12/27/09- Queen of the Vacu-Suck

Having goals is stressful. It's especially stressful since I'm the kind of person who knows those goals will never come to fruition. They will be, instead, left hovering around my head like tiny bubbles, never popping and increasing in size the longer they're ignored. I have a fleet of bubbles gang-banging my brain on a daily basis. I am the queen of unfulfilled goals. Here's a short and current list of neglected intentions.

1. Finish my B.A. I flunked out of college after a single semester. It's quite a feat and I pulled it off, so there's something in the way of accomplishment. My new found freedom and popularity were precious commodities and therefore required a great deal of time and effort to cultivate. It became more important to experience what it was like to finally be "cool", then it was to graduate. Currently, I am the only person to take 4 years to finish a 2 year, Associates Degree program, so as you can see, the notion of starting a Bachelors program is overwhelming to say the least.

2. Learn to play my guitar. When I was 16 I begged my parents for an acoustic guitar. I considered myself quite the songwriter/lyricist and had convinced myself I was destined to be the next Ani DiFranco or Liz Phair. 16 years later, I have yet to record a single hit and the guitar remains in a corner, out of tune and covered in dust. You have to have very flexible fingers to reach some of those chords. Flexibility, not laziness, is my downfall. Were it not for my cursed fingers, I would have had my Grammy acceptance speech interrupted by Kanye years ago.

3. Publish something. I've been attempting this one for years. I'm pretty sure it's something everyone is convinced they could do if they wanted to, so I know I'm not alone. I should've graduated with a degree in English, gotten my job as a music journalist with Rolling Stone and gone on to collect my Pulitzer. After I flunked out of school, I decided I was going to write the definitive book of my generation. A slackers bible, whose message would continue to be relevant for years after I'd died. It was to have been a ticket to my important career in journalism, without the labor of learning. Instead, I have a zip drive with a decades worth of unfinished ideas. Stories with no endings, stories lacking a beginning; brain farts that haven't been fleshed out, abandoned in Premise Purgatory.

4. Learn to cook vegetarian meals. I am not a planner, preparer or chef. Everyone in my family can cook, excepting me. I hate shopping for food, I hate handling food, I hate cooking food, but I do like eating food. If we could afford it, I'd order out every friggin' day. When I gave birth to my first kid, I became obsessed with eating the right things and making sure, I was providing Evan with the most nutritious options possible. There was this show on called, "You Are What You Eat". Host, Gillian McKeith, a lithe, almost transparent, blond, British nutritionist, would find morbidly obese families and completely overhaul their diets from that of fast/junk foods to vegetarian. She made it look so amazing and delicious. I began craving chickpea burgers and Aduki bean stew. I was determined to cook those meals and live a healthy Vegan life...until I saw the amount of shopping, planning and preparing involved in each component, of each meal. I had an infant for Christ's sake! I could barely make a bowl of oatmeal without sighing about the effort. So, I ordered a salad for lunch from the sub shop down the street and resigned myself to the fact that this was as healthy as it was going to get.

There are many more goals that I've aspired to over the years. Places I'd wanted to visit, books I'd wanted to read, rooms I'd planned to redecorate, photo albums I'd wanted to organize...all vacu-sucked into the black hole of incomplete projects and I've continued to fully surrender to its pull. I started a baby book for Evan after he was born. Two and a half years later, I still haven't finished it and I have no intention to. Now I'm pregnant with baby #2, a decision that seemed logical at the time and is becoming more and more irrational to me the further along I get. I'm tired of failing and I'm also, just plain tired, which makes accepting the failures the easier of the options.

Like me, my husband isn't a goal oriented person. I'm not saying he doesn't work hard and hope for more, but he is quite content with his life and wouldn't be unhappy if things didn't change. There are days I want to pound his face, mainly because I'm so jealous of his personal satisfaction. It would be so nice, to wake up in the morning feeling thankful, or to lie down at night thinking, "This...this isn't so bad. Life is pretty good." Chris seems to tap into it easily enough. The man sleeps like he's never ducked a storm cloud. Like, his mind is swathed in permanent sunshine. I envy him. It's one of the things I love most about him. I, on the other hand, have this constant sword fight going on in my head during my hours of disrupted sleep. What if we're always stuck here? Why can't I be more like Kate? Why can't I make Evan listen to me? When did I put on that extra 3lbs and what do I have to do to get it off, FAST? Why does everything have to be so challenging? When is it our turn? All these fears and insecurities, just slicing at me so quickly, I barely have time to duck and parry. These are the products of self neglect and still, I feel like it's not under my control. I have this unrealistic expectation that I can have my unbelievable life without having to work to attain it; like, I'm going to step in a big puddle of luck and everything will start coming up roses.

Where does that leave me? Pregnant, tired and anticipating a positive outcome, based solely on fate and luck. There's no better way to experience constant defeat than to wait out fate, am I right? So, here's my other plan. I get off my ass, take each one of my four, most important goals, and try to complete them before the end of next year. I think it's a fair amount of time given my propensity toward procrastination. I'll be posting my progress with my goals and whatever else is going on that may be interesting. Until next time.