Grateful

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When life is going perfectly, at least as perfect as you think it can be at that moment, it’s easy to take a step back and be so grateful. You feel loved and you can acknowledge all the good around you. I usually call these heart-swells, since when I feel this way, I feel like my heart is literally swelling in my chest. I feel lighter, smiles are almost automatic, and the sun seems to shine brighter.

Sometimes, life throws you several bags of shit all at once – way too many to catch – and so you catch some of them and the others just fall at your feet and stink up your life. You feel sad and things look bleak and nothing seems good. I don’t have a name for this, but it usually feels to me like my heart is being steamrolled. It’s harder to breathe, colors are dulled, and my eyes sting with the constant threat of tears.

What I’m saying is that sometimes it’s hard to remember to be grateful. And there is always, always something good in your life. You might just have to dig deeper at times to find it.

Last night I found myself overcome with anxiety and apprehension. My mind was completely overcome with negative thoughts about the holidays, my dad, my life, myself. And I thought – I said to myself, “Sara, why are you allowing these thoughts to dominate your mind?” I couldn’t answer my own question and so I shifted my perspective. I began to think of all the things for which I’m so grateful, all the things that give me heart-swells just by thinking of them.

And so, on Thanksgiving-eve, I give you my gratitude list.

I’m grateful for…

  • Having to choose which side of the family to visit for the holidays – or any other time. I have both sides and I am thankful for that.
  • Being able to afford both the time and the money to visit the chosen side of the family. This Thanksgiving it’s my dad’s side, with whom I haven’t spent a major holiday in over a decade.
  • My dad, who, in his own way, is making a huge concerted effort to make sure I feel included and wanted in his home for this holiday. That’s not easy for him – because of circumstances outside his immediate control – and I am so grateful to him for trying.
  • My little half-brothers, who are beyond thrilled when I visit, even when it’s only once a year.
  • My mom, who sends me care packages with exactly what I didn’t know I wanted, like neon socks and jars of baby corns and homemade caramel corn.
  • Being strong enough to do 14 pushups on my toes – and 40 more on my knees.
  • Having the dedication to go to Bar Method classes every single morning, even when I’d rather lay in bed.
  • Waffles the Cat, who is the best cuddly jungle cat I could have found.
  • All of my many friends, who complement my life in so many different ways – and who still love me despite my not-so-secret Cat Lady tendencies.
  • My stepsisters.
  • Adam.
  • My new habit of waking up before my alarm without being cranky.
  • The confidence to put myself out there in ways that make me nervous.
  • Dancing outside my comfort zone for the last 6 months.
  • Being alive.

I’m so lucky, blessed, whatever you want to call it, in my life. Things are not always easy – no, sometimes things suck and sometimes things more-than-suck – but no matter what, even when it’s hard to find, I am so grateful.

So here it is, my declaration, my acknowledgement of all things good in my life.

Thank you.

Impressions of Adulthood

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When I was very young – I mean not-yet-double digits young – I was somewhat fascinated by adults. Adults got to do so many things I could not, like choosing not to eat their bread crusts and not having to go to school. Grown-ups could stay up late into the night and they liked to drink things like gin and tonics and beer. Adults liked to do things like read newspapers instead of watch cartoons.

Adults were fascinatingly boring.

As I got a little bit older – we’re talking maybe middle school – I noticed they didn’t think they were boring. They thought they were funny, even, and wildly entertaining. Of course, they were delusional, but they still had all kinds of advantages over me. Adults had no pimples and their bodies weren’t changing on a daily basis and they knew how to style their hair and apply mascara.

I envied adults and their stable, totally boring existence.

Throughout high school and college, as I reached and moved past each milestone of adulthood, the concept of Being an Adult remained a mystery. My hormones evened out and I grew into a smart, well-spoken person. But sometimes I still had pimples. And sometimes I still felt the same insecurities I felt as a child.

“When will this end?” I wondered. At what point will I become a grown-up?

***

Now, I’m closer to 30 than I am to 25, which seems to me to be an age solidly in the adult range of ages. Still very young, yes, of course; I have no delusions about being old (whatever that means). But my skin isn’t always clear and I’m far from perfect, which is confusing because when I was a child, adults were perfect.

To be an adult is to be a lot of things. Adults have a lot of financial responsibility, for one, although I was paying for car insurance at 16 and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t an adult then. To be an adult is to be autonomous, hopefully, although I had the privilege of making a lot of my own decisions in college and I’m not sure I was an adult then. Mostly, though, I think being an adult is just figuring things out as we go and maybe learning some good lessons along the way.

Turns out, becoming an adult is just called life. I’m not going to wake up one morning and suddenly realize that I’m there; I am an adult.

It’s just shifting my perspective, right?

