m a dreamcatcher who can choose which dreams to hold onto, and which dreams to let disappear in the daylight.

[Photo Credit: ceceliafitzecam]

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Chocolate Cake and Lessons from a 4-year-old

posted 26th April 2012    Written by: Rachel    CATEGORY: Inspiration, Life Lesson, Rachel, Season 6, What I've Learned

My niece, Buggy (her nickname), just turned 4 years old. I got to make her chocolate-strawberry shortcake princess cake. The coolest kid in the world, she’s brilliant, funny, and sassy. Her latest obsession is playing restaurant (be still my chef heart!). Buggy plays so hard that she never breaks character, and chastises anyone who addresses her by her name, and not as “waitress.”

She is strong-willed like I am, and I have to tell you, while I know how difficult it can be to be so determined, I kind of love that about her. I adore that she is a pistol and that she’s bossy. A couple Christmases ago, we were playing bubbles, a riveting game where we fill the kitchen sink with water and bubbles and let her “wash” some plastic dishes. I must have been crowding her, because she turned around and punched me square in the shoulder. Now, she was 2 ½ at the time, so it didn’t hurt but it demanded discipline, and she got into big trouble with her mom. I get it, though. Sometimes you just want to bop someone! All of us have moments like that, but unfortunately as an adult it’s called assault.

Watching her grow up has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. From me she gets unconditional love, attention, and well, let’s be honest, I also spoiler her quite a bit too. But what she gives me is even greater.

These are the greatest lessons that I’ve learned from a 4-year-old:

  1. Live in the moment. She doesn’t care about 1 day from now, 1 hour from now or 1 minute from now. Buggy is happy when she is playing and talking and dancing, in that very moment. The only thing she may care about in 1 minute is if she can have a big piece of chocolate birthday cake or some gummie bears, which leads to #2.
  2. Gummie bears make everything better. It doesn’t matter if it’s accidentally grabbing a cactus or some major life event, sitting down with a bag of gummie bears is a treat and everyone needs a treat.
  3. Filters are for pools. Saying whatever pops into your head is really refreshing. There are definitely times when it is not appreciated, but you’re intention isn’t to be mean, just curious.
  4. Tiaras and costume jewelry ALWAYS go with your outfit. Do I really need to explain this? It’s just the number one 4-year-old fashion rule.
  5. Sing loud and proud. This girl can DANCE and it’s downright crazy how many current pop songs she knows all the words to (I’m a little ashamed of my lack of lyrical ability).  No one rocks a car dance party from her car seat perch better than Buggy. She doesn’t care if we are in the middle of the store or playing Just Dance at home, she’s a dance and singing maven. She also doesn’t care how well you dance or sing, you will be joining her in the dance party, even in the middle of the store.
  6. Hugs are always necessary. I think we forget this as adults. We get so wrapped up in our daily life and zipping around, that we forget small acts of love make us feel better.
  7. It’s okay to be upset sometimes. I’m always trying to make myself happy, but sometimes, even at age 4, you just have to be upset for a little bit. When you lose your favorite costume jewelry ring or your Playdoh dries up, you can be upset for a few moments. Then eat some gummie bears, and things will start to look up.
  8. Big mice are freaky. She’s terrified of Chuck E. Cheese and well, so am I! I don’t know what weirdo teenager is dressed up in that rat costume. It’s freaking scary when he comes up behind you and then hovers. I get it, Buggy!
  9. Always tell people you miss them and love them. It’s so simple but when a 4-year-old says it to you, you melt, and then realize that displaying more of this love is needed in the world.

Happy Birthday, Buggy! Thank you for giving me so much! I love you!

 

 

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The Rachel Berry Experience

posted 25th April 2012    Written by: Jill    CATEGORY: All Posts, Creativity, Jill, Life Lesson, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 6

There are two things that really get under my skin: screwing up, and Glee.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of the former lately.   I’m leaving a trail of little failure-flavored breadcrumbs everywhere I go.

Let’s first visit the elephant in the blog; I missed a post last week.  I missed a post last week for no good reason other than I don’t like anything I’m writing.

