I’ve had some big falls off of the bicycle of life.

When I was suffering from chronic depression in college, I accumulated seven Fs on my transcript because I wasn’t able to handle the necessary hoop jumping to get certain classes dropped – which I should never have been signed up for in the first place. *Sigh*

You would think seven Fs would kill your college career for good, and yet, even when my appeal was denied to get some of them retroactively removed, I was still able to get my master’s degree in Linguistics, a very difficult field.

How did I do it?

(1) Ignore the naysayers, real and imaginary

I didn’t allow my negative self-talk, or anyone else, to deter me from my goal to enter the field of Linguistics and to finish with my Master’s degree. When I had to face the head of the Linguistics department with my seven Fs, I held my head high and said, “I am aware this looks bad, but I know I can do this.” After his initial skepticism (boy did he hit me with some heavy condescension!), it was he who invited me to apply for the Master’s program two years later.

(2) Get Over It: Don’t Dwell In, or On, the Fall

I know there are many people who would have given up for good upon failing out of college – as I essentially did (I was required to take a year off before I was permitted to try again). It is for that reason that I trot out this story over and over again. I did not dwell in the story of my failure, deciding to be a college dropout for the rest of my life. Nor do I dwell on that story of failure, by using it as a “poor me” story. Instead my story of failure has become a story of success.

(3) Just Do It, AKA, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Get back on the bike. When my academic probation was over, I held my transcript in my hand and met with the head of the Linguistics department. That took tenacity. Guts!

In the end, really, you have nothing to lose.

Currently I’ve fallen off the blogging bicycle.

Somehow I’ve let the weeks slip by and have not posted in two months! It never used to matter so much when I let time pass without posting, but now this blogging thing is more than a purging of thoughts to me – I care about what I’m doing in this space – and I don’t want to lose all my readers by being perceived as an unreliable poster.

How do I solve this according to the above strategy?

(1) Ignore the naysayers, real and imaginary

For me, aside from my fears that my readers all hate me now, is my extreme writer’s block stemming from, “What exactly do I write to fill in the blanks of several weeks gone by?” Seriously, where do I start? So much has happened in the past two months! Sebastian has begun eating solid foods, has eight teeth, enjoys swimming (being held and swirled around in deep water), and is crawling!

(2) Get Over It: Don’t Dwell In, or On, the Fall

I messed up.

Why didn’t I just post the following?

:: Summer Break ::

“Dear readers, I’ll be taking a summer break. I will resume with weekly Keep or Purge posts sometime in September.

Enjoy your summer!”

I refuse to identify myself as a failed blogger. I have blogging goals that I have not yet reached and I’ll never get there if I keep replaying that negative self talk over and over and over. Yes, I’m upset with myself for not at least foreseeing that I would need to take a summer break and alerting my readers to that fact. But what’s done is done.

(3) Just Do It, AKA, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

And here I am! I’ve done it. I was terrified to post again, but now I have! I’m back on that horse, or bicycle.

Or whatever.

First I made him take a boring walk around the neighborhood with me and the baby instead of letting him go on a scenic hike when he got home from work early.

Then I pooh-poohed what he wanted to make for supper. “Do you think we can grill a plantain? Then we could eat it with the grilled sea bass and some black beans.”

“Blech!”

“You might like it!”

“I might like it but I’m not really in the mood for it.” (I’m not really in the mood for it – on his birthday!!!)

Then he offered me oysters and I said, “No!” As in, Ew, how could you even suggest that!

He said, “But it’s a special occasion! We have to celebrate.”

And I said, “Celebrate what? That you bought oysters again?”

“No, today is a special day. Don’t you know what it is?”

I tried to get my sluggish, stuck with baby twenty-four hours a day on very little sleep, don’t even know the date, brain to work. Our anniversary!? No, I know it’s not May yet. Just when the light bulb was about to go off he says, “Today is my birthday.”

Oh, I felt so bad. I buried my face in his chest for a while. He took it well though.

