The other evening, after sharing pizza and highs & lows {worst thing about your day and then the best thing about your day}, my wonderful roommates {Kara and Taylor} and I decided to embark on a
BLOG CHALLENGE.
Blog Challenge?
"What is this?" you ask.
Good Question!!
We have challenged one another to a
WEEKS WORTH OF BLOGS!!
WEEKS WORTH OF BLOGS!!
We chose 7 topics ranging from "meaningful quote" [which, as we can see by the title of this post, I am doing today] to "Your future self walks up to you in the street and gives you advice. What is it?"
---
Well here we are, day ONE and I am already struggling. To be completely honest, I choose "meaningful quote" because when I sat down to blog it was past my bed time [I recognize that it is a Saturday and I should be out-and-about appreciating my youth, but lately I have been exhausted and NEEDING more sleep than usual. I blame it on the menopausal/Katy Perry {"you're hot then you're cold"} weather. Really June-Gloom-In-July? Get it together California.] and I was tired and I thought it would be easy. But now, after going through my entire "Dog-Eared" section of my blog, I am no closer to finding my "meaningful quote" and I am much further from my bedtime.
I thought about quotes from movies ["Why do you try so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out"--What A Girl Wants], songs [scroll to the bottom of this page] or books ["We need much bigger pockets... We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends." Oskar Shell, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close//Jonathan Saffran Foer... but I have already written about this quote as seen here] and found some other great quotes along the way [keep a look out they will be coming in bulk now], and even considered quoting Ben Franklin ["Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight."] but then I realized that none of the aforementioned quotes were quite good enough.
So I settled on a completely cliche quote that I repeat to myself when I need a little pep talk.
This one was actually my senior quote:
"Life may not be the party
we hoped for,
but while we're here,
we should dance."
I feel like now more than ever this quote is especially pertinent. I know that I often do get a little mushy gushy on here and talk about love and daydreams and my strange habits, but I rarely share, at least not in depth, and not really since my semester in Spain, the more uncomfortable parts of my life. When my life gets messy, usually I opt to take a blogging hiatus instead of self-disclosing [I have what my friend calls "irritable vowel syndrome" a.k.a. "word vomit" and often end up telling the person at the Trader Joes register exactly why I am buying three types of cheeses, two juices, lots of popcorn and huge quantities of mirepoix {the base to most soups, meaning it is the base of any edible bad-day cure}] until you all run away.
But, as this is the blog CHALLENGE, I will self-disclose.
Here goes:
I have extremely high expectations.
Of myself.
Of others.
Of life.
And my high expectations get me into trouble.
Because when ones expectations are unreachably high, one is setting himself or herself up for disapointment every time.
Lately, my expectations have been following me around like the seagull you thought it would be fun to feed [forgetting of course that seagulls will follow you until you have vacated the beach because they will always expect more food] wow that bad analogy really came full circle. {I was writing it and thought "this is way too much." its like those books that throw in the Fbomb just to sound cool -- ick please do yourself a favor and don't read The Magicians, unless of course you want Narnia, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings to be LITERATUREALLY <-- see now it is so late that I am getting really punny [literature + literally = literatureally] pissed on.}
MAIN POINT: Even the seagull gets lets down by his expectations.
ACTUAL MAIN POINT: My high expectations have been especially problematic as of late.
(what I meant by "following me around")
I expect myself to be someone that I am not,
I expect people behave in certain ways,
and I expect that life will go my way.
When I/they/life don't meet these expectations,
I have a very hard time.
... if I had no expectations, every time something even remotely nice/pleasant/exciting happened, I would be thrilled.
I wish that I could replace the part of my brain that has high expectations with the part of my brain that yells "DOLPHIN DOLPHIN DOLPHIN" every time I see a dolphin... even if the last time I saw a dolphin was 37 seconds ago.
And that is why I like this quote.
Because for me and my expectations, life will never be the party that I had hoped for [as life is not one perpetual dinner party].
But I have to remember that while I am here,
I should dance.
So I settled on a completely cliche quote that I repeat to myself when I need a little pep talk.
This one was actually my senior quote:
"Life may not be the party
we hoped for,
but while we're here,
we should dance."
I feel like now more than ever this quote is especially pertinent. I know that I often do get a little mushy gushy on here and talk about love and daydreams and my strange habits, but I rarely share, at least not in depth, and not really since my semester in Spain, the more uncomfortable parts of my life. When my life gets messy, usually I opt to take a blogging hiatus instead of self-disclosing [I have what my friend calls "irritable vowel syndrome" a.k.a. "word vomit" and often end up telling the person at the Trader Joes register exactly why I am buying three types of cheeses, two juices, lots of popcorn and huge quantities of mirepoix {the base to most soups, meaning it is the base of any edible bad-day cure}] until you all run away.
But, as this is the blog CHALLENGE, I will self-disclose.
Here goes:
I have extremely high expectations.
Of myself.
Of others.
Of life.
And my high expectations get me into trouble.
Because when ones expectations are unreachably high, one is setting himself or herself up for disapointment every time.
Lately, my expectations have been following me around like the seagull you thought it would be fun to feed [forgetting of course that seagulls will follow you until you have vacated the beach because they will always expect more food] wow that bad analogy really came full circle. {I was writing it and thought "this is way too much." its like those books that throw in the Fbomb just to sound cool -- ick please do yourself a favor and don't read The Magicians, unless of course you want Narnia, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings to be LITERATUREALLY <-- see now it is so late that I am getting really punny [literature + literally = literatureally] pissed on.}
MAIN POINT: Even the seagull gets lets down by his expectations.
ACTUAL MAIN POINT: My high expectations have been especially problematic as of late.
(what I meant by "following me around")
I expect myself to be someone that I am not,
I expect people behave in certain ways,
and I expect that life will go my way.
When I/they/life don't meet these expectations,
I have a very hard time.
... if I had no expectations, every time something even remotely nice/pleasant/exciting happened, I would be thrilled.
I wish that I could replace the part of my brain that has high expectations with the part of my brain that yells "DOLPHIN DOLPHIN DOLPHIN" every time I see a dolphin... even if the last time I saw a dolphin was 37 seconds ago.
And that is why I like this quote.
Because for me and my expectations, life will never be the party that I had hoped for [as life is not one perpetual dinner party].
But I have to remember that while I am here,
I should dance.
2 comments:
you should never, ever, EVER change that part of your brain. it's what makes you ever-so delightfully kendra.
also, i'm dancing, pretending it's near YOU!
so part 1) if we turned into "DOLPHIN DOLPHIN DOLPHIN" it might be entertaining because then we could live lives like Dory or Doug [SQUIRREL] but then again your expectations make you wonderful. so in response to your feeling that you should not have such high expectations of yourself or others, i give you this [which i gave to all of my students on name cards last summer in kenya]: if you shoot for the moon you'll always land among the stars" - your expectations and goals are what make you wonderful, and they are what will propel you forward to something wonderful, so don't ever feel like you should not be the way you are :)
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