Life In The Fast Lane

Cause when your hourglass runs out of sand
You can't flip it over and start again
Take every breathe God gives you for what it's worth
Don't Blink

-- Kenny Chesney

Something I notice more as life goes on is that each day, month and year go by faster than the previous one. But life seems to move like this in more aspects than time. Upon coming to school I entered this "relationship" before labor day even happened. We went from studying together, to talking, to grabbing meals together, to spending a few nights together, to literally living with each other in a matter of days. About a month later it was over. And that is how I saw a lot of things happen relationship wise around campus. People would start dating and all of a sudden they were attached at the hip. I'm guilty of wanting to spend an ungodly amount of time with the person I like but why is it that college brings this change? Are we so desperate to grow up, to have some bragging story to tell to our buddies back home, or just someone to bring home for a weekend?
Is that we think we are suppose to do? So we don't have parents around to tell us what to do, so I'm going to sleep in my boyfriends bed every night. Because these things are new, being able to eat, study, drink and sleep next to the same person uninterrupted (unless of course you go to class occasionally), do we feel like we have to be doing them constantly? Or do we just really have the desire to be there all the time? Is it the feeling of being in their arms that makes you want to sleep there? What is our motivation for having these relationship on fast forward?
Everything comes fast in college; test, weight gain, drugs, alcohol and sex. But is it possible that emotions do as well? That beneath the on going struggle of text books and the haze of a black out we aren't just rebelling but actually caring for another human faster than we thought was possible. At a time in our lives were we are suppose to be selfish, slutty and irresponsible, is falling in love something that can actually happen?

I Love You But I Hate You

*Brought to you by Thought Catalog- Ryan O'Connell*

If you love someone, you run the risk of not loving them one day. You run the risk of seeing them in a grocery store years later and hiding behind the display of bananas so you won’t have to say anything to them and pretend that the love never happened. It’s funny, isn’t it? When you run into someone like your childhood best friend (the one you haven’t seen in years, the one who became a Christian and has a Coach bag), you say hello. You hug, quickly find out what they’re doing with their life, if they’re happy, and then you move on. Sure, it’s awkward, and there might be a temporary ache in your chest afterwards (time can be unkind) but you acknowledge them, you pay tribute with a smile, a hug, a “How are you doing?”
With the people you once loved, the people that once had an all-access pass to the most intimate details of your life, you sometimes can’t pay tribute. You can’t ask them about their work, their travels, or god forbid, their family. Your mind can’t process it. They can only exist in black and white; they can either be everything or nothing. You say hello to the person you played with when you were five, and ignore the person whose cum you swallowed, who once cried to you in a cab because everything was going wrong and oh my god, you wanted to help them, wanted to save them.
Who do we hold on to and who do we force ourselves to forget? The hardest thing about love often seems to be the extremes. How quickly it can go from “hold me through the night” to “get fuck off of me.” One day you’re in a hotel gift shop with the person you love and you look over at them and start to see different things, things you wish you were never able to see. This is the beginning of the end, the beginning of “get the fuck off of me.” You know in that moment that you’ll be ignoring them five years from now in a grocery store.
You always have the ability to hate someone you love. Hate is passion just like love is passion. You must know this when you sign the love contract. “I hereby acknowledge that loving you carries the potential for disaster. I hereby acknowledge the possibility of hating your fucking guts!!!” Will this stop anyone from loving? More importantly, should it? No.
In a way, hate can be the best compliment next to love. Because the second you’re able to come up to your ex in that grocery store or on the street, you’ve healed and moved on.  The love exists now in a healthy compartment in your brain or not at all. This is all very well and good, but it also means that it’s truly done. Technically, this is what’s supposed to happen. This is the path you’re supposed to be on. But losing the passion can sometimes be the hardest thing to give up. Holding on to feelings, whether it’s love or hate, reminds you that you’re still alive and that the relationship happened. Or something.

Love is Like Walmart, It's Stressful

Sometimes doing the easy thing isn't right, sometimes doing the right thing isn't easy. 

I'll be the first to tell you I'm not an angel. In fact on Judgement day I half expect God to look, laugh and press a button dropping me off his cloud. I will tell you that I'm pretty damn honest though. If I don't like you, if I don't like something you did or something you said it is typically pretty easy to find out. However, even though I'm honest, I have a tendency of doing the easy thing instead of the right one. 

Rather it was weathering the storm of a bad relationship to ease social standings or picking college algebra over AP Calculus senior year, the easy way out was the only way out in my world. 

So the question I pose today is, if the right thing hurts someone, but doing the easy thing does too, then which do you choose? 

Well don't worry, your intellectual answers aren't necessary, because I kind of already answered it my self. After about a month of deliberation I've choose the right thing is better. It is actually always better. While choosing the right thing hurt one person, that person will be fine, if I had choose the easy way I would've been hurting everyone involved including myself. And in the end it isn't about what was easy, it is about what feels right. At the end of the day I'm the only one who has to live with my decision, so why not choose the one that makes me happy? 

I may be selfish, impatient, manipulative, or simply a bitch but at least I know I'm honest, and I rather be called a bitch than a liar any day. 

