Archive: July 2009

A progress report on my three resolutions for 2009:

Every day, I will clean for 15 minutes.
Big failure here. According to the original terms of this resolution, I should have taken care of my 8 days’ worth of cleaning preemptively (ha!) or right when I got home, and neither happened. I invoke the Going Back to Work Immediately clause! Bleh. The house is still livable, but it is not nearly as spic and span as it once was earlier this year. I can feel myself sliding back into the whole “I want a clean house, but I don’t want to clean it” cycle, which is counterproductive, to say the least, and the reason for this blasted resolution.

Every week, I will write and send my grandmother a note.
Yay for an easy win! Plus, two of my notes this month were post cards from Denver, so that counts for some local bonus charm, I think.

By the way, my grandmother sent me a card earlier in the month, and she included a dozen books of stamps with a note: “I think you could use these.” How cute is that?

Every month, I will take at least a few hours just for myself.
Uhhh. I went to DC for a weekend with my sister, so does that count? I am really falling short of being intentional with this goal; at the end of each month, I keep telling myself to keep it at the front of my mind, but it just slides on back as soon as everything else catches up to me. I can hardly remember what I did this month (other than go to Denver), much less what I did on my own, and that is a sad state of affairs.

In conclusion, it appears that I am an overall disappointment. Here’s to a much better August!

The good news is that I’m only working half days today and tomorrow, but the bad news (well, not really bad so much as news that makes me apprehensive) is that I’m taking the afternoons off so that I can coordinate another wedding — yes, I am directing the logistics for a wedding that is taking place tomorrow, and tonight is the rehearsal, which makes me even more nervous than the prospect of the wedding because no one will have a darn clue what they’re doing tonight, but one would hope that by the time the wedding day comes around, we will all have figured it out, so for this entire morning, I have been throwing shifty glances at my folder of notes, wondering if I have forgotten to account for or ask about anything important, even though the bride and I had a meeting last night about all of the questions I had from our first meeting a month ago, and we addressed all of my little check boxes and highlight marks, so I’m not sure what I could be forgetting, but the idea that I don’t know what I don’t know freaks me out because when it comes time for me to run the rehearsal — so help me! — I might be lining up friends and family members when a giant gap shows up in my careful planning and I have no choice but to stand there with my mouth agog and my eyes wide because I have to make up a feasible solution like right that second to demonstrate the responsibility and organization that qualifies me to be the one holding the clipboard and watching the clock, and even then, if everything goes to plan, I still have to get everyone through their paces in only an hour (!) before everyone jets off to the rehearsal dinner, at which point I will make revisions to my notes, double-check the church set-up, and mentally kick myself for volunteering to “do whatever!” for this wedding, simultaneously conceding that I am secretly reveling in the challenge.

JG and I were raised with drastically different vacation styles.

His family has gone to Ocean City, New Jersey, for a week every summer for as long as he can remember. The traditions at the beach are well-established: spend the day on the sand, take a nap in your beach chair, read books, go bodysurfing, play games, drift back to the house for happy hour and dinner, and take part in evening rituals like the boardwalk or endless card games. Everyone came to relax and bask in the sun. It was simple.

My parents would choose a destination, do scads of research, and then wake up my sister and me at some ungodly hour to drive there, no matter how far away it was.  Each day we were away, we would get up early and go nonstop. There was only so much time to be wherever we were, so we had to cram in as much as possible! We absorbed the culture, ate indigenous foods, and took massive amounts of pictures. It was overwhelming.

Thus, as adults faced with the prospect of planning a vacation, JG asks, “Where’s the beach?” and I ask, “What are we going to do?” Then we look at each other blankly.

For our honeymoon, we took a cruise: a lovely melding of the beach and sightseeing. It was the best vacation I had ever had, and the chasm between our leisure-time archetypes had yet to reveal itself. Then, we opted for the full week at the beach because it was (mostly) free, and who can refuse that? After that week, though, I started to pause. When people asked me excitedly about my vacation, I tended to shrug and say things like, “Better than being at work!” Excuse me? I thought my vacation enjoyment bar was higher than that.

I should confess that I am a total miser in regard to my generous allotment of vacation days, which seems like mere pennies in comparison to JG’s much-deserved wealth of summer break. I understand that not all of my time off will be spent for my sheer enjoyment, but I am very reluctant to sign away a full work week with the knowledge that I just won’t have very much fun. However, the reality is that we can’t afford my type of touristy expeditions regularly, so the almost-free beach trip is as good any. Time and money aside, the fundamental differences remained: to JG, my educational, activity-filled vacations were stressful; to me, his languorous, sun-soaked vacations were boring. Resigning ourselves to separate trips seemed excessive — couldn’t we make this work?

It was with all this baggage that we approached our most recent Denver vacation, or as JG put it, “our first RA-style vacation.” No pressure, right? JG was game for the change, and it helped that Denver is more casual and outdoorsy than other cities. I promised to limit my plans to one or two big activities per day as long as he acknowledged that I was scaling back. Despite our differences, JG and I do align in the world of planning, and we prioritized our activities so that we were sure to do the items at the top of our list, and others at the bottom could fall away if we ran out of time or energy. It was like a lower-impact version of my childhood vacation: still full of activity, but not held so rigidly to the itinerary.

Ultimately, our trip to Denver was fun for both of us. Yay! I learned that I can barely keep up the pace set by my parents in my youth, so our watered-down version is the best for everyone. Almost every night, JG said, “I’m glad you’re having a fun vacation,” which was sweet and all, but then I had to ask, “What about you?” He usually said something like, “I’m having fun, too, but I couldn’t do this every day.” Hooray, you don’t have to! Just for a week at a time every so often!

There are days when I really struggle with the fact that our ideas of fun lie in such disparate quadrants. I let myself doubt that I can come up with activities and excursions that we will both genuinely enjoy. I worry that my preferences are prohibitively expensive, and I hate to spend the money if JG is wishing he were somewhere else. The trip gave me a glimmer of hope that maybe, with the right setting and activities, JG and I can have fun playing tourist together.

After a long day of wandering around downtown Denver, JG and I trolled Larimer Square for a casual dinner spot, and we stumbled upon Lime. It was sort of a Mexican restaurant pretending to be a night club, with its bass-heavy music and dim lighting, but the food was tasty and the service was fast, so we were happy with the impromptu choice.

Halfway through the meal, the waiter came by with a small plate holding two upturned, squeezed lime halves. “They’re filled with tequila!” he shouted. “On the house!”

What? I looked after him in a daze and then kept eating, fully intending to leave those little limes just as they were, thank you very much.

“Come on,” JG said. “We have to do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s free!” JG has my number; free is my favorite flavor and just my size.

“But I’ve never done a tequila shot!”

“So what? We’ll do it together.”

Cringing, I picked up my lime half and waited for JG’s count of three. I only managed to get some of the tequila into my mouth before coming up sputtering. So awful!

JG eyed my half-full lime. “You didn’t even get all of it! That’s like half of a half of a shot.”

“It was spilling out all over,” I protested. “I guess I could have pinched it, though.”

“Hey, I figured it out.”

Well, excuse me!

We continued on with our meals, and JG commented, “I can’t wait until you tell your sister about this.”

I nodded. “She will flip out. And I still have to finish my margarita.”