Ponderings | The Unexpected Appendectomy

Somewhere around July or maybe even before that I stopped having a life. You know the kind where you go outside at least once a day, shower regularly, remember to eat your first meal before 4pm, talk to your best friend on the phone more than once every 3 months. Yeah, I lost those things and so much more. I spent pretty much every waking moment on the couch, in my new condo, glued to my laptop. I was editing thousands of pictures, sending thousands of emails and sadly checking Facebook every time I needed a distraction from the actual work I was supposed to be doing. This isn’t how life should be for long stretches. It just doesn’t make sense. Yes, I have a new photography business, I am still fine-tuning my editing process and building a solid foundation, and learning so so much. But 3 months with out having a phone conversation with my BFF in LA? Really? I’m pretty sure my boyfriend considered divorcing me and my other Big Sky friends stopped calling me because I always responded, “Sorry, I have to work.”

I love my job, but not that much. And you want to know what it took to help me wake up and add a little more joy back into my life? Unexpected appendicitis. One day I’m fine and the next I’ve got a strange pain in my lower abdomen. Emergency room, CT scan and to surgery I go. I was a little frightened at first. Surgery? Me? I’ve never had one and wasn’t expecting to when I woke up that Sunday morning. But, I’m alive and sans appendix and feeling better than I have in a while. (I also really enjoyed having cable in the hospital and watching The Rachel Zoe Project at 4am when I couldn’t sleep.)

You see I got a forced 5 day break from my laptop. You’d think that when you are laid up in bed that you’d still be able to edit photos. However, when I tried, my mind just couldn’t compute. I looked at the photos and they didn’t even interest me, they almost seemed trivial. And that was a scary thought. Could my work really not be that meaningful or important? In the days since, as the Vicodin haze receded I’ve realized that was a perfectly normal reaction considering I had a very brief period where I felt physically threatened. It was only an appendectomy, a fairly common experience, but it still gave me a brief bout of panic where I began to think about my life in a different perspective. What had I been doing the last few months? When had I stopped making time for the people in my life? Yes, my photos have value and merit, just not as much as my work habits make them out to be. At the end of the day my health and wellness matter just a bit more. My people matter more.

It has only been 9 days since my surgery and most of them were spent on the couch. Now that I have my energy again and it doesn’t hurt to move I have a much needed, refreshed outlook that has added spring to my step. I’m getting more sleep, working less, cooking good meals, spending more quality moments with my boyfriend through out the day and just not stressing how much I have to do. I feel a little relieved and almost glad it happened. Kind of strange, but I guess sometimes life truly does give you exactly what you need.

Dreams of blogging…Dreams of…

I have a dream where I actually blog on a regular basis.
It’s just a dream, it in no way has come to fruition. This little dream that seems forever suited to sit on the shelf in my big giant dream closet has a lot of buddies. Here are a few of blog dream’s closest buddies.
1. Travel again from a backpack with a writing/photography focus.
2. Do something meaningful with photography (i.e. Donate family portrait sessions to families with an ill loved one, invest in youth that are interested in photography)
3. Go back to school (Get my masters and get every last drop out of the experience)
4. Make a difference in life (i.e. become a teacher, find a need in my community and work on fulfilling it, be more about others and less about myself)
5. Become a writer (I don’t even have to be published, I just want to write well and regularly)
Sure, some of those are pretty lofty and vague. Maybe that’s why they seem to have taken permanent residence in that ol’ closet of mine. How can you accomplish a dream when it isn’t even completely formed?
And then there is my goal closet and that is about 5x the size of my dream closest. Should that be the other way around?
Here I am drowning in goals and dreams and yes I have achieved quite a lot in the last two years. I have a real job, real relationship and I enjoy both. But there is a part of me that wants more, imagines that there should be more to life. Yep, I have hopelessly romantic notions about what life should be like.
I don’t want to forever be this way, this is one of my biological father’s biggest flaws, causing him to miss out on the wonders of life he already had in front of him. I have so so much that I don’t appreciate and enjoy. Big Sky, Montana, my boyfriend, my family, reading, writing, breathing, because I work too much because I want too much, and possibly not the right things.
Our culture just doesn’t know how to slow down and I’m suffering that fate at present. Sometimes you just need to stop, reevaluate and figure out what really is going to bring you satisfaction, joy and peace in life. Even if it doesn’t fit with the American cookie cutter dream. I have to think back to my traveler’s mentality that had lifted the societal walls and showed me the world was truly my oyster and redefine my goals and dreams. I have to not be afraid of what I might find when I do this, because I’m pretty comfortable at the moment. Its time for a little shake up. However, soul searching might have to wait until October, when I’ve finished editing thousands of pictures.
Yep, soulsearching is going on the calendar for October 6-10. Next thing you know, I’ll have to write sex on the calendar. Not good!

Travel | 10 Days Til’ UK Craziness

I can’t believe in just ten days I’ll be in Heathrow airport again , lugging all my stuff down to the underground where I’ll here phrases like “Mind the Gap” and “Piccadilly Line.” It’s been over a year since my last visit and it seems like a lifetime ago that I called Bristol home. I have mixed emotions at the prospect of returning and seeing my friends again after so long. I feel like a different person, so much has changed in the past four months alone. I have two new jobs here in Big Sky, jobs that I love and am excited about, plus I’m starting my own photography business on the side. I’m more comfortable in my own skin, I know who I am and have a very clear idea of where I’m going, two things that definitely didn’t describe my last stint in the UK.

