first day

and so my life as a free-lance what-have-you begins. and it's not too bad, to tell you the truth. i have about a million thank-you cards to write, about a million more things to pack up, and i still need to clean my bathroom. all i can say is thank God for clorox bleach pens. those things are freaking amazing.

i'd did data entry for about a million hours today. i had to wear my reading glasses. i can't really complain, though, because i'm being well compensated, and this little contract job means that i won't have much lag time in getting the payola this month. that makes me very happy.

my friend ottoman is coming to hang out with me this week. i'm pretty excited. he's been at camp all summer long, so we haven't gotten to hang out much. ottoman is the very wise person who told me once that the furthest distance any of us will ever have to travel is the eighteen inches between our brains and our hearts. he's a smart kid and i like chatting with him. funny what happens when kids you had as a camp counselor become your friends.

so my life is beginning something new. i woke up this morning and was just fine. i'll probably miss things more the further away i get from the actual day-in day-out of the job. i'm sure i will wake up in the middle of the night more than once, wondering if i threw away all the pizza boxes, returned the tapes, rented the cars, copied the permission slips, wrote out the check requests, etc. and then i'll remember that i don't do that anymore. and i'll roll right over, turn the pillow to the cool side, and slip right back into my slumber. either that or i'll cry my head off and wonder what the hell i walked away from.

somehow, though, even though both will probably happen, i'm psyched out of my mind to see what happens next. i was talking to esteban this afternoon, and he and i have both had a doozy of the last half-year. we both agreed that we feel like something wonderful is about to happen. someone i was talking to the other day said that the buddha taught that when something wonderful is about to be born, rotten and crappy things happen right in your face, to keep you in the present, and not focused on the future good thing about to happen. i don't know about that rationale, but it sounds fair enough, i guess.

my friend Jesus said that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that if God is big enough to take care of the birds of the air and the flowers in the field, God is big enough to take care of me. that definately sounds fair enough. and i know that whatever and whenever and however the next chapter of my life works itself out-- this is my life, and even when things suck, or when i'm confused, or tired, or just don't know which way to go next, it's my life.

and life is beautiful, even when it's hard. even when you realize that people you've stretched out your hands to could care less, or worse, never cared to begin with and just gave you lip service out of some sick and twisted sense of chivalry, even when you tell the truth and get into trouble for telling it, or when people can't tell the difference between the truth and a big fat lie, there are moments when the beauty of life is enough to break your heart, in a good way. like the time i cried all the way home from work because of a situation i couldn't fix, and the sun was setting right in my rearview mirror, making a vanilla sky right behind me, and in an instant, i was humbled enough to be greatful just to be alive to see that. the situation still sucked, but i had found a little beauty to see me through. or the time i was three weeks away from turning 18 and cried all the way home from san angelo, after a horrible weekend, and i had to pull the car over because it was raining harder than i was crying, and then the clouds broke open and the most vivid rainbow sprawled out across that dark grey west texas sky, and i knew that life was still beautiful. or the time i had my heart ripped out and shoved in a paper bag, only to have said bag thrown on the sidewalk and set promptly on fire and stomped on like a gigantic bag of human waste, but came home to see a beautiful butterbean of a baby with no teeth and huge blue eyes to remind me that love sometimes looks different than we expect it to look, and comes to us in different ways than we expect it. or the time i got all gross and gooby and was almost in tears in the front seat of my own freaking car because two of my cherubs were flirting like mad in the car and i felt like someone's mother on a pre-driving stage car date, added to the fact that i had just found my first gray hair and had come to the crashing conclusion that no matter how much sleep i got or how much cold cream i put on, the wrinkles in my forehead were here to stay, and my fabulous sister in law called to tell me that the most wonderful baby in the whole wide world was going to be coming to see me in 7.5 months. i know that was a horrible run on sentence, and that you got the point after the first two illustrations. but it's my blog, and i'm allowing myself to get carried away. partly because they are stories i love to tell, and partly because the more you say something good, the more it becomes true and lovely. or something like that...

anyway, i'm pooped. in fact, when i went to target today, i got a basket out of the cart corral ( i can't believe i just typed "cart corral"), turned around, and thought --hey, that car looks just like mine, only to realize that it WAS in fact, my car. geeze, oh man. and that's after i got 8 hours of sleep last night. go figure. i think i've hit sleep deficit that's somewhat comprable to the gross nation debt, which, as of last count, is in the trillions. but who's counting, really?

life is good. life is beautiful.

mil besos-rmg