Vacation is no party.

1980 - Small Vintage Portrait on Particle Board

A few days off have put me into thinking mode, one of my all-time favorite modes, as it were, and I'm sifting through my brain, trying to decide where to go and what to do next in my life. I wish I knew, truly. Today, I'm thinking about opening a thrift store. As yesterday's thinking revealed, dreams are sometimes only images flashing across our brains, without any structure to hold them together.

I wish I could step confidently into the dreams I've had for so long. But what I've found in my life, over and again, is that dreams are never what you think they will be. You fall in love, only to discover the hollowness of the other person. You buy an old car, only to realize that you aren't the hobby mechanic you'd hoped to become. You take a job you'd only just imagined in college could exist, only to find it radically conflicts with who you are as a person.

So I've become a little scared to dream, hesitant to take another step forward only to see a nubile dream die with a thud. I'm scared to discover that being human is really as difficult as it seems to be, full of failings and hardship, slim glimpses of true beauty, followed by slippery hope in something more, something big enough to hold, something more substantial.

I think I've stopped trying to find someone to fall in love with because I've realized it's impossible to manipulate, that some things cannot be made to happen, that some things really are out of our control.

Peace, friends :)

Summer house-sitting

Vintage Italian Race Car tie

I am often asked to house-sit, since I'm single and people assume that I will jump at the chance to live in a real house (or maybe they just know I love dogs and central air, and know that I won't have to get a housesitter for my own house, seeing as how I live in a garage and carry all of my valuables with me when I leave).

It's pretty difficult for me to leave my bed for more than an afternoon (it's really an all-purpose piece of furniture: desk, chair, kitchen table, sleeping mechanism). So my experience this summer of housesitting has been a really positive one. I was able to pack up my stuff and drive away, and I was super proud of myself for just doing it, without planning to go home every day to check on my store, but just putting it on vacation, and saying, "I'll mail it Tuesday". I'm proud of myself for getting out of bed, for weeding the garden and playing with the dogs, for taking the opportunity to walk down to the river and stumble upon a pack of super-tan cyclists on some sort of long-distance jaunt with bike trailers. And I'm proud of myself for being the kind of person that people trust to leave their dogs, cat, and schools of fish to care for.

And finally, I'm proud of myself for figuring out how to use the coffee maker, because that kind of failure would have been tragic.