It wasn't easy to do the right thing, but nothing in life that is worth having is.

PS The title of this blog post was inspired by the most brilliant man I know, my daddy.

A Simple Kind Of Lovin'

One night driving home from a shopping trip with my mom I asked her if she could have one thing in her life what would it be. After moment of thought she responded with "a simpler life." After a few moments of panic, because that was my answer too, I slowly realized I was becoming my mother.
I want to be able to make quilts for my children, to sew their Halloween costumes and make a family dinner every night. I don't want to live in a cookie cutter house, and have to drive an hour to and from work, and I want everything to always be a hundred percent honest. And the last statement is where this simpler life style is lost. We are all so worried about being politically correct, about not hurting someone, but as my mom pointed out to me while I was home a few weekends ago, by lying we are only hurting ourselves.
I want to go camping, and read for pleasure. To spend a day in bed with the windows open listening to the rain instead of running from class to class. I want to rake leaves and bake banana bread, I want a constant stream of country music to be playing from a radio in my house. I want large family get togethers, and a nightly glass of wine. I want a dog and a truck and an ice cold beer, and to fly kites and play with chalk.
I don't need five TVs, I don't need an iPhone or the latest car. We get so caught up in being caught up that we forget the important things in life. We don't remember that test we failed, or the paper we forgot to write freshman year. You can't plan life. Life is what happens while you are planning.

Life Savers

"You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"

-- Jodi Picoult

I haven't updated in a while so I apologize for repetition. If you ask me at the right moment I would tell you that sometimes it seems like life is hazing me. Like I'm jumping through these ridiculous hoops to get to the one place I hope to belong. And once I think I can handle it, that I know the exact height to jump and when, they set the rings on fire and place them over a pool of sharks.

So my question is when we are drowning, when we are over our head and close to giving up, how do we pull through? 

Answer? The people we allow into our lives. 

Feel free to get nauseous, to say I'm going soft, because maybe I am, but there is a quote saying that a true friend reaches for your hand but touches your heart. Once you are finished gagging, hear me out. To say I have trust issues may be an understatement, but recently I've started this 100 percent honesty thing with this guy. How do I know he is being honest? I guess I don't, but I can't imagine why he would lie. 99 percent of the time we get in over heads because of lies we tell, or the situations we put ourselves in, and that is what I was doing. I've never had a more honest friendship with anyone before. He truly reached past all my external flaws and choose to see and accept the internal ones. He, like my friends in the previous post, are the people in our lives that throw us the lifesavers when we need them. 

We don't always know where we are going, or what we are doing. And the obstacles that life chooses to haze us with become tedious or destructive. But we hang on because we have people that are hanging on to us. 

Love Me!

There is something to be said about someone who loves you even when you aren't lovable.

Maybe its a girl thing, but numerous times in my life I have heard the sentence "these girls will be your bridesmaids." It is silly really, girls spend most of their life choosing their bridesmaids, they usually know the girls standing up there with them longer than the man they are marrying. They have been through more with them, these friends have seen a side of them that man hasn't. And that seems to be forgotten when we are growing up. We forget about the people who answer their phones at 3 AM as you do the wake of shame (walk of triumph) to your room, and goes to Planned Parenthood to buy plan b with you. They know you hide your condoms in your band aid box and they know when you say you're okay, you are lying. But we get wrapped up in relationships, we spend more time at the significant others house, or eating with them, and less time with the people who listen to you gush about him. & lets be honest, except for one time those boys fade away, they break promises, and forever doesn't last and those friends are still there for us to come back to. Today for no particular reason, I realized why I love my friends so much. Because they know me and still love me. I've talked about wanting to be able to stand emotional bare in front of someone and have them still love me, but have failed to realize I have a group of people who already do. 

Me & my best friend Matt @ prom senior year

Me & my sister at a game

Me & my sisters Taryn, Sam & Katie in our Sorority house

Bethany, Sarah and Sadie. Three girls that literally hold me together.

My Tattoo

For a year people have been asking about the meaning of my tattoo. Its a thick, black peace sign on the top of my right foot. My response is usually just that I like peace signs, I'm a hippie at heart, pretty typical things. But the peace sign is much more to me than that. As I have talked about before my parents fight, a lot. I have always been aware of violence and hate and as a child I had to go to therapy because of some irrational fears I had. I'd go in and we would make these worry dolls that I could put on my bed to protect me. I was afraid of fires, of my parents dying, or of the house being broken into. Every night either ended with me laying in my bed bawling or laying on a mattress on my parents floor. They would leave to go to the grocery store and I would stand and cry at the window till they got back. I was in 4th grade. This was when I started to draw peace signs. Compulsively. I would get nervous and trace them on my wrist and would draw them in class to stay awake. The habit never got kicked. I still do it today, but surprisingly after learning the meaning of the peace sign I began to feel relaxed by it. Which is why there is one on my foot. I don't have to tell you the evils of the world, or that life is hard, but when I see my peace sign I calm down, it is like having a security blanket always attached to you.
So that's why.

P.S I'm in an awful mood sorry if this sucks.