some truth.

he'd just eaten seven hotdogs on dollar dog night. i, however, have no excuse. we are the most photogenic couple to grace the earth, obviously.

There are things I take for granted now that in less than three months may cause tantrums and tears in their absence. This is more than just having an Apple store within a 25 mile radius of my person for inevitable technology-related meltdowns, although I've already gritted my teeth in anticipation of such events.

 

 

This is something more along the lines of struggling to feed myself, lacking back-rubs and soothing words, and the absence of a warm body I've grown so accustomed to waking up next to.

 

 

What I'm trying to say is that Matt isn't coming to Montana with me.

 

 

At least not at first.

 

 

Let me say up front that I am the reason for this. I have asked him to hang back. I've insisted in my own stubborn way that this is a path I need to forge on my own. Because honestly, I feel it like electricity moving through my veins, my need to set off on my own. To me, it's a fact as solid as my eyes being green and my perpetual appetite for bacon. It defies any logical explanation for me, it just is. I need to go alone, to start this pursuit on my own, to go forth without company.

 

 

In true Matt form he's taken this request as he always does with my self-over analyzed bombs of news that aren't what he wanted to hear. First he was silent, then he fought me, and then he accepted it, because he loves me and knows that my way is just as ingrained in me as all the other qualities he loves. The good with the bad. The easy with the difficult.

 

 

To say he understands my need to leave alone probably misses the mark. In truth, I can't even fully wrap my mind around this compulsion, let alone give a cohesive and coherent argument to present my case. But he accepts this as my choice and my decision, and for that I am flooded with gratitude and overtaken by affection for him.

 

 

It took me a long time to reason with myself about this decision, and a lot of grappling with feelings of guilt and selfishness at pushing a distance nearly a country-width between us, especially when Matt is vehemently against us being apart. He planned to move with me wherever I went to grad school from the start, no matter how far or at what cost. He's supportive and amazing and I don't deserve it.

 

 

But he's not coming now, and it's my doing.

 

 

I know the day I leave is one we're both dreading in our own way. But I'm heading toward something I am drawn to with wonder and he's being left behind, so what follows the moment we part will be an utterly different experience for us both. Now that the room has stopped spinning a bit at the reality of the events unfolding and I've had time to calm down and consider things, clarity is coming a bit more easily. But only a bit.

 

 

As I've pondered and poked at the reasons for my decision, I realized a few things about the nature of my choice.

 

 

1. I genuinely don't want to be with anyone else in this world. Just Matt. In my heart, I don't look at my leaving as me leaving him, just a necessary step in the process until we're reunited.

 

 

2. I have total faith in the strength of our relationship. Total faith. Which is kind of eerie, to be honest. I know it will be hard at times, as I've done a long distance relationship before, but I'm going into it with total confidence this time. We will be fine. We will learn a lot. We will emerge stronger and intact.

 

 

3. Going back to school is fucking hard and grad school is very time consuming. I've been out of school for four years. I'm nervous about this. Actually, I'm scared shitless. It's enough of an adjustment and commitment without dragging a stubborn and antisocial man who doesn't want to move to Montana and 160 pound beast-dog across the country with me. I need focus and peace and alone time to process. I fear with Matt there I would not be able to find a good balance for my time. I will have no time to speak of anyway. I cannot afford distraction and resentment because of hard adjustments. I adjust to change almost instantly, Matt is a little slower to come around. It's just a fact, not a fault. Still, it is something I've had to consider.

 

 

4. Matt does not want to move to Montana. It's one of my biggest dreams. I will not have my dream hampered from the start by someone who doesn't want to be there, however unintentional, however much I love that person with all of my heart. However much he may have tried to hide it. I would have known. Things would have gotten weird. Bad weird.

 

 

5. This may be my last chance to live alone. Ever. I can't for the life of me let that go easily. I want one last cozy nook of the world that is mine and mine alone.  

 

 

6. Matt and I have very different ideas about what makes a fulfilling leisure time activity. I want to be outside playing and or reading and or at the bar with my friends and he wants to be at home on the couch watching sports and playing xbox. It's leisure time and there's no wrong way to do it, but in any precious time I have to spend in leisure while I have such an impressive display of the great outdoors at my disposal, I'm not interested in holing up inside. At all. I brought no television to this relationship and I don't intend to carry one with me out west. That's not be being a pretentious hipster, that is me voicing my needs honestly, part of the reason I'm moving out west is the breathtaking landscape. I need to be out in it.