Search parties went out; the good people at Microsoft Word emailed me to inquire why I had twenty-four unsaved drafts open; my mom kept texting me about what was up with my QLC that week (she needed to know!).  Things happened.

Things happened, except the whole “finishing the post” part.  Whoops.

Breadcrumb #2 is very personified; it shakes its finger at me and says, “Oh, Jill, you know better!”

For my new job as a teacher’s aide, there’s a stack of paperwork that needs to be processed and cleared. The tentative start date was dependent on making sure everything was copacetic paperwork-wise, and I put a wee bit too much faith in everything going smoothly.

Needless to say, it didn’t.  I found out that it will take “at least 75 days” to process a certain form, which left me temporarily unemployed.  I picked up a part-time barista job to fill the gap, and it has put a little damper on my new-job-new-me (!) excitement.  My, how the mighty-employed have fallen.

Sprinkle in some daily slept-in-too-late, drank-too-much-wine-by-myself-again, argued-that-the-San-Francisco-Giants-were-a-football-team flubs, and pretty soon I started to feel like a big dummy.  That’s right, a dummy!

I decided to throw myself a pity-party.  I got a stack of girly magazines and bright colored nail polish, and pumped up a cheerful Pandora station (my pity-parties are straight out of a sorority movie, and a damn good time).

But Pandora is a tricky little minx.  She started playing Glee.

Ugggghhhh.  You weren’t invited to my pity-party, Rachel Berry!  I walked over to my laptop to skip the song, when I got a little spring in my step.  Maybe my hips started shakin’ a little, too.  Maybe, just maybe, I morphed into the braces and glasses wearing, pigtail sporting, Rainbow Brite backpack toting version of my pre-teen self and danced like a fool in my room.

The song is so peppy!  The lyrics are so relatable!  I’m just so happy right now!

It was a concentrated dose of Prozac in the form of cheesy pop music and white-girl dance moves.  It was the cherry on top of my pity-party sundae.

This got me to thinking; if there’s a hidden nook of Glee that is not completely terrible, maybe there’s something to screwing up that isn’t so bad, either.

The lesson I learned from missing last week’s post: nothing will ever be perfect.  Even when I enjoy doing something so much, there will be a time when things don’t go as planned.  I could find my perfect job, perfect grad program, perfect living situation tomorrow, and I will be one hundred percent confident that it won’t be perfect all the time.  I’m learning to be okay with that, and to admit that (deep breath) I’m imperfect.

The silver lining of the great paperwork snafu of 2012: I am relearning how to make the best of things.  Going back to barista-ing isn’t exactly at the top of my bucket list, but neither is being homeless.  I solemnly swear to not complain, to make a few new friends, and to learn a thing or two about coffee.  As much as I hate to think about it, this probably isn’t going to be the last time in my life when things aren’t the way I envisioned they would be.  I don’t want to write times like these off as “times I can’t be happy.”  If nothing else, I’d like to write them off as “the dark times when I listened to Glee and didn’t hate it.”   

As for my daily dummies, I think that’s just how I am.  Sometimes, I’m just a bubble.  It’s a me-quirk!  And for the record, I know that the San Francisco Giants are a soccer team, guys.

The moral of the story is when life throws a big, red slushie in your face, break out into song and dance!

[Photo Credit: Redagamea]

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Under the Influence

posted 23rd April 2012    Written by: Arielle    CATEGORY: All Posts, Arielle, Life Lesson, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 6

When I was 15 years old, 5 friends and I sat in a circle, passing around a beer we had stolen from someone’s parents. Though we only had a few sips each, we still giggled at the drunkenness we thought we were feeling.

At 16, after a few more incidents of sipping alcohol with probably no effects, I found myself on a cruise pounding shots of 151 with my friend while her parents slept in their room on the other side of the ship.

That’s how my tumultuous love affair with alcohol began.

