lessons.

For someone who lives for perpetual efficiency and self-improvement, it’s hard for me to make peace with the fact that life is basically about learning the same freaking lessons over and over again. Through every stage of life, you forget and you re-learn. It’s infuriating, but I guess it’s also human. 

I’m coming up on a big birthday. It feels important, but in the context of everything else happening and changing, it feels like a blip that will come and go. And I’ve never been one for wild celebrations, especially not when I’m the center of attention. My current plan to ring in the big 3-0? Fresh flowers, take-out fried chicken, and a bottle of Prosecco (and hanging out with my manfriend-for-life). And the actual day will be bookend-ed by a flood of visitors, old friends who make me feel like myself, and that’s something to celebrate.

So I’m working on my birthday list*. I’m feeling pleased with my progress on last year. I started writing my new list before I looked back at this last year’s list, and I’m also feeling a little surprised/not surprised by how many things are coming back around again. I may be resolving to BE CONFIDENT until the end of time, or at least until I’m 100, after which I won’t care. But I think that’s good, actually. It’s good to see myself as I am and as I want to be, to see my own strengths and weaknesses clearly.

So I'm just working, learning lessons, thinking/overthinking on life, and listening to the wild chorus of end-of-summer cicadas just outside my window.

Also, I’m eating frogs today like a boss.

*Birthday lists gone by: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.

things-to-figure-out.

I’ve been putting off an update here because the longer time stretches and the more that happens, the more I lose sight of why I come back here. It starts to feel like this space is impossibly far away from my actual life. I’ve been living some sort of fairyland-crazy life the past few months. I’ve felt trapped beneath a mountain of work (with no end in sight), meanwhile there’s been a parade of friends and family and good food and beaches and moving to a new city full of new adventures.

I don’t feel just one thing. I feel everything. J and I were talking about the emotional life of characters (after a play we saw last weekend), and he said that actors have to channel the fact that humans are feeling a constant, tumbling flood of emotions. You aren’t just HAPPY or ANGRY. From second to second, different emotions are flowing through you, and every so often one emotion lands and sticks a bit longer. Good actors bring this emotional depth to their performances. Good humans (like me) acknowledge that we’re feeling a lot of things all the time.

I’m sitting in my living room right now in our (new) little corner of Chicago, as of three weeks ago. The sky is blue, there’s a tree outside this window, and a warm fall breeze is blowing. I can see the Sears Tower (I mean the Willis Tower). We don’t have a coffee table yet, so there’s nowhere to put my feet up. I’m sitting on the ugly-but-comfortable couch smelling a plum cake that I just pulled out of the oven.

There’s a lot going on right now. My to do list feels endless. Beside the things-to-do, there are things-to-figure-out. WEDDING. Finding freelance work. Finding friends in a new city. A project for the first actual class I’ve taken in seven years.