Things to come

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m watching an episode of Star Trek. The original one, when William Shatner was young, lean, and kinda hot even in day-glow yellow polyester and jack boots.

Yesterday I had a wicked headache for most of the afternoon, so the only thing I managed to do was clean out my truck. Late last night, I finished reading a book that I wanted to like more than I did. I kept hoping it would get better, right up to the last few pages. Earlier today I cleaned my house, did laundry, went grocery shopping, ran, did some dog training, and cleaned out my refrigerator drawers. I have nothing else on my ‘need to do list’ (shut up - I like lists.)

There’s really nothing wrong with all this, but something happened tonight that made me think of the person I was in my twenties. *That* girl wouldn’t have spent a weekend like this unless she was dying of some Mongolian body rot. That’s not to say I was the ‘belle of the ball’ by any means, but I was busy. My last semester in college I took 28 credits, worked 25 – 30 hours a week and I did my volunteer rotation hours where the director of my program told me to - for another 15 hours. I was quite literally, on the run, constantly. One of my roommates at that time was living the same life and getting divorced. We also had a crazy alcoholic roommate who was either drunk, getting drunk, passed out and pissing on our couch, or passed out and setting the kitchen on fire. (Yes, really.)

After graduation in May, the drunk roommate went to rehab, the other roommate moved to Arizona with her biker boyfriend and I moved into a little guest house on a horse farm. My full time job never went over 40 hours and I had NO idea what to do with all that free time. By fall I was back in college, taking Tae-Kwon-Do, and exercising the horses in the morning before work. Two and a half years later I had to leave the horse farm. I bought a condo, changed jobs, gave up Tae-Kwon-Do, got ‘serious’ with a boyfriend, started racing motorcycles, and got my start in dog training.

When I look at all that, it gets me wondering what happened to all that energy? motivation? Where did it go exactly and when? And how did I miss it leaving? Shouldn’t something that big require an announcement? a parade?, at least a trumpet? Maybe “Taps” would have been appropriate.

Is this how balding men feel? They just look in the mirror one day and suddenly the comb-over is not only an option, but the only option? And they’re all “it was just here yesterday.”

It’s no comb-over, people, but I do not like the look of this.