megfowler.com

Ahhh, sunny.

It does my heart more good than I can possibly express. Maybe some signs are pointing to me experiencing some sort of SAD, but I’m not so sure. After all, rain doesn’t make me depressed… it just pisses me off.

But sun! Sun! I love sun! Sun makes it all okay again, and that’s what matters.

In fact, sun makes everything SO okay that none of the following things has irritated me in the last 24 hours:

1. My allergies (go Reactine!)
2. Rachael Ray
3. Shoes
4. That horrid, horrid “Lips of an Angel” song
5. Nancy Grace
6. The obsessive love people have for “The Sopranos”
7. The strange, strange way my bangs behave
8. The motion light in the backyard
9. The way all the Vancouver free dailies are basically information culled from blogs
10. Oprah (ok, ok, I lied. But it wasn’t until this morning)

See? Life is practically PERFECT when the sun is shining.

If you’re on there, you know what this is. If not, run. RUN.

Do you ever have one of those days where everything you say is the wrong thing, and then you compound it by reacting the wrong way to everything everyone else says?

No?

That doesn’t sound familiar?

Whew. You’re lucky.

One of these years, I’ll learn to be sage, and I’ll learn restraint, and I’ll learn to leave some mystery, and I’ll learn a bit of finesse.

But until then, I’ll just continue to bludgeon my way through conversations and make the best of it.

And gush, when it occurs to me.

And express love, when I feel it.

And hang on to strong opinions, when I have them.

And be open, when I can’t help it.

And get mad, if that’s what’s needed.

And refuse to give advice about other women, just because that never goes well.

It might make life a little more interesting than it needs to be at times, but a little bit of awkward never killed anyone.

Right?

The rain stopped. I can’t even tell you how exciting this is.

So we went out to celebrate.

Here are a couple of random shots from my camera phone when we were out and about…

The view off the Lion’s Gate Bridge:

A blurry shot of English Bay going by:

When the sun went down, the stars came out, and seriously… I felt reborn.

I have a thing about stars. Nothing to do with them telling me how to run my life, but everything to do with how they fill up my eyes to the brim.

Then I was distracted from stargazing when a woman on the radio called in to dedicate a song to the woodpecker she’d rescued earlier that day.

Apparently, his name was Sammy.

And he wanted to hear Faith Hill’s “Breathe.”

So they played it.

I think the weather has left us all a little insane, don’t you?

Lindsay and Karlo are married by now. Which is SO excellent. And everything looked great. Which is ALSO excellent.

I, however? Am tired.

It’s been a long, long week and my sinus infection is still lingering about the edges of my psyche like a seventh-grade boy at his first dance.

And my mom’s back went out last night, which was a little interesting, but we made it happen.

Oh, yes. You cannot take a Fowler girl down. No sir. Especially not when a wedding is on the line.

Lindsay wanted simple, rectangular glass vases, and spare arrangements in red, orange and yellow in a single stem: tulips.

My mom suggested adding some roses for texture, and that worked out beautifully.

(Well, the thorns on the roses kind of sucked, but at least tulips don’t have thorns. Just really floppy leaves that need to be stripped and a tendency to OPEN UP REAL WIDE WAY TOO SOON.)

Here’s how they looked:

Pretty.

So, to sum up:

Stems stripped of leaves: 200

Stems stripped of thorns: 48

Arrangements made: 14

Bouquets: 2

Canes walked with by moms: 1

Number of emergency trips to florist: 1

Shots of espresso consumed by daughters: 4

Dads who came along to be lackeys: 1

Blushing couples smiling in spite of the rain: 1

Sounds perfect to me.

Congrats, Lindsay and Karlo! You both looked gorgeous, and I know you’ll make each other happy for years and years and years.

And thanks, Mom. Another mother-daughter wedding success!

Now I just need to SLEEEEP. Also, anyone good at back rubs?

Vancouver has a rain warning today.

This seems so REDUNDANT.

Wordpress is also batty. It posted this weak and uninformative entry FOUR TIMES.

Also? I put my neck out this morning, while coughing as I was getting out of bed. I am an old, old, crotchety woman.

Tomorrow I am helping my mom do flowers for the wedding of an old friend of mine. We’ll make them gorgeous! Well, my mom will, and I will be a useful lackey.

AND…

A picture of me with my Shamu straw (which Catherine melted in the dishwasher)…

My favourite is the one that appears to be filing.

Go here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you that you might die of cuteness.

I have no idea how to start this post.

I’ve tried a few different lead-ins, and everything just ends up sounding stupid. Not that I’m usually all that far from stupid on my lead-ins, but nothing feels right or true or even a little bit sincere.

It felt like I was trying to buffer what was coming next, and I don’t think I’m going to do that today.

I’m coming up on my 33rd birthday in less than a month, and while I know that 33 is nowhere near “old”, I’m feeling like the last few years have aged me more than the entire span of my twenties. Or my teens, for that matter.