***

As a small child in the 80s, I would often lean my head on my mother’s shoulder as she spoke or read or put me to sleep or just sat next to me. Her shoulders were comfortable, squishy, like pillows. They weren’t like my dad’s shoulders, which were bony and hard and dug into that space where my ear meets my cheek.

I would feel my own shoulders, so much more like my dad’s bony ones, and think, “I can’t wait to grow up so I can have squishy shoulders like my mom.”

I had no idea she was wearing shoulder pads.

Bread Crusts & Childhood Lies

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I was never a picky eater as a kid, but I hated bread crusts. Is there really a kid who likes those things? I mean, there’s an entire line of pre-packaged PB&Js with no crusts. So I’d munch on broccoli, eat tomatoes as though they were apple slices, and demand lemon slices to suck on, but give me a sandwich with crusts? I’d throw a fit.

However, my brother was picky enough for the entire household, so my mom really had no patience for my secondary requests for no crusts. Instead, she did what lots of parents do when they need to make their kid do something the kid doesn’t want to do: She made something up.

She’ll tell you that’s not what happened, but it’s my memory so I get to tell it how I like. And in my memory, she told me I had to eat bread crusts because they were the healthiest part of the bread. Apparently I was one of those weird kids who didn’t immediately reject food on the pretense of its health factor. Do those kids still exist?

I mean, I also ate American cheese on Wonder Bread for years, so it’s not like I was totally health conscious either.

Anyway, I was also the type of incredibly trusting child who took everything adults told me at face value. I also had no sense of irony, which is how I ended up in high school believing that 30 years old is “over the hill.” Don’t even get me started on the time I asked my parents about oral sex. (“Is it … talking about sex?” … See? Logical, but charmingly naive.)

But back to the bread crusts. I started eating them – because they were the healthiest part of the bread – and eventually learned to like them. In fact, I even started eating the heels of bread, which, as I understand them, are generally thrown away once the rest of the loaf is gone.

One day, maybe in high school, or maybe it wasn’t one day and this memory is just a compilation lots of days, my mom was about to throw away the heels of the bread. I stopped her, declaring them the healthiest part of the bread.

“We need to eat those,” I said. “They have all the nutrients in the bread!”

She stared at me incredulously. Over the course of the next several seconds, it dawned on me that she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

“Aren’t they?” I asked, now questioning everything I’d known ever known about bread.

She laughed, still looking incredulous, and said she had no idea if the heels of the bread (also the slices with the most crust!) had any more or less nutrients than the rest of the bread. “The heels are gross,” she said. “I’m throwing them away.”

I was shocked. Betrayed. What other foods had I been tricked into eating – and actually liking?!

Not one to accept the fact that I had, in fact, been duped for several years – and by a perpetrator who forgot her discretion no less! – I did a little research. Turns out, there have been studies done that have found there are actually up to 8 times as many antioxidants in bread crusts than in the actual bread.

What I’m saying is that my mom lied, forgot about it, and then was proven right by some Germans in 2002.

What I’m also saying is that you should never throw away your crusts or heels.

You should give them to me.

Nostalgiaville, USA & Prairie Dog Town

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When I was nine, my family took three days to move from the western border of Idaho out to Chicago. Now that I think about it, I really only have two memories from that move: leaving and arriving. It’s almost as if, in my mind, I simply teleported to my new home; I have no recollection of the actual drive.

The mind is tricky thing, you know, especially when it comes to memories. Before I really thought about it, I thought I remembered everything about the trip. Turns out, my nine-year-old brain was smart enough then to block out how incredibly boring the middle of this country is.

Aside from wanting to see the Gateway to the West, there was really no rhyme or reason to my plan to drive through Missouri and Kansas. I’d never been to either state and while I don’t have any kind of arbitrary life goal to visit all 50 states, I won’t pass up the opportunity to pass through a new one if it’s on my way.

Which brings me to Missouri and Kansas.

After the arch, Missouri kept going for 250 miles. Colleen and I learned quickly to give ourselves treats every 300 miles or so, care of my Roadside America app; halfway through Missouri, our reward was Nostalgiaville, USA.

Nostalgiaville, USA: Where candy costs 3 cents and nothing was manufactured after 1965.

At Nostalgiaville, USA, Colleen and I bought candy cigarettes and 3-cent candy and pretended to be nostalgic for an era during which even our parents were toddlers. Also, Colleen got to drink her first Coke out of the bottle. After we left, I turned the wrong way, got lost in Mexico for a while, and finally made it to Kansas.

All I really knew about Kansas prior to this trip was that there were lots of tornadoes and Dorothy really wanted to go back there. The Wizard of Oz jokes were hilarious until it became clear that Dorothy was actually insane because there is no reason anyone ever would choose Kansas over that yellow brick road. For 450 miles, it was 109 degrees and Windy As Fuck, which at this point is basically a trademarked term for use only on I-70 in Kansas. We actually drove through several dust devils that literally pushed my car into the other lane.

