*Note* First off, please excuse the crickets and tumble weed for the past few weeks. Getting rid of that pesky quarter inch (done. kinda), closing out the year strong in my Actual Job (done) and holiday partying like Clark Griswold (doing) have made sitting down long enough to string a few pseudo-coherent half-thoughts together rather difficult. Some day if the dream lives and this operation goes legit with more than just one writer monkey at the helm, you won't even notice my absence. But for now, suck it. I've been busy. So back to the post at hand.....
I know, I know, December self-reflection. It's so cliche.
But this dose of meditation has less to do with 2009 drawing to a close and more to do with the fact that recently I entered my name in the lottery for this particular self-inflicted torture. As I clicked “enter”, I was struck by the reality of how different my life is now from just one year ago. “Swim across the Chesapeake Bay? Oh you must mean because Osama bin Laden himself has attacked Sandy Point, and this is the one way humanity and America can be saved.”
That is how I would’ve likely responded to that notion a mere twelve flips of the calendar ago.
Additionally, in the days since that particular run of the computer mouse, I’ve been acutely aware of what I’m doing at any particular moment, and I’ve found myself comparing it to exactly what I was doing one year ago. Why? Well, let me annoyingly answer a question with another question: How much does your life change from one year to the next? Really, truly change? If you spent a moment jotting down the things that are true about your life today, place of employment, residence, family, friends, your hobbies, your pets, anything, and compared it all to a list of things that were true about your life one year ago, how much of it would really be different? Our lives are rarely identical from one year to the next, but change typically occurs piecemeal, in one aspect of our lives at a time. As such, even if there is a Big Event, such as a new job/spouse/child, most of the other things we know to be true are still in place. Life is still mostly familiar. However, every once in awhile, a comparison of two lives separated by nothing more than 365 days could not be more striking.
If you were a spectator to my life last year at this time, you would already know that last December my life was one big hot mess. My often-charmed existence could more aptly be described as cursed. The operation had gone horridly haywire, the wheels had come flying off the machine, and the appropriate Google image search would yield this beauty. In short, things were “no bueno”. Occasionally, I would spot someone in my immediate company take a step or two back when they thought I wasn’t looking, presumably to avoid getting struck by all the lightening.
I can’t say I blamed them.
What happened? Well, rewind to Thanksgiving of 2008, when life seemed to be ticking along quite nicely. I had exciting career prospects, a boyfriend who had me smitten, and a rock solid plan to quit this hell hole called Baltimore and go back home to a sweet new crib in Philly, where I clearly belonged. Then December 1 hit, and a big roll of the dice turned up a losing combination. In what can only be described as cinematic fashion, someone turned the leaf blower on the house of cards that was my life. I’ll refrain from boring you with unnecessary detail, but suffice to say by the time the ball dropped on Times Square welcoming 2009, I found myself unemployed, heartbroken and moving into my parents‘ house, exactly what every modern girl in her 30’s dreams for her life.
Oh, did I forget to mention that grandma kicked the bucket that month, too? Even through the tears I couldn’t help but appreciate the comedic timing of all the shitiness. Had my limbs started falling off one by one, I can’t say I would’ve batted an eyelash.
Good times!
I've always said that bad times are a blessing, because it gives the people who love you a chance to flex their friendship muscles and show their stuff. If you find yourself in the midst of a tough spot and you don't find your loved ones elbowing each other out of the way in their rush pick you up and carry you through your misery, then either you've chosen the wrong set of friends or you haven't been a very good one to them. And thus, at very least my friend-picking skills proved rock solid, and once again it became evident how blessed I am with great family, as everyone stood by me like champions. My parents put a roof over my head and food in my cats’ bowls. My sister gave me a spare key to her house in case I needed escape. Dr. Shazam offered her "poo throwing services" and other various methods of creative revenge. I remember one weekend where Becky and Tad, God bless them, dragged me from one holiday party to the next, finally waving the white flag and taking me home as, “oh, for the love of God, she's crying again."
Rarely in life do we have the opportunity and/or are forced to start over essentially from scratch, but January 1, 2009 found me sitting in my old bedroom gearing up to do just that. With no job, no mortgage, no spouse, no children, and not even a car payment to hold me down, I really could do anything I fancied. So did I follow in the footsteps of Frances May and Elizabeth Gilbert, blazing my own trail to find love and adventure overseas? Well, no. As a matter of fact, turns out that being unemployed during one of the worst job markets in recent history causes one to lose the gumption to spend even a few weeks pissing through some severance money in Italy. (I’ll have to leave that to the next time I get laid off, sigh.) But over the course of the next few months, I landed a great gig, I bought a cute little postage stamp of a house and dusted off an old love by diving back into the pool. As a result of those three actions, I scan the landscape of my current world and marvel at how few things in my day to day life remotely resemble what was true last year at this time. Where I wake up, what I spend my time doing and with whom I spend that time are utterly different. A few months ago I completed my first triathlon, and two days ago I hopped in the pool to knock out a 4000 meter swim. The notion of either last December would’ve inspired little more than a confused, blank look. Exactly one year from the night Becky and Tad lugged a whimpering blob around Wilmington, I poured myself a drink at a holiday party in Baltimore and toasted a room full of good friends, not one of whom I knew existed one year ago. These are just a few of a seemingly endless list of examples.
To be fair, there is much that remains consistent. My family is the same, I am still the owner of two ornery pets, and my long time friends are still there, even if primarily via Facebook. I still have all my limbs, and once again I have an orange pork chop on my business card. Additionally, some of the changes have been sad ones. There are people who are definitively absent from my life, and the word Edgely is not currently in my daily vernacular. Mad4Mex happy hours are at most a biannual treat instead of a weekly occurrence, and I’m fairly certain my forehand flick is getting worse and worse by the moment, if that’s even possible.
Out of all of this, one of the coolest pieces for me is a renewed respect for the concept of time, something that is so easy to take for granted. If the world has collapsed around your feet, think of what awaits only a couple hundred days out, when you’ve worked your way through the storm. Similarly, if you find yourself in a good place, be sure to appreciate the present, because the leaf blower could be getting gassed up at this very moment, just for you. The beauty of the cycle, though, is that even if two weeks from now you were to find yourself clamoring around, picking up cards off the wet pavement, six, twelve or perhaps sixteen weeks later would likely yield a whole new house of cards, probably better than the old one or, at very least, different in a cool way. Cheers to all that.
Clearly not playing with a full deck,
khop
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