Monday, June 30, 2008

I'm not proud to admit it, but...

...here's what I found when I cleaned out my car this morning:

a pencil
8 pens
several half-sticks of gum
a baseball cap
91 cents
a conducting baton
two car wash tokens
a washcloth
some laffy taffy
an ice scraper
a flashlight
one AAA battery
two rubber bands
...and enough garbage to nearly fill a 13-gallon bag

Curiously, I did NOT find a single napkin, Taco Bell hot sauce packet, or Goldfish cracker.

Stuff I found that isn't ours:

a Shrek figurine
lip balm
a lighter
one lone red glove
a lip liner
two more ice scrapers
a Hot Wheels-type toy car

If I didn't trust my husband - or if I didn't know this car was previously driven by women - the lip balm/liner might give me cause to worry. As it is, I'm more concerned with the fact that it's taken almost a year of owning this car for me to reach that far under the seats.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Stumped

Well it's been another two weeks, incredibly enough. I've had a lot swirling around in my head the last little while, but sadly for you, Dear Reader, it's the kind of thing that belongs more in a personal journal (another item which I forgot on my most recent road trip) than on a blog.

I will say this: last night I found myself trying to measure the success of my day by how much I got accomplished. Let's see...I unpacked from our trip...kept the boy entertained...the dishes are done, plus I made it to the store...filled a prescription...cleared things up with management...went to book club... Somewhere in the middle of crossing off my mental checklist for the day, I realized that I do this every day. I'll be washing my face or changing into pajamas when I start to either silently chastise myself for a day ill-spent or pat myself on the back for one that was unusually productive - at least by my standards.

The bad part is, even my best days rarely leave me feeling satisfied. I spend a lot of evenings committing to 'do more, be better' tomorrow and a lot of days frustrated at how my life seems to slip through my fingers. Am I chasing the end of a non-existent rainbow here? Where does true self-satisfaction come from?

I worry that my whole life I've been too extrinsically motivated: grades, praise, big hearty 'thank yous' and the like. So I look for validation at the end of a day in the number of things I've accomplished because it's a quantifiable measure of how I'm doing. Clear-cut. Solid.

Does anyone else do this? How do I ever know how I'm really 'measuring up' - and is it healthy to worry about it at all?

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Two weeks

A funeral attended
Two relatives moved
Book club hosted
Relief Society taught...twice
Slideshow finished
Birthday lunch date enjoyed
Birthday party thrown
Interstate road trip taken

Such are a few of the things that have occurred in the two weeks since I last posted, which is part of why I feel justified in not having written anything in a while. May not look like much, but for some reason the last couple of weeks have almost done me in.

The guilt was finally getting to me, and when I mentioned to my sister that I needed to jot off a post to stave off said guilt, she insightfully replied, "Well, there you have it. I'm never going to start a blog because I don't need one more thing to feel guilty about." She may have a point...

But while I'm here: I've decided traveling is not relaxing to me. I mean, if I was headed to Hawaii with my husband on an all-expense paid vacation, MAYBE I would feel relaxed. As it is, I got three hours of sleep the night before our trip because I was up packing everything from diaper cream to biohazard suits into our luggage. And you know what I forgot? My toothbrush.

Not relaxing.