Then he made this fancy concoction for dinner:

Grilled sea bass (his own recipe, with stuff like chiles, minced tomato, onion, and cilantro, lime, etc), a tostada with vegetarian beans (for me) and queso fresco, a mango-cucumber salad, and a grilled plantain that didn’t turn out very well.

And then I shared this awesome birthday video with him:

In conclusion, I’m a lucky, lucky gal.

Now, as for me, I’m planning to empty some more cardboard boxes of their contents today, and maybe buy a new desk to set up the office area. We gave away our old one when we moved. It was an ugly thing from a University. It served it’s purpose for several years, but we couldn’t bear to bring it into our new lives. Without it though, we have ugly boxes bursting at the seems with office stuff that won’t fit on shelves. That desk sure did hold a lot of stuff.

I’m going to concentrate on books today, of which we have too many. But most of them we own for a reason. I’m going to pull out some inspiring books about eating right and setting goals.  Peruse them, put the rest away – the trick will be deciding which bookshelf in which rooms will hold which books – and then get motivated to decorate, write, knit, sew, and cook!

Yeah, I know, poor me. I don’t have to go to a job right now. I have all day to bake and make crafts. But, I’m not good at those things. I’m the chronic disorganization queen! I’m more likely to be a sloth all day reading YA novels and feeling guilty that I don’t read adult novels or exercise.

Alright, that’s enough complaining! My husband and I have already gone on two amazingly beautiful hikes since we’ve been here and I’m planning to start walking in the mornings. So, there is exercise in my future. I just have to learn to organize these long chunks of days that I’ve got ahead of me now. I don’t even have to fight through traffic anymore. I’m in paradise and I don’t know what to do with myself!!!

I keep reminding myself to just enjoy this ability to be lazy, because it’s going to go away in five months when the baby is born. But the life-long feeling of being an unproductive, lazy slob never goes away. What do you all do to combat non-productivity? Are you compulsive list writers? Remember, I can’t even plan a weeks worth of meals, I don’t know if I can handle lists. The problem with lists is that I come up with five hundred things I need to do and that just overwhelms me. Is there any hope for me? Do you have any book recommendations on this subject? I love reading books.

: )

I may spend the hours it will take to get the blog looking like that again, but given that I’ve been bad at keeping records of how I do things in the first place, I may not have the patience. I am enjoying the ease of use and the theme choices I get by having updated to the newest version of WordPress though. I can’t believe I didn’t know how to do that before! All it took was one phone call to my host provider, and if I had made that phone call yesterday, perhaps none of this would have happened.

I’m going to blame my complete inability to make that phone call in a timely manner to for lack of a better word, shyness.  Shyness which over a lifetime computes to complete lack of assertiveness. I hate talking to strangers on the phone. But the guy was extremely helpful and now my blog is at least functional. Well I’ve learned a few things in the process. What doesn’t kill your blog makes your blog stronger, right? Isn’t that what they say? Whatever.

I can’t even keep track of the number of dishes I’ve broken since living in this old, dishwasher-less house.

And this is NOTHING.

Recently I managed to take-out four or five wine glasses at the same time!!!!!

My friend was helping me hand-wash and dry a ton of dishes. I was just marveling at how sparkly and pretty the wine glasses looked after she had towel dried them and lined them up on the counter – I always leave them to air-dry – and a glass slipped out of my soapy hand, obliterating all of them.

I don’t even know exactly how many broke. It was just a sea of shards everywhere.

I stood there with my mouth wide open and I just had to laugh it off. I couldn’t believe her reaction either! She was the best possible friend to have had there at that moment  – because she Didn’t. Even. Flinch. She just asked where the dust-pan was.

And that was what I needed right then.  Because it couldn’t be changed – and I didn’t need any concerned looks to set off my guilt spiral.

Because it’s difficult to keep my thoughts from spinning out of control when I break a dish. About what a careless, clumsy, failure I am.

But I’ve learned to let it go as quickly as it happens. (Perhaps because it’s happened so often?)

It’s just a dish.

I’ve learned that even if it’s a sentimental dish – it’s *just* a dish.