Burlap Soul

We're home. I was supposed to return to work today, but seeing as how I am still battling the strep throat that I contracted the day we left, I'm taking an extra day off to recuperate. I am still working on something like a wedding day entry, but I have a feeling this wedding will be told more in photos than in words.

However, I honestly feel that J. has summed it up better than I ever could. And he's right, he still hasn't stopped smiling. Neither have I.

Really, doesn't that just say it all?

Hi everyone. My name is Staz and I'm a bad blogger. I've been back from my honeymoon for a few days now and even though all I've blogged about for the past year is this wedding, I still haven't posted a single thing about it.

I have an entry in the works, I swear.

In the meantime, I know you'd like to see pictures. Well, I'm currently figuring out exactly how I want to re-tool the photolog to make it easier to use, thus leaving me in a holding pattern. However, I do have a public Flickr site that I've uploaded stuff to like mad the past few days and I've never mentioned it here. (It's not my burlapsoul account.) Rather, it's nice and public and I've only used it for my family thus far, because letting them see my photos online is so much easier than trying to email a thousand 4mb photos after every holiday.

If you'd like to know where it is, just leave me a comment and I'll send you the link. If you're a complete stranger that visits my site like once a year, then hey, you're not getting in. Not to be rude, but my online identity is sacred to me. Just so you know. But if you're just a shy lurker and I've at least heard of you before, go ahead and leave a comment or just drop me a line. Chances are, you'll be looking at wedding photos in no time.

Again, I swear I'm working on that wedding entry. No, really.

There's more to this, ladies and gents, but for now this is what I've got...

I don't know what to say here. I've tried to think of twenty different ways to tell you all about our wedding, but the truth is that I can't. Images of our wedding day, the chaos, the family insanity, the happiness, the glitches go through my mind constantly. I am in a whirlwind of thoughts lately, images from the honeymoon, memories racing through my mind in a blur. I want to document everything and then I don't. I know that my memory is absolutely horrible (a side effect of my thyroid disorder) and that I should document everything now while it's fresh. However, a part of me says no, keep it to yourself - trust that you will remember. Maybe that's what I'll do, just give you my images, my memories and then the rest? Trust that I'll remember...

We interrupt all this emotional wedding nostalgia to bring you a very important announcement.

I feel as though I am at a crossroads in my life lately. In 17 days, I will turn 30. Yet still, I do not have the career that I always wanted. Nor am I even close to the correct path. Truth is, I am still not sure as to where that path might be or how in the world I even strayed from it in the first place. I know there was a specific moment that changed the trajectory of my life, but I am just not sure why it affected me so deeply and then why I didn't ignore everyone and get right back on the path quickly as I always do.

My absolute dream job is to be an animal behaviorist. However, my only option at this point for such a career would be graduate school. This is a problem because A) I basically never planned on grad school and so did not prepare for it academically at all, B) I burned all my bridges at every college I ever attended and C) I'm not even close to being competitive for entry into a grad school program (see A and B). The truth is that I'm just sick of entry level jobs. I'm tired of continuing to stray further and further away from animal work. I'm stuck with this label of only having pharmaceutical and psychology experience behind me and I feel that it drags me down with every "new" pharmacy and psych job that I take. I'm about 80% certain that I will be quitting my job in the near future, as it has become such a dreadful place for me and I am not challenged at all. I'm promised the sky, but given nothing. Everyone else's departments are undergoing positive change and mine is not. Truth is, as long as my current boss is still my boss, nothing will ever change. And even if changes did come? It doesn't truly interest me anymore anyway. It's not even close to being an animal related job and to be honest, I can't stand working in a cubicle all day, communicating via passive-aggressive emails and meetings without breathing any fresh air and being made to feel guilty for not being a workaholic. What the hell's the point of that? Exactly.

I've always wanted to start my own business, no matter how small. It's always absolutely driven me nuts to work for someone else - I am just too damned independent. However, I'm learning that it takes money to make money and therefore, that's where I'm in a bind. We have a house that desperately needs more work just to be livable (money) and as my asthma continues to worsen, my medications continue to rise (more money). However, it's the state of the house that's aggravating the asthma (catch 22). I also have massive student loans to pay, along with other debts that I've been trying to get caught up on for years. Add all that up and there you have it - my conundrum. How do I fund my house, begin training to create my own business or attain my dream job, and still pay my bills while having free time and a life?

Yes, yes, I know... I should be so lucky as to have this dilemma. And everyone else has the same damned dilemma too, so what am I griping about? I guess I'm just afraid of leaving a sure thing. Yeah, I dread getting up in the morning, I have moments where I want to cry in the bathroom at work all day, I am completely under-utilized and unappreciated and I hate my job... but hey, I'm still getting paid to be miserable. What if I quit and all the misery is just free? Then what? Is that somehow a better alternative? I don't honestly know. I just know that I want to paint my damned living room, I want to train my new puppy and I want to have the time to water my new plants without dreading the next work day while I do it.

Still, being able to buy nice lingerie with my own money and surprise my new husband? Well, I like being able to do that too.

*sigh* Decisions, decisions....

On family, martyrs, arguments, breakdowns, selfishness and the whole goddamned crazy mess this weekend:

Oh, the drama! I'm just so fucking sick of other people.

