My Life Laid Out

Maybe I am glad that my life is undramatic. I am not a highly emotional person. I do cry sometimes without much provocation. I get the giggles without much humor sometimes, too.

My weeks are pretty much the same. I am married. I have two dogs. I have a house, a car and the bills that go with them. My mail goes to a PO Box. My drycleaner is the cheapest in town. I pick up pre-made chicken cordoun blue for dinner when I am too tired to cook and burnt out on pizza. My car is usually dusty on the outside because everytime I get it washed, it rains. My habits act as if I have more money than I do. I would rather hire people to take care of the weeds, cut my dogs nails, clean the house than do it myself. I am in hyper-drive and I've been this way for a long time. I consider it cheating to eat cookies, french fries or non-diet soda.

Relationships are the most important thing in my life. I could probably make more money than I do. I could find more time to pull my own weeds, clean my own house and wash my own car if I didn't make so much time available to people.

I don't wake up early in the morning. My typical wake up time is between 8 and 9 in the morning. This also makes me feel guilty, but I usually have evening engagements that make me unable to get home before 9 pm and by the time I unwind it's about 11 or 12.

I spend a lot of time worrying about things I shouldn't. My mind is a steel trap in some ways. When I have a list of things to do, I have a hard time letting something go until I can completely cross it off of my mental list as done. Therefore, I tend to feel like I am pestering people and taking on too much responsibility. I should let people handle what their job is.

Then sometimes I get overwhelmed by everything and I end up shutting down totally. I take a day off for no reason and spend most of the day watching my Friends DVDs in bed and eating chips and salsa or string cheese. This happens about once every other week.

I spend the majority of my time either working at my profession or working on my passion. As the past year has rolled by, my passion in working with teenagers has grown. I have increased my energy and time spent with them. Jeremy and I are planning more and more things to help build a basis for a huge amount of growth. We want to establish a steady program to meet most of the teenage sub-cultures and issues. We want to be able to have after school tutoring to a crisis hotline to kickin' events like our all day concert. Our passion is to see them change. We live in a small community that is overrun with meth use, domestic violence, poverty, teenage pregnancies, crime and a high drop out rate.

Yet even with our current meager resources, we have seen an impact on some individual lives. We know that if we weren't here doing what we are doing, they would be different people without much going for them. As it is, they still struggle and get into trouble but they are managing to be better people than their circumstances are dictating.

Today I am finally taking down the Christmas lights from the roof line, replacing light bulbs that have been burnt out for six months and I'm gonna clean the house. We used to have a set meeting in place on Saturday nights. This is the first Saturday without it. I feel free. It's the only day a week that I now have unaccounted for. So it's 11:22 and I'm still in my PJs. I gotta go change and go to Home Depot.