A survey of my first few Stratejoy posts reveals the following words: drunk beer-tears vodka hangover tequila Bud-Lights booze drinking big-drinker pub-crawl VODKA hangover

That’s a lot of boozy words. More than I realized. It’s like these words just kind of snuck themselves into my blog posts and embedded themselves there. In a way, that’s what alcohol does in my life, too. It weaves its way seamlessly through my experiences, an indispensable accessory, tricking me into thinking that it doesn’t have that big of a hold on me, until, just like counting the alcohol-related words in my Stratejoy posts, something snaps me into reality.

The thing about being told that you drink too much is that it’s a lose-lose situation.

If you say, “You’re right, I do drink too much,” you’re an alcoholic.

If you say, “No, I do NOT drink too much,” you look like you’re in denial, and then AHA, you’re an alcoholic who hasn’t accepted that age-old adage, “The first step is admitting you have a problem.”

For what it’s worth, I would like to submit to the jury the following statement:

My name is Arielle, and I am not an alcoholic. But I do love drinking.

Further clarification from the friend who confronted me about my drinking yielded that I need to stop relying on alcohol. Which, for the record, I totally agree with.

Yes, I drink to relieve stress. Yes, I drink to forget that I’m feeling particularly bad about myself on a given day. And yes, I drink to make myself bolder and more fun.

I’m not proud of any of it. Not of the fact that I drink to forget all the self-loathing (which, FYI, sometimes backfires and makes me feel worse), and definitely not of the fact that I cannot imagine ever trying to flirt with a guy or give him my number without the mighty alcohol buzz of courage.

The tricky part, though, is finding the balance between drinking for fun and drinking to escape. This is particularly complicated because I love going out. I’d much rather spend my weekends having drunken shenanigans than staying in watching TV. I love brunches with unlimited mimosas, happy hours, silly drinking games, pregaming for events, pub crawls, birthday parties, going to bars to watch sports, and being drunk to the point of thinking I’m the BEST DANCER EVER. Want to go out and collapse into bed at 5am? Yes, let’s.

I definitely haven’t been drinking more since my wonderful quarterlife crisis started. In fact, in an effort to save money I’ve cut back on casual drinking, preferring to save my cash for the big nights out. Or as I’ve started telling people, “I’m cutting down on drinking when I’m not trying to get wasted.”

I know, I know. DOING IT WRONG.

So if my drinking habits haven’t changed, and it’s only the mentality behind the drinking that is occasionally unhealthy, how do I combat this? How do I separate the fun drinking from the stress drinking, the drinking that makes me feel wonderful from the drinking that leaves me sobbing and trying to calm myself down enough so that I don’t make a scene on my subway ride home? (This is happening more frequently than I would like, lately)

I cannot go through life relying on self-medication as a way of either forgetting what the hell is bothering me or enhancing who I already am. I don’t want to change the part of me that loves seeking out happy hour specials and other fun drinking events, I just don’t want to believe that the drunk version of me is the best version of me and the only version of me worth anyone’s time. I shouldn’t need to down a few vodka sodas before feeling comfortable in my own skin or in my own life.

It’s fortuitous that, as I was writing this post, fellow blogger Caiti posted her own great story about dropping some bad drinking habits. It was like a glimpse into my future, one in which I don’t turn to alcohol when I need some bravery or a shoulder to cry on.

It’s all too obvious to me what I need to do now, and it scares me to the point that I avoided writing it in the first several iterations of this post because I don’t want to actually become accountable for it.

I need to stop drinking. At least temporarily. So for the month of May, no booze.

I’ve known for awhile that I need to do this. To figure out who I am without needing alcohol to tell me, and to really evaluate the role that drinking has in my life right now and what role I want it to have going forward. But it freaks me the fuck out. The idea of going into social situations without a beer in my hand is more frightening to me than the moment before I dove into a 440-foot chasm with a bungee cord around my ankles. Which I’m pretty sure is a sign that it needs to be done.

I’m already panicking. I’m imagining all the awkward situations that I can’t drink my way out of, all the nights where I’m feeling less than stellar that I can’t forget by coating my feelings in liquor. For one month, I’m going to face my life head on and clear-headed.

It might suck, but it needs to be done. I hope it’s worthwhile.

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