 

 

7. I am infuriatingly selfish.

 

 

8. My guts. My head. My heart. My soul. They're all working together on this one and the message is clear. Do this thing for yourself. This is you, pursuing your dreams. It gets harder to chase them every single day that you wait. Run. Hunt them. Catch them. This is something you have to do to feel purpose and contentment with life, no matter how great your partner. You have to be okay with yourself, love yourself first. This is a journey you must take alone. You can do it. Trust yourself.

 

 

 

And so I am. I'm doing it by myself.

 

 

The plan is for Matt and I to start talking about him moving west after Christmas when he's had time to save some money, look for a job, and buy a car- Another good reason for him to wait.

 

 

 We've talked and fought and hugged and sat in silence over this. And now it's done and we move forward with the plan in place. Not all of our arguments and misunderstandings have such amicable and positive endings, but I'm comforted to see that the big ones do. The ones that truly matter in the grand scheme, those we can work through and tease out and iron of wrinkles.

 

 

I'm not really afraid of spiders, so I can't say I'll be missing my protector from icky things, but there are millions of other ways Matt saves me every single day, and I can't wait to fully appreciate every single one of them in his absence, and then thank him repeatedly when we are reunited. But for now:

 

I love you, Matt. Thank you for saving me hundreds of times every single day in every way I need it.  

 

 

i think this is a milestone?

Well well well. Guess who is NAILING her 100th post today? 

CHEERS!!!!!!!!!!!

ME!!!!!!!!! 

Let's not shit ourselves, when I started this little happiness project last November I had no idea I'd make it this far. In fact, I was even supposed to have a coupla co-bloggers. They bailed out as soon as I registered this little sideshow and made it all official-like. 


Dicks.


I mean we're still practically BFF, but I'm not going to pretend like I'm not mad about being deprived of a little photo shoot in cracked-out golf attire for our much anticipated "T'd off Tuesday" feature. The three of us swinging golf clubs at a camera in unison could have been totally dangerous epic.

Whatevs, I'm over it.


I'd be lying if I said that after 100 posts I feel like I know ANYTHING close to what it is I'm doing here, floating around in the blogosphere. But hey, it feels pretty damn good to have a place to use curse words gratuitously and bitch about how much the winter makes me want to hibernate. Plus, no one seems to judge me too hard when I listen to my Bon Iver pandora station a smidgen too long and start ranting and raving about god knows what in my fragile emotional state.

So, thanks Internet.

It's been a beautiful beginning to a lovely friendship. And for realsies you've done wonders for my attitude. Just ask Manfriend, he'd probably have killed me for the life insurance money by now if I didn't have this sturdy little crutch.  

SPEAKING OF THAT GUY.

Guess who got a brand spankin' new suit last night? Yes, my own boyfriend. Since we have four weddings to attend in the near future and all. And guess where my mall-phobic boyf let me drag him?

 H&M!!!! HOLY TRENDSETTERS BATMAN!

 If I could have had a video camera for the moment he opened the dressing room door wearing 'skinny-fit' trousers and a too-small suit jacket, I would have had a chance to bring more joy and laughter to the world. It was truly a sight to see. A hilarious, wondrous sight. We finally settled on a suit that looks snazzy on him and he needed my advice, so he had to stop giving me the silent treatment for making a scene in the dressing room and we jaunted off to our next glamorous destination.

THE STORE THAT SELLS VACUUM BAGS!

Because I'm 25 years old and I still own an old Hoover handed down from my parents. Except it's so old that they don't actually sell the correct vacuum bags anymore and that's when I started to panic.

I must suck all the dog hair into the vacuum on the daily or my lungs say "No Bueno" and give up. Yes, my lungs speak Spanish. I do not.

And you know what Manfriend did? He bought us a brand-new STATE OF THE ART ($$$) vacuum that DOESN'T EVEN NEED BAGS. It's great. You just rinse off the filter. And empty it. (a million times a day if you have a mastiff like we do.) I LOVE BREATHING!  He reaaaaaally doesn't want my life insurance money, apparently.

Plus he even bought me that Michael Kors watch I requested for my birthday. With diamonds. I feel like a magpie staring at it on my wrist all day. I think that means I'm in love. I don't hate it.

Anyway. Thanks for the memories, Internet. And thanks Manfriend for keeping me appeased the rest of the time.

X's and O's!

Sara

kiss me (i have NO idea if i'm) irish.

My knowledge of my heritage is what one could refer to as patchy, at best. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that apparently my ancestors would mate with anyone that hung around and looked interested. At least no one can call us bigots! So I'm most likely some sort of European mutt, which is fine because I'm like, omgz totally one-hundo percent American. GO USA!


As a child I was extremely inquisitive. If you've ever played the "why?" game to annoy the shit out of whomever you're with, then you get the idea. So naturally, I was curious about where I came from... and not in the biblical sense.

