Trips Home and Down Memory Lane

When my semester wraps up in May I'm planning to head east to BFE and spend a week in my childhood home.  Two family friends who are really like adopted great aunts are aging pretty quickly and so to make the trip more enjoyable I've offered to help them with any tasks they've been having trouble getting to.  The offer was also extended to my mother and my grandmother.  I'm also planning to bring each of these lovely ladies a late mother's day gift of a basket containing yummy tea, nova scotia oat cakes, jam and a little pot of annuals. Neither Jeannie nor Lavada have grandchildren and I love filling in as defacto family.  It reminds me that family can be chosen and that love extended to someone who needs it is returned with a gratitude that is worth the tiny effort of extension.

Yesterday I found myself wondering who I would want to be in my wedding with me.  I honestly don't know how one comes to this decision.  There are girlfriends who have come relatively recently to my life but have made a great impact, those who I have had very strenuous relationships with but whom I still consider like a sister, those who I grew up with but who have grown apart due to new developments in their own lives.

I finally found the dress I plan to wear to my brother's wedding.  I'm a little afraid it's going to be a bit too short but I have great motivation to work on my legs all summer!

Dilapidated and Abandoned

There is something inherently and hauntingly beautiful about images of abandoned property.  This has been a subject of near obsession for me since I was a little girl wondering about the beautiful, dilapidated farmhouses and the little one room school house near Uncle Wayne's farm.  What was the moment when someone last locked up these places, walked away and never came back?  What was the purpose of the building?  Why had no one bothered to dispose of the place?  Would it be dangerous for me to go in and explore?  I want to know about the people who occupied these places.  I want to know about the reasons they left these places.  I want the stories of life and love that haunt these places.  As a farm child I had a considerable amount of daydream time allotted to me and I would create these elaborate stories about these places and why they stand abandoned.  These places are complex characterizations of my imagination.  I only wish I were brave or stupid enough to explore abandoned properties.

Because I Get Worked Up Over Lawmakers Sometimes

Lawmakers are infuriating.  I'm not sure if this is just a condition of being young or naive or both but I get this feeling of dissatisfaction for the way people who are older than me think and behave.  It seems as though I'm occupying a world that has to work around the people who are in power to lift up ideas and projects that will work; that are proven to work.  I have very little respect for federal government.  I dont want to work with the other states.  I like living in my blue bubble of opportunity and ideas and not restricting other people's rights because my flying spaghetti monster had followers that wrote a book of rules to live by 6,000 years ago that I pick and choose from to satisfy my cause because if I lived by all of them, I would be seriously contradicting myself at every turn.  I don't want lawmakers from Mississippi to have a say in what I do in Colorado.  And I certainly don't want Paul Ryan to have his sticky little fingers on budget reform.  Maybe it's idealistic but I firmly believe the world will be a better place when natural selection of ideas wins out and these places that churn out these lunatics have no population replacement because they've lost their intelligence base to cities where you don't have to be an anarchist to live.  The lifestyles of these people will kill them off sooner or later.  In the meantime, I wish the squashers of ideas for progress would just stay the hell home with their opinions.

The snow is causing some serious seasonal mood disorder happenings in my household.  I don't have any interest in feeling cold so I'm skipping classes in the interest of warmth and comfort while at the same time causing cabin fever.  Tomorrow is suppose to be nicer, I think.  Then the weekend and then more snow Monday. FML.

I had an opportunity to meet with someone doing the job I'd like to someday do.  It was incredibly enlightening and he gave me some great insight into Grad school.  Then I spoke with my program advisor who clued me in on the new and improved MURP program at UC-Denver and now I'm thinking about staying again.  It would be easy to stay.  I love it here (apropos the weather this April), I have friends and family and a support network of people who have my best interest at heart, I have already started making contacts in the world I wish to work in and that alone can be it's own job, I like what the future is looking like for this city, I'm in tuned to what is happening here.  But is it in my best interest to do what is easy?  I'm thinking I'll apply at Denver, Portland and Seattle and let the chips fall where they may.  I sure as shit will be staying the hell away from any Red States until things improve in their thinking.

What to Wear and Loss of Control

September is still a few months away but I'm already on the search for what I should wear to my little brother's wedding.  I'm not thrilled that my future sister in law seems to not be my biggest fan.  And I'm not thrilled about the wedding in general; however, family means that I get to keep all of that to myself and pretend to be thrilled about this thing.  I have to pretend to be thrilled hearing about this girl stealing ideas that I had about my own potential nuptials.  But on a side note, whatever ideas she uses that I thought I might like to utilize, I realize that my tastes may change and new ideas will come along in the meantime.  Lucky for me, I will get to travel to BFE Nebraska to celebrate with people who make me cringe.  The plan is to self medicate with alcohol for the better part of the process.

What do you wear to your brother's wedding?  I Googled it.  I didn't find an answer.  I did find that white is a big no no and people have mixed feelings about black.  I assume there will be quite a bit of walking on dirt and grass so stilettos might not be in my best interest.  By September, after having run pretty seriously all summer, I'm hopping to be in really great physical shape so maybe I can rock strapless?  At any rate these pictures will be framed and in public for potentially the rest of my life and I'd like to not regret what I wore when I look at them in my future.  This makes buying a dress a bigger deal than it probably should be.

The next few months of my life are completely impossible to try and predict and just about impossible to plan for.  The hardest part for me is letting go of control long enough to just let them happen the way they will.  I just want to orchestrate the whole thing and make it go the way I want it to go.