It's a sad state of affairs when the mere sound of your mother's voice on a cell phone causes you to break glass and hurl four trays of ice cubes around the garage for an hour, just to feel the relieving rush of breaking something, of having control over something. Then the screaming, the constant screaming, as you say how you really feel for the first time in nearly 30 years. Followed by that feeling of falling, just enraged falling, as you realize Martyrs never hear you. Martyrs never will. Your raw vocal chords damaged for nothing, yet still she is there talking, provoking, keeping you screaming. The pain never leaving, until our relationship was severed irrepairably, until I was so angry I banished her from my house in anger and exasperation, no feeling, no guilt, only relief and an embarassably small twinge of concern that was just too tired to rear its beaten head anymore.

Yet still, I am unfulfilled. How can you relieve the pressure and fill the hole when the thing that created both wounds only continues to fester and bite you, resistant to nothing? How can you scratch an itch that is created by the very thing that created your nerve endings? How can you heal when the scar continues to be scratched at, bitten and bled?

You can't. That is the hardest part.

How do you rip the cancer off without killing your whole fucking system?

Life is just hard for me right now, guys. That's all I can really say. Life is just hard. I want to remember the parts of my wedding I haven't written yet. I want to tell you all about our new puppy and how funny he is. I want to show you all the rooms we've painted and all the plants we've planted at our new home. Only, those things haven't happened yet. Yes, we had a wedding. Yes, we have a puppy. No, there hasn't been time to do the painting I've so desperately wanted to do. No, I haven't been able to enjoy my own backyard. We're just not enjoying any of it.

My mother and I are barely speaking. This has been coming for months, but last weekend it just finally blew up because I'd had enough and just lost my shit. I know I was in the right and that she needed to see how pissed and fed up I was before she would realize she needed to back off... but still, it doesn't change the fact that my mother has become a shell of her former self and I'm just so sick of being the damn parent that I don't care anymore. I've also decided to leave my job. I gave official written notice on Wednesday and I've been upset and worried about it for days. I like some of the people I work with, but as long as my boss is still my boss, things will never change. I'm being wasted, underutilized and not challenged and as much as I like having a stable place to go everyday and make money, I just can't muster the will to go back in there everyday and give them my time anymore. Our house is falling apart. We both have said that if we had it to do over again, we would never have bought this house. It had so many more problems that the previous owners hid and hid well. Even the inspectors didn't realize it had once caught on fire and of course, that damage was covered with carpet too quickly by the stupid previous owners so there's now mold under our entire livingroom carpet. Add in the fact that I have asthma and that the humidity around here hovers around 80% all summer long, and you have a very unhappy girl coming home to a very stifling and uncomfortable house everyday.

The stress that I'm going through is not something I had planned on. I thought we had everything mapped out for a while. I thought after the wedding, we would be able to just relax and work on our house and pay off our debts and be a married couple. But it seems that the drama never leaves me. I've done my absolute best and busted my ass to escape my childhood and have that drama-free life that everyone else seemed to have, but for some reason, it continues to find me. I can surround myself with as many different people in the world that I want, but it doesn't change the fact that I am still at the epicenter of some strange Earthquake of Drama. I am the calm in the middle of everyone else's storm, whether I choose to be or not. Yet, when it's time for me to have a little storm and throw some rain of my own, I find nothing but larger tornadoes all around me, fighting for the spotlight and ignoring my angry monsoon of tears, laughing at my trivial winds and pointing in jest when I have a 7 hurricane in my eyes. I just want to be heard, I want to be acknowledged, and I want to be me without everyone else's noise filling my own ears. And most of all, I don't want to feel guilty for it, nor do I want everyone else's storms to become my daily weather.

Today is our one month wedding anniversary.

So how did we celebrate? Slept in until 11am, made egg & cheese sandwiches for breakfast, spent five hours working on our yard and gardening, heroically pulled all the massive poison ivy off of our fence for my insanely allergic husband, finally planted one of the the lovely and huge Mandevilla plants that we used in our wedding so that it could wrap around our deck stairs and we could have it forever, decided on a simple birthday cookout for both of us next weekend by the pool in Eastern Kentucky, played with our beagles outside in the grass all day, showered together, made spaghetti and garlic bread with our new kitchen accessories, ate it on our new wedding gift dinnerware, watched tv, played with dogs, and headed to bed early.

All in all, just perfect.

So how was your Sunday, might I ask?

Okay, so does anybody have an idea how to get my "hepcat/bio" thing over there on the left to wrap around and look normal?

Anyone? Please?

Update: I just did it old school and added the break tag everywhere. If anyone has a better way, please do tell. Thanks!

So I am in my hometown in eastern Ky this weekend. We're having a big cookout by the pool this evening to celebrate J.'s birthday (which was Thursday), my cousin's birthday (today) and my birthday (tomorrow). (Apparently November is a busy month in our familes.)
So far, Bogey has been impossible. All the new sites and sounds at my dad's place have him wound up. He's just now sleeping after being up since 6am this morning. J. insists that he's "worse than a baby." I don't think so. He's adorable and funny, and he is going to be a serious challenge, but he rarely wakes up at 4am and I don't have to feed him from my boob. Luckily, I won't be working soon so I can take Mr. Challenge on. This dog thinks he is 10 foot tall and bulletproof. However, he is afraid of loud noises. What the hell?
Our plan today is to get him into my dad's pool and make him a water dog. Yes, yes, I know all you beagle owners out there are laughing and laughing and laughing. However, it can be done. I've seen it. We will have a water beagle. I swear.

Wish us luck and have a great weekend. Enjoy yourselves, relax and relish your existence. Don't be stupid like me and turn 30. :-)