Lots of good things have happened in that time, too, of course.

I always feel compelled to mention that, for whatever reason. It’s not like my life is the most difficult one out there, or that my experiences are impossible, or that I want to be pitied. Compared to most, my life is easy.

But I think part of the reason I’ve struggled so much over the past few years is that I have a little problem with that “comparison thing.”

Comparing my life with other peoples’ lives to make conclusions about my own, to be more specific.

It wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the conclusions weren’t so rarely good.

Am I a good enough friend? Am I too emotional? Am I dealing with things appropriately? Am I where I’m supposed to be financially, relationally, emotionally, mentally? Am I failing when I should succeed? Am I being a giant pain in the ass?

Comparison has become my gauge of success. It’s not a good gauge — I’m certain of that — but it’s still how I organize things in my head.

Currently, the comparison gauge is telling me that I should be in better shape, that I should be in a relationship of some kind, that I should be saving for a house, that I should be submitting articles to major publications, that I should have known I couldn’t have kids years ago so I could be in the adoption mindset, that I should earn more respect from the people around me, that I should be less frustrated by small things, that I should be better organized, that I should have less in the way of regret.

And the worst thing? It tells me that I’m too late for half the things I want, and too screwed up for the other half. That’s just stupid.

But I believe it sometimes, late at night, when I think about all the steps it will take to get where I want to go.

Fighting that voice is a big part of who I am right now. For every positive move I make forward, there’s a huge part of me kicking myself because I’m not all the way there yet.

My parents will tell you I’ve always been this way… prone to beat myself up about failures and unable to learn things one step at a time. I want to be perfect, and I want to get it right NOW.

I used to stop learning things because it was taking too long to become good at them. Which is insane. And shows a lack of discipline. And forethought.

Yeah. I’m a real prize.

I know I need to work on all of that. I need to work on a lot of things.

People give me lots of advice about being my own person and living according to my own standard and not existing to make anyone else happy and all sorts of other sage thoughts that are true and even a little irritating now and then.

Because my problem is not that I don’t know. My problem is that I don’t act on that knowledge.

I’m also not as honest as I should be about where I’m at on any given day. The comparison gauge tells me to suck it up and keep going because that’s what the people I admire do.

But for all the reserve I try to practice — and despite my desire to protect the people I love from my own frustrations — I still have to be honest about it sometimes.

After all, I’m not the people I admire. I’m just me.

So I have a few things to tell you.

I have to tell you that this is hard.

I have to tell you that being sick and then being sick in a different way on top of it makes me feel like I’m running a marathon with ankle weights.

I have to tell you that I’m sometimes envious that other writers can open themselves up completely without consequence online.

I have to tell you that I struggle to make it some days. Not in the sense that I don’t want to get out of bed or that I don’t function just fine by all accounts. No, I struggle with feeling deep down like I am only half the person I am intended to be.

I have to tell you that blogging has felt impossible to me at some points as of late because I have nothing wise or funny to say, and if I don’t say anything cheerful, people stop reading, which is anathema for me as a writer. I know I owe you better.

I have to tell you that I’m horrified by the thought of disappointing anyone, but I also know I do it every day.

I have to tell you that I don’t feel like I do enough for other people anymore, but that I’m also trying hard to get back to that place.

I tell you all of these things because acknowledging them makes me work harder to change.

And also because I get sick of not saying them when I am trying to hold myself together.

Or when I think I shouldn’t say them, because I should be stronger.

Regardless, this is me.

And I don’t know how to end this post, either.

Hot showers; the need for sunglasses; salsa fresca; desire; white sheets; glass bowls; waking up slowly; oatmeal; men who dance like spastic freaks; grace; wine gums; ponytails; brown eggs; suspension of disbelief; kindness; peonies; coffee so hot you have to drink it slowly; a well-written newspaper article; Knut the polar cub; brand new music; pink t-shirts; ballet flats; burn-y lip gloss; knowing things; johanna’s ferret of the week updates; letting idiots go; Emergen-C; avocado; turtles; cherry blossoms; enthusiasm; people subscribing to my RSS feed like a silent little family; wood stove smell; large windows; that weird feeling in your stomach when you go over a bump fast in the car; lemons.

Moths; rain; any book Oprah is promoting; cold coffee; puffy, itchy eyes; the taste of Splenda; sitcom reruns; Bill O’Reilly; Windows Vista; the term “blog wars”: chips to the toenail polish; “torture porn” movies; that the hems of my jeans keep curling up; American versions of anything Japanese; men with tempers; the term “rehab”; spray tans; Botox; aloofness; cheap plastic wrap; guilt; produce that goes bad too quickly; Lost; people who confuse bitchiness with confidence; obsessive coverage of celebrity pregnancies; the wildly fluctuating price of chicken and gas; the slowdown of my brain after two weeks of being sick; skunks in the back alley; Janice Dickinson; and blue sports drinks.