I wonder what this trip will be like, part of me feels like I shouldn’t be going. I have so much work to do, so so much and then there is the expense. On the other hand, I think I need the break from my nonstop life of late, I need the chance to just experiment with my camera and the craft of photography free of a customer’s expectations, and I just need to sit still and drink in the present moment a bit more (maybe have a few pints while I’m at it).

It should be exciting, it should be a time to read and write, a time for photographs, and a time for friends.

I’ll keep you posted.

Why I love Big Sky, Montana!

Photo Memories…Hmm, I think not

This is an example of why Facebook should stop presuming to know as much about you as it thinks it does.

I do not consider a photo of my ex-boyfriend with his current girlfriend to be a photo memory, thank you very much.

Conundrums | How can a hacker have a copyright?

Someone please explain to me how you can illegally hack into someone’s website and then throw a copyrighted image up there? Really, you think people are going to respect that copyright?

Good Read: Alexisalive’s Posterous

I’m loving living my travel dreams vicariously through a good friend of mine’s first adventures in Europe. For those of us who can’t be out on the road at the moment, it is always a pleasure to share in the trials, tribulations, joys and laughs of someone fortunate enough to be playing foreigner. I love her blog and you will too. She’s honest and makes apt observations about the ups and downs of travel. Her words have allowed me to relive my first travels on an almost daily basis, as I read and think ahhh, I remember feeling like that or I remember coming to a similar conclusion.

And of course like any good travel blogger, she offers up some temptuous eye candy that has me checking kayak.com obsessively.

Ready to check out her travelogue. Click here.

A whole year…

I purchased a travel writing course over a year ago. It is meant to be a 12 week online course, with one lesson per week. Hmmm, I’ve made it to lesson two. Really? In an entire year, I never managed to find the few measly hours necessary to complete the course. This is a lesson in goals. Write them down, attach a deadline and keep them in a safe place. Refer to them every once in a while just to keep yourself on task. Sure other things come up and your goals/priorities change, but don’t let goals you really want to accomplish be swept by the wayside.

Guilt for a Missed High School Basketball Game Assuaged: Finding Balance Today

I’m sitting outside in the sun actually enjoying beautiful Montana. I’m reading, thinking, reading, watching. I’ve begun a new chapter in my life (I’m finding a career), a good chapter, but with each step I take in this new direction I’m experiencing a heightened sense of personal claustrophobia. I feel like I’m sitting in a cubicle and the cement truck has backed up and started dumping fresh quick dry cement over my head. Like, this is make or break time, I’ll only have a few hours before it dries or I’m stuck forever.  All I see is work and responsibility, and more work, and then a husband and children yielding more work and responsibility, basically the end any moment to myself as I know it. Some of you probably think, hell you’re being dramatic and others, why don’t you grow up already? Both opinions are equally valid, but it’s not responsibility or having to work hard that I’m afraid of. What I fear is my own inability to find balance. If I dive in now, will it be 30 years before I submerge and I’m left with a thought of where my life went?

Yesterday, I had to take the trash out at work prematurely, while it was still light out. Thank god that happened! The clouds were thick and thunderous, the light golden and rich, my first thought was, “I’m missing this. I’m missing Montana.” This is my biggest fear, that my loyalty to work and responsibility will cause me to miss out on my own life. There is a never ending all consuming list of things to do, many of which are necessary, but all of us, and I mean all, need to learn that we have to stop sometimes, we have to balance things out.

I thought of an experience I had in high school where until today hind sight has led me to believe that I acted selfishly and stupidly. I’m reconsidering those notions now. It was my senior year, and I liked a boy and there was a formal dance party at a friend’s house. I wanted to go so badly because my school being private and Christian didn’t allow such unChristian behavior. But I had a basketball game. It was my last year on the team, I was the captain, a key member. Somehow I just decided to ask my coach if I could miss the unimportant pre-season game, and I did. I was penalized the rest of the season, losing my starting spot, and I don’t even recall the party being all that memorable, but after four years of not so much as a missed practice let alone a game, was it really so wrong for me to want to go to a party? It’s not like I was even that good at basketball or hoping to play in college. High school was about more than sports, more than AP exams, more than friends, it was about a balance of all those things regardless if I my coaches thought so or not. Until now, I’ve felt like that was such an irresponsible decision, but really I was a 17 year old girl wanting to do 17 year old girl things, that isn’t so bad.  I hope for the rest of my life I am brave enough to sometimes just choose myself regardless of what a coach, boss, husband, parent, friend etc. thinks. Don’t we all owe ourselves at least that?

The Lost Generation

I just started reading The Lost Girls, a travel memoir by three twentysomethings who quit their coveted NYC jobs, to take a year long detour around the world. Of course this book appeals to me, I’ve done something similar in my twenties, and I want to do it again in my later twenties, and I’m thrilled to be reading about other girls similar to me who left their careers for a year to follow their travel dreams.

I’m only a little way in but I thought I’d share this quote with you:

“Dubbing ourselves “The Lost Girls,” a term describing both our own uncertainty  about the future and an emotional state we felt represented many in our generation, we committed to spending one year of our late twenties wandering the globe.”

I read this with huge relief, because lost is exactly how I would describe myself for the past several years, and the notion that this emotional state could be ascribed to three others like me, let alone my generation as as whole is incredibly comforting. Maybe my desire to spend a year living out of a backpack with camera in hand, writing and experiencing is actually perfectly normal.