This all stemmed from a single interaction. In kindergarten, June, this boy in my class, could and did proudly proclaim that his family was from India and we spent like 20 kindergartner minutes (read: more than my attention span would normally allot for a single task) learning about about his heritage and family traditions and cool clothes, etc, etc. I was jealous. I was insanely jealous of the fact that I could not one-up all his culture with our common Christmas tree, Easter-egg hunts, and pathetic Thanksgiving turkey. ALL OF THE OTHER KIDS HAD THOSE THINGS. UGH, they were used, lackluster, jaded. I, of course, wanted proof that I got to be more than the other kids when it came to a little thing known as worldliness.


Can we see now how the compulsion towards turning everything in life into a competition was already forming?


Yes. We. Can.


I can actually see my miniature self speaking very calmly to my mother from the backseat of the car as to not alarm her or let her catch on to the heirarchal thought stream spewing through every channel of my mind.


"Mom, where are we from?"


"Your Daddy and I are from Columbus, Ohio, and you were born in Pennslyvania. You know that stuff, silly!"


"I know where we're from in AMERICA, Mom. I mean where we our people from BEFORE us. Like your great grandparents."


"You know what, honey, that would be a great thing to talk about with your grandma and grandpa or Nana and Papa next time you see them."




AVOIDANCE.




My mother saw my innocent curiosity and met me with COMPLETE AVOIDANCE. To her credit, I was high-maintenence child, and the best method to prevent an extremely involved family project was probably to casually dismiss some of my more labor-intensive queries.




Travesty, anyone?






From that point on, I was constantly hounding every family member I could corner for clues about where I was from. Okay, maybe not constantly,  but whenever I remembered June, or not gettting answers, or not feeling as awesome because another kid had something I didn't. The way I saw it, I still had one very important factor on my side, potential. Since I wasn't told I was basically the same as everyone else that fled Europe or wherever they were before to pursue something better with the grand illusion of a much better livelihood, I wasn't merely that. Not yet.


Occasionally, I would get random tidbits of information to piece together, such as my mother proclaiming that she's "mostly Irish!" or my great-grandmother stinking up her home making cabbage rolls that ew, gross, I wouldn't even taste and thus I would learn that she was Hungarian... thus, so was I! I learned my Nan's maiden name was German and some of our cousins on that side spoke German, so we were somewhat Germish. German? Yeah, that's better. There was some talk of "lineage" at one point at a family wedding where everyone was plastered and I think partial English blood was discussed. I was patching it together.


I'm a mutt. Whatever.


And then... I started not caring about it as much. I worried about things like boys and cars and clothes and sneaking out to go streaking with my friends. Things I could really win at, and that were in my control.


Until last summer.




Last summer I was visiting my fraternal grandparents, Nan and Papa at their home in Ann Arbor. We basically played Scrabble, walked around U of M while they told me stories of their glory days there and when they met, sat around drinking cocktails, and looked through thousands of old family photographs.


I honestly had no idea my Nan was schlepping around 8927348937 pictures from house to house that they moved around the country. As I was looking through them, and she was encouraging me to take any of them I wanted, because, hello, time to get rid of some of that baggage, I came across a bonafide breakthrough.


I'm sitting next to my WASPY seventy-three year old grandmother looking through snapshot 376376 of 2837498374. I'm sneezing because everything. is. so. damn. dusty.




I HAVE ALLERGIES, YEESH I HATE IT SO MUCH.




Anyway, yeah, allergies can go blow a whale.




We're sitting on the couch together and we come across a old ass photo of a man that turns out to be her father. And then my dear, dear, Nan, my biggest influence and person I look up to most on this earth, says offhandedly:


"Oh, this is right after he came over from the old country."


My ears perk up ever so slightly. "Oh, yes, Germany, right?"


"No no no, Sarabara, from Romania of course."






WHAT IN THE EVER-LOVING HELL?




Romania.




Old country = Romania.


And that is the story of how I found out that I'm badass and a vampire and my family is from ROMANIA. Don't get my wrong, I fully realize the whole vampire thing is kind-of worn out and quite frankly kind of annoying ever since Twilight pretty much stole the soul that was the coolness of vampires. But take a long look at yourself, and really dig deep into your soul and answer honestly when I ask what I'm about to ask.

Wouldn't you TOTALLY ride out the awesome and cool vampire-darkness heritage you JUST found out about?

I knew you would.

Now I just need to find that June kid and let him know that actually, I win. Again.

But since, according to my mother, I'm at least a little Irish too, I'll be celebrating all the snakes leaving the Emerald Isle or whatever all this madness is about today. Just in case. Wouldn't want to make my ancestors feel unappreciated.

If you see me tomorrow, be gentle.

XO Sare.