relax.

Once I started a food blog. I thought that since I like food and I like to write, I would write about the food I ate and cooked and stuff like that. But I rarely did. I mean, I already had a blog. And when I would log in and it brought up that page, I think they call it the "dashboard", it indicated how many blogs I was managing, and the indication was two, and for a moment that made me feel a little more important. I wasn