Living Furiously.

***Side Note***

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to my PERFECT husband for buying me the adorable little PURPLE net book that I am posting from today! (Yes, it's technically a school expense, and he will use it on occasion...but it's SO ME!- and he let me get PURPLE instead of blue, without even whining about the color's emasculating effects on young men in college! What a man!)

***Side Note Over.***

I think because it's a new year (and an additional reason is possibly that 2009 was the worst year of all our lives.) people are reevaluating themselves, their lives, and their passions left and right. Blogs on every level have been posting about new years resolutions, weight, goals, and what they think of themselves as they are NOW. Many even talk about where they are going, where they came from, and weather or not they're lost. Happiness, of course, is always the desired product.

One of these blogs (and you can access it by clicking on "Angie" in my list of blogs i love) talked about living furiously, and how we all have at one point. What happens to us, as we grow, and change, and become 'successful' that keeps us from living furiously ?

For some it's the weight of responsibility, the things that keep us tied to the place we're standing (job, family, etc.) For others, it's money (making too much money to just walk away, or not making enough money to even drive out of state) or the lack of gumption.

I don't have a soap box here. I don't have advice, and I don't know how to fix it. All i know is that everyone wants it, and that I have had a great deal of life lived furiously.

A tribute to my friends, and a (late) tribute to New Years.

The night had started out simple and mundane enough- but a lot of our nights had started out that way and ended up as life long memories. It was New Years Eve, about to become 2002. We had little plans except to be together.

The movie 9 to 5 has always been our movie. I was Jane Fonda's character- the jaded, insecure, learning to be independent while trying to discard who I thought I was once upon a time girl who couldn't run a copy machine. Rachael was Lily Tomlin, because if she ever did kill her boss, it would include a broadway musical style of singing and dancing- and probably animated animals too. Nyssa, though, was Dolly Parton simply because she wasn't blonde, and her boobs weren't

huge. And we all knew someone who was a "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical biggot." Not to mention, if one of us ever had to hide a body, we knew who to call.

In those days, I was still a teenager. I was in college. Crazy Town's "Butterfly" was my song and I once dirty danced to it at midnight in the middle of a busy street. With my girls. There was a red convertible with the top down, and we were drunk- but only on our youth.

In the freezing cold, we drove down to the Holiday Oil, because Nyssa wanted to take a picture of the gas prices, which had reached an all time low of 99 cents a gallon. (Yes, down a great deal from 2 years ago when it was 5.00 a gallon in the middle of Texas.) Of course, being only 10:00 on New Years Eve, Wise Men and plastic portraits of baby Jesus clung to front lawns like a child to it's mother's leg- 'Don't let go! Don't forget about the year that will never happen again!'

Well, we shouted back, with cherry lips and frothy faces in the cold wind- 'Good riddance! And a Happy New Year!"

Somewhere along the road (it's not there anymore, and my memory is a bit rusty) was a house with a sign that said 'Tilley Time Daycare."

It's Utah. There are a lot of kids here, and so there are a lot of daycares. What made this one 'special' (as in "Ed.") was that the sign was a 5 foot long yellow umbrella that looked like a giant Twinkie with red writing on it. No, really- it was the ugliest thing ever. And it was nothing to us but a hideous landmark until something smashed through one of it's corners and left a huge gaping hole in it.

Now, if you remember anything from the 90's, you'll remember these:

Where’s The Cream Filling? Opossum

Now, really - how could 3 all-grown-up-but-not-really girls resist? We spent the next two hour making signs on poster board that said "Hey! Where's the cream filling!" and eating hostess cupcakes and Twinkies. Rachael was terrified that they'd find her fingerprints, so she wouldn't touch the signs, but in the end, she signed her whole name. I mean, first, middle, and last. So much for anonymity. But that was Rachael.

At midnight, we hammered our posts into the ground, and ran away laughing. None of us thought to take pictures. Nyssa wasn't a photographer yet, and I didn't even own a camera. A few days later, the signs were gone, and we never heard from the police. After all, what we did was only a very mild form of vandalism, and if it had been my sign, I would have had the decency to laugh. Hopefully, the owners had a good sense of humor. We didn't mean it to hurt anyone.