livin' a dream.

on especially mundane days when i am totally bored with everything around me, sometimes i catch myself slipping into my fantasy life, where instead of being a low-level, bottom of the totem pole, go-fer highway design engineer from the suburbs who hasnt bought herself a new article of professional wear since she got her job over a year ago and spends her workdays doing mindless tasks and simultaneously hoping that her superiors will bring in more work or just find something for her to do once she finishes the busywork they have her doing at the moment, but also happy for the excuse to surf the internets for a few more minutes a day in order to stretch the amount of time each little tasks takes, i escape to an alternate reality and become a fashionable, successful young professional, living in a tiny apartment in the city whose windows leak (but Hey! it has character!) and working in a big office building doing something very exciting and important that also lends itself to creativity and personality and the option to work from home a few days a week (or just work a few less days a week!) and i am charming and witty and outgoing and fun to be around and i keep up with politics and have credible opinions about things that are more important than nail polish, shoes, and how annoying my latest haircut experience was, because i am a well-educated woman who is able to retain mass amounts of information and recall it at the drop of a hat and i am poised and prepared to make a difference in the world around me!*

...and then my boss comes over, drops a huge stack of plans on my desk, and asks me to make him a copy of them, snapping me back into my reality.

its around this point that i usually stop and make myself reflect a little deeper on my real life - the one where i am a well-educated, well-adjusted product of public schools and higher education with a good degree and a good job. i am married to the man of my dreams who loves me enough to kiss me when my breath stinks and rub my feet whenever i sit down next to him and drape my feet into his lap. we live in a wonderful house that we OWN and it is beginning to feel like home. i am learning new things every day, even if they seem trivial and mundane in the moment, they build on each other and make me an interesting blend of ideas and experiences and allow me to relate to other people in a real way. i am surrounded by an ever-growing support system of friends and family and colleagues around whom i am beginning to realize that i can really be myself - my crazy, irrational, quirky self who is sometimes loud, loves all things adorable and geeky, and gets easily distracted by bright colors and shiny things (not that that happened at bible study last week or anything like that)

i have a great life. maybe its not exactly the way i always dreamed my life would be at this point. but i wouldnt change it for anything. i am growing. i am learning. i am adapting. i am enjoying it. and it works for me.


*and all across the state my english teachers collectively cringe over THAT fantastically awesome run-on sentence!