Roadside America told us there was a giant dragon (and other creatures!) made out of farm equipment somewhere in the middle of Kansas. We drove and drove and all we could find was a tiny dragon in someone’s yard that was very clearly not made of farm equipment. Kansas was proving to be worse by the minute, since even our 300-mile rewards were proving to be nonexistent.

So when there were several billboards advertising Prairie Dog Town, which claimed to house the largest prairie dog in the world, I stopped the car immediately. Colleen and I spent a few bucks to enter into what turned out to be the single most depressing place I’ve ever seen. Prairie Dog Land turned out to be a dusty desert “petting zoo” where a few pigs lounged in mud pits, a couple of deformed cows glared at us, and Roscoe the Miniature Donkey just seemed to be happy he had a normal amount of limbs. (The cows had five and six legs, respectively. On their backs. Don’t ask for pictures, they’ll just make you sad.)

Here you can see the disappointing non-farm-equipment dragon, a never-ending Kansas highway, the entrance to Prairie Dog Town, and the World’s Largest Prairie Dog, which appears to be some overachieving kindergartner’s papier mache project.

After the longest seven minutes of my life, Colleen and I finally came to our senses and pretty much sprinted to my car, where we tried to revive the parts of our insides that had either boiled or died in the oppressive heat and bleak landscape.

When I was nine, my family drove across a few of the most boring states of the country and my tricky little mind simply decided not to hold onto the memories of endless cornfields, straight roads, and dust devils. Now, I want to hold on to the memories so that I remember to never, ever drive through Kansas again.

In conclusion, Missouri stole Mexico and Kansas is the worst.

Gateway to the West

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It started as one of those jokes we were both secretly serious about, so the joke part dissolved pretty quickly.

I was sprawled on the floor, staring at four giant AAA maps of the United States and its enormous regions. She was watching me try to combine Google Maps with the “real” ones, choosing different routes until one gave me everything I wanted, which was to get to California and see everyone I knew along the way.

“Do you want to come?” I asked, not making eye contact in case she dismissed the proposition with a laugh.

“Are you serious?” She asked back, with a glimmer in her eye and an involuntary grin bursting across her face.

If you need a crash course in U.S.geography, I’m your girl.

Colleen is 12 years my junior, so it made sense to me when my friends expressed their surprise at our plan to spend the next nine days in a car together. I’d be lying if I said I never had any doubts, but it’s hard to remember now what they were.

I set the rules and she complied; amidst the endless snacks and Starbucks, she agreed to replay our favorite songs over and over again and promised to stay honest as long as I did too.

We only pissed each other off once and it was all Kansas’ fault anyway.

***

After I said goodbye to my friends in New York City, I said goodbye to my family in Connecticut. I didn’t expect to have to say goodbye in Chicago, so I was startled to find the word staring me in the face the morning I left.

Now, I find myself refreshed by my own naiveté: all change is a process, moving included, and I have a lot of places to call home, so of course I will continue having to say goodbye.

At the time, it had me doubting for the first time my decision to move out west.

***

Day three of my epic adventure found Colleen and me driving southwest through Illinois, straight across Missouri, and just over the Kansas border before calling it a night. St. Louis, Missouri is just about exactly the halfway mark between Chicago and Kansas City (the route we were going, anyway), so we made plans to stop and see the St. Louis Arch.

When I was sprawled out on the floor with my maps a few days earlier, Bri had noted my potential routes and asked, more rhetorically than anything else,

“Isn’t the St. Louis Arch the Gateway to the West?”

It seemed cheesy and cliché to adjust my route to see this landmark, but I knew I couldn’t skip it.

And when I parked my car and stared up at this giant piece of metal against the endless blue sky, all the sneaky doubts that had crept into my brain just five hours prior simply evaporated.

This has to be a metaphor for something, right?

Tug of War

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If thoughts are the ocean and I’m the swimmer then sometimes I just get too tired to tread water any more. I get tired and worn out and my head starts bobbing, just above the waves so that it’s hard to see over the next one.

That only really happens when I’m by myself for too long, which is a lot of the time now since I’m living in a brand new city. I’m living in a brand new city with enough of a safety net to prevent me from breaking as I hit the ground, but not quite enough of one to count as a soft landing.

What I’m saying is that even though I’m the one who moved myself here – I chose to uproot myself completely in favor of the utter unknown – it’s still hard. It’s still lonely. It’s isolating. It’s foreign. It’s absolutely terrifying.

When I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t even breathe? That’s when I miss you the most. You – you’re my best friend, my sibling (one of many, or all), my parents, my pets, my bed, my anything familiar. The missing pricks pins into my eyes, stinging them, making them leak. Just a little bit, since I stare at the ceiling and chug water to choke back salty tears. The missing blurs my vision, clouds my head, makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking in the first place.

