Sell/Use by: ____

A few weekends ago I went over to a friend's house for the evening for champagne, homemade tiramisu (courtesy of moi), and to exchange a few stories from last year.  She just got out of a good relationship, and to be quite honest so did I (well--it feels like "just"), but the one conspicuous similarity between the two is that there was a time limit on both.  An expiration date that hovered in our periphery the whole time, that sometimes squeezed the breath out of my lungs with its inevitability, but still hauled us off toward happiness.

That horrible, hovering inevitability could only be disregarded when I consciously decided to make the most of my time left in Edinburgh.  When I got up at a reasonable hour and decided that instead of hanging around and being useless all day, I'd drag someone I wanted to spend the day with to the botanic gardens, or to a movie and then for a pint, or--you get the point.  The deadline-related panic only abated when I spent my time doing something fun with a friend.

Consciously deciding to make the most of your day, though, doesn't apply only to romantic relationships.  The world could be caving in, but we're still surrounded by people who love us and who we love in return.  We shouldn't forget that, even if we're not surrounded by all the people we love at present.

What I'm getting at is that life is a lot happier when we live as if we have an upcoming expiration date (even when we don't)--an expiration date that we've decided to disregard so we can make the most of what's left of our fleeting butterfly lives.

It's difficult, and sometimes requires an excessive amount of optimism.  I won't try to deny that.  But it's worth it.  We can find small bursts of laughter in more places than we're willing to believe, and those amusements build up into something resembling a happy life.  It's worth it.

Monstrous Catch-Up #3

Leave home long time; April 17, 2011

Original post can be found here.

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Ta-daaa! I’ve had my first traveling-related epiphany!

Okay, it’s not actually travel related. But it stems from the travel and is more all-encompassingly-life-related. (It feels kind of silly, actually, because it’s one of those things that I definitely ought to have realized earlier.)

Traveling the way I have, by myself and randomly meeting people and talking to strangers (in a way I wouldn’t be if a friend had come with me)—it’s one of those states of being where everyone you have fun with (and everyone you don’t) disappears within a few days, max. I met a wonderful girl last night on a three hour train ride that I will never see again. She’s just—disappeared into the world.

So… it made me realize how important friends are. The people that are constantly in your life, the ones who aren’t going anywhere. The people you see every day and value their company, but maybe don’t necessarily share with anyone how much more dull life would be if they weren’t around.

Sooo—this is kind of awkward, even in print where you can’t necessarily see my awkwardness—I want everyone to know that I’m glad they’re my friend. Everyone I live with this year, everyone I’m going to live with next year, everyone who I’ve ever gone to lunch or hung out or gone out with on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night. Everyone I’ve ever shared any form of writing with. All my friends from high school, and everyone from my first two years at UCSB, and everyone who has been kind to me this year, regardless of how often we talk at this precise moment in time.

Sappy and sentimental? Yes. Will I be embarrassed if you bring this up next time I see you? Most definitely. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

(And if you make it awkward enough, you’ll probably even get a hug because I won’t know how else to respond.)

Handy-dandy wild girls

Today's been interesting. This whole week has been pretty fantastic, actually. All things considered. (The time taken to write this post is actually a major procrastination effort. =P) I received three emails this week from Writer's Digest, letting me know that I one of my short stories, Wings on Her Feet, won 31st place in their 2010 genre short story competition, and two of my poems (Morning Glory and Yesterday in the Sun) won 74th and 76th places in their 2010 non-rhyming poetry contest.

I was eating when the short story announcement came through, but I definitely screamed when I got the other two. Being in the top 100 for a contest of this size is just as immense as the competition. There were so many submissions that Writer's Digest is announcing 1,001 winners. (And as I told someone earlier, if I'd known thousands of people entered these contests every year, I probably wouldn't have.) But this is the kind of thing that will help me get published in other magazine and journals.

So, other than that, what else has happened this week? We had our first (and only) flat party. It got out of hand. I still had fun. :) Aaaand I got to spend today showing off my handygirl skills that I picked up a few summers ago while fixing up a house in Vegas, which was kind of fun. I tend to have a little too much fun with plaster. If I play my cards right, no one will ever be able to tell what happened. Which would be fantastic, because otherwise we're going to be charged an arm and a leg to replace a door.

Mostly, though, it wasn't such a terrible party. Quite a success, in fact, though later on in the evening was a bit more than I could handle. (I went to hide in my room after my friends left.) I had a healthy handful of friends show up, and I'm so, so glad they did. I had to disappear a few times to take care of different things, but it was wonderful to have people I knew to hang out with. And, of course, they kept me from completely losing my mind.

This is most of us (we should have gotten someone we didn't know to take the picture. Oops.):