I FINALLY did it!

I got a new blog background! Thanks to Danielle and her super cute and funny baby blog see:

www.sweetchloelight.blogspot.com

And... (disclaimer, this one gets a little deeper than my usual blog entries)

I am shaking the "swine flu"/strep throat like sickness I have been battling for the last two weeks. Throw in a little PMS and my my, what a cocktail of misery! No wonder Ryan "went fishing in Savannah for the weekend"...

But more important than all that, I reorganized our living room furniture, cleaned out my jewelry studio and started on a new little collection for a late fall sale, tried KFC grilled chicken, am actually enjoying Chemistry and Statistics class (gasp!) and went one whole week without the poodle chewing up anything with more than a $10 value. Awesome.

The new living room format started it all over the last two weeks! The new format is much more conducive to having guests and watching movies, but I'm not sure about the level of "design intergrity". (I think it's ugly) Unfortunately, since we have a great house (cough cough... big mortgage payment) and one of us is gainfully employed while the other is underemployed, in school, and addicted to participating in equestrian sports; my perfectly sketched out living room furniture and design, including rug, is to remain in the same folder as the: barn plans, pic of the white Aston Martin Vanquish convertible, build your own F-250 King Ranch printout, 50 acre horse farm with original historic stone house, lake and adjoining organic farm ad, and the business cards from my favorite estate jewelry dealers which I have been collecting for years.

Sometimes, I look at this folder and wonder when or if any of these "material girl dreams" will in fact materialize. I also have much more realistic desires like granite countertops and a fenced backyard and sometimes think about where the heck my "bailout" check that must be lost in the mail from Washington is! J/K about the check. Anyway, then, I think about whether or not any of that stuff really is important and whether I should spend time wanting it at all. Maybe I am still in the "quarter life crisis" stage of life (don't laugh, this really happens) or maybe I was just reared in a culture where material things were paralled with "dreams" and markers of success. Am I not sucessful until my folder is empty? Will I be satisfied if it is? These uncertain economic times have slammed my generation on its "I have a college degree and therefore a job, a 3 series BMW, and I eat sushi in Buckhead 3 nights a week while wearing Tori Burch flats and a Tibi top" entitled hiney. We can all pretend that we aren't shocked by stories of people our parents age losing their entire retirement saving in the stock market or when we open that letter from our credit card company lowering our limit "just because", but I think we ARE shocked. This was not the plan. This generation did community service since middle school, we are college educated and multi-lingual, we gladly took unpaid internships and worked at summer camps to build our resumes. We did all the right things and burst into the "real world" expecting the same things we saw those just a few years older enjoying and BAM...the real world said, "put it in the folder honey cause youre not gonna see it anytime soon". So no new furniture and no fenced yard. We work our hineys off to do what we should and pay the mortgage instead of expecting someone else to save us. We slowly pay off those student loans and we get letters in the mail about how the "homestead exemption" has not been funded by the state this year and the property taxes are going up. After spending a few days realizing that after the mortgage, health insurance, car payments and insurance, bills, etc... are paid, there's still more to be paid, it hit me. The stuff in the folder is SO not important and so not an indicator of success. The things my culture taught me were important to have were only important under a completely different economic context.

We are successful because of what we've done and are doing NOW, not because of what we have. We are working and are lucky to both have jobs. We are paying the bills and we aren't losing our home. We have great families and great friends and great hobbies. We are loving and enjoying life, and even though we HAVE to laugh about not having 401K's and investment portfolios or 8 month emergency savings accounts, we are, at this time and in this culture, successful. I am not a pastry chef or a candy maker and I don't NEED granite countertops, even though I think they are pretty and that I need them because I love things made out of rocks.

So I FINALLY did it, I chunked the contents of the folder. It was hard, I won't lie. I am incapable of not wanting things, I know, but I think I FINALLY grew up a little. I walked back inside my cute little house, sat down on my green couch with a little dog hair on it, put my feet up on a hand-me-down ottoman, drank a glass of cheap pinot grigio and said a little prayer to thank God for my blessings and my family and petted my dogs. And really, at that very moment, I had everything I wanted.