Husband to Be and I partied pretty hard on Saturday and after the party on Tuesday we were planning on attending was canceled, we decided to have a nice quiet evening at home. We ordered a pizza, watched Veronica Mars, and took a bubble bath, which we agree will be much nicer when we someday have a Jacuzzi tub.
And we talked about how we’ve gotten too comfortable in our routines. We go to school/work, go to the gym, spend what seems like forever making dinner, watch a little TV, talk about wedding stuff, work on our computers, and all too soon, it’s time for bed. Socially, we do the same regular things with the same peeps.
The same drive to school, walking the same hallways I’ve haunted for 5 and half years. It’s like living life in stop-motion and fast forward at the same time.
Not that routine is always bad. Familiar friends and familiar rituals are comforting and necessary touchstones to have. But we could definitely use a little adventure from time to time, a break from the everyday.
My ongoing challenge, besides not going crazy trying to finish my degree, is to find meaning and happiness in the present, which is hard to do when my entire body is reverberating with the mantras of “I can’t wait to be married” and “I can’t wait to be done with school!”
The summer I spent in Germany, we’d ride our bikes a long way down to the Rhine to get ice cream and eat it while looking at the faint blue hills of France off in the distance. And to me, it was always the long trip that made the ice cream so satisfying. Long walk, part of gift, that sort of thing. For the first time, I’m so fixated on ice cream, I’m only tolerating the ride.
(Although in this case, it’d be pistachio gelato. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that it’s the greatest thing ever? On another tangent, ice cream is inextricably linked with my memories of Germany. I swear an ice cream cart was around every corner we turned. A maple walnut cone I ate in a light rain on the road up to Neuschwanstein ranks as some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had.)
Big changes are ahead of me and it’s easy to look forward to them (Moving someplace new and terrific! Maybe buying a house! Getting a dog! A real job! Income! A modicum of respect!) so much that today just becomes a chore, a means to an end. And I don’t want to spent even a small chunk of my life that way.
Time to shake things up.
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