…

Sometimes, when I’m by myself for just long enough, I have the courage to acknowledge that even with all the missing happening in my heart, I still made the right choice coming here and leaving there. It’s an odd feeling, confidence coupled with self-inflicted pain.

I get to wake up every morning staring at palm trees. I drive to work with the sun rising and home with the sun setting and through my cheap Forever 21 aviators, everything looks vintage and poignant and beautiful in a way I’ve never known. When I leave the house each morning, the air is sticky and salty with sea air wafting from just two blocks away. People say hello as they walk by, just because we’re both there.

What I’m saying is that I’m really happy to be here. I’m happy there’s always sunshine, that there’s always at least one puppy on the sidewalk, and that I can almost always smell the ocean. I’m grateful to have discovered that driving is a welcome disconnect from the world; focusing on the road lets me clear my head of anything else.

A few times, I’ve let out a giggle I didn’t know I had inside me. The happy just bubbles up straight from my gut and forces itself out into the world. I catch myself, because how can I be so happy and so sad all at once?

They say that laughing and crying is the same emotional release, which makes sense to me since I can’t usually do one well without ending up doing the other.

It’s just a little strange sometimes finding myself smack dab in the middle of this weird tug of war inside my heart.

The Route

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Today is day two (of nine!) of my cross country roadtrip. Yesterday, Colleen and I drove down to D.C. to ease into the huge amount of driving we’ll be doing, but also to see some other sibs!

The drive to D.C. took about six hours, since I refused to drive through New Jersey and instead opted to go through Pennsylvania. Some highlights included me discovering how to work cruise control on my car (best invention ever), seeing a license plate that just read “OMG” on a car being driven by an old dude with a beard, and thirteen dead animals.

Yes, we’re counting the roadkill. We have a LOT of miles to go.

Anyway, now that we’re well on our way to Chicago, I thought I’d share the rest of the planned route. I’m so excited to have been able to plan our stops coinciding with so many friends and family!

In Chicago, we’ll stay with my dad tonight, have breakfast tomorrow morning with a dear friend, and meet Caryn at the bean in Millenium Park!

Then we’ll continue on down to St. Louis, Missouri, where I’ll get to see the arch for the first time. It feels particularly appropriate to visit the gateway to the west on this trip. We’ll stay the night in Kansas city Monday night (Missouri or Kansas, no one can tell!) and then head out to Denver on Tuesday.

Wednesday, we’ll drive over to Salt Lake, where I get to have dinner with Ameena, Mikael, and a childhood friend I haven’t seen in 18 years! We’ll stay with old family friends outside the city before leaving Thursday to go visit my paternal grandparents in Idaho for lunch.

We’ll continue on Thursday part way into Oregon, where I’ll be driving on the Oregon Trail Highway! [Insert all early 90s Oregon Trail jokes here.]

Then, Friday we’ll arrive in Portland, where Doni has, to my immense delight, taken the afternoon off work to show us the city! Saturday will bring another early morning and lots of driving, though I’m most excited for this long stretch down the Pacific Coast Highway. I’m not sure I’ll ever have another chance in my life to drive almost the entire length of the United States’ west coast!

We’ll stop somewhere in California and continue on to Los Angeles on Sunday, July 1. Like I said, follow us on Twitter using #CrossCountrySibs for the latest updates on our adventures!

Why LA?

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When I announced, several months ago, that I was planning to move to LA, a lot of people had a lot of reactions, but the most common question was, “Why LA?”

A million answers usually swirled in my head, depending on the tone of the asker. Sometimes – well, a lot of times, and especially from friends and acquaintances in New York City – there was more than a hint of judgment. Most times, though, people were genuinely interested in why I’d chosen to leave behind my life in New York for the total unknown of Los Angeles.

At first, I tried to articulate my reasons. There were the job losses, constant unemployment, and astronomical rent prices of Manhattan. Of course, the weather has never been a positive focal point of the Northeast, either. Suffocating mugginess in the summer, biting wind in the winter, with maybe a few weeks of fall and spring – if we’re lucky.

But I’m not leaving New York on a bad note . Quite the opposite, actually. I’ve loved the last five years of my life; I couldn’t have dreamed of a better introduction to the real world after college. I’ve made fantastic friends and had amazing experiences. I can’t say I’ve loved every second, but I wouldn’t change any part of my time in New York.

It’s never been a secret that I didn’t plan on staying in New York forever. In fact, I’ve spoken often of my eventual dreams to live elsewhere. Five years in, I said, I’m just ready for a change.

“But why LA?” people would insist. I could list reasons like the weather, the sun, the beach, the excitement of a new city and a clean slate. But when it really came down to answering the question, the most honest answer I could come up with was simply,

“Why not?”