Reality… The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

My girlfriend C-Rich is a classically-trained singer whose talents are apparently only on display with her church choir.

Hey!

I heard the chortling. I don’t judge her on her religious beliefs and I’m sure she’s not judging something about me – so get off my nuts about my churchy friend. I’m embracing diversity.

Anyway, *glares at readers* the instant message excerpt below got me thinking…

Peace 9:39 am
    We can no longer friends due to your anti-coffee-ness. I'm sorry. It's not me. It's you.

 C-Rich 9:40 am
    It’s just a phase.

 Peace 9:40 am
    Most of my life is a phase I'm still looking to outgrow

 C-Rich 9:42 am
    I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I finally accept that I'm an adult

 Peace 9:43 am
Right?!?!?!?
I mean, you and I, we grew up thinking we'd be one thing; and now we're another. It's very disconcerting

 C-Rich 9:44 am
    Yeah.
    I did not dream of being a Business Analyst slash Project Manager

 Peace 9:44 am
That, my-friend-who-is-no-longer-my-friend, is something I COMPLETELY understand. I still get a little freaked out when I try to draw the line from there to here. And, because it’s always super-productive *eyeroll,* I "what if" the crap out of every decision that led me to this incredibly uncomfortable chair.
That's both a metaphor and a truth. I need a different chair.

 C-Rich 9:47 am
    You're going to forget the coffee thing because everything else we share is magical.

 Peace 9:47 am
    It is. I’m not.

… about how the direction of our lives changes, and wondering why, once we realize we’re completely off-track, we become like rubber-neckers at a car wreck. We absolutely slow down to look at the grisly mess, but only stop to do something when we have both the time and no choice.

Have you ever tried to draw the line from where you were headed to where you are? Don’t. It's depressing. And sometimes unseemly.

But, having done it...

I took a seat in Dr. Pinot Grigio’s office to reflect on what I discovered so that I could appropriately place blame, because, you know, that’s way easier than admitting that you fucked up your dream using your own primo decision-making skills. Anyway, by the end of my two bottle session I’d managed to uneasily identify the forks that took me “elsewhere,” and sadly they seem to have two common denominators: impulsivity… and me.

SHINY OBJECT!!!

Here’s the rub. At the time, I’m sure every decision seemed like a perfectly sensible one. After all, who makes life-altering proclamations and path deviations just all willy-nilly?

*slowly raises hand*

I suspect this is how I ended up with a house in the middle of nowhere that will never be out of the remodeling stage, and four dogs.

Admittedly, I should probably be grateful things didn’t go completely sideways, given the circumstances. Though it is, by no stretch of anyone’s imagination, the career I dreamed of, at least I can go to work in jeans without combing my hair to have Nerf gun fights, neurotically IM crazy crap with C-Rich, and collect a paycheck enough to sustain my chronic need for mani/pedis and even more shoes.

Still… if I should find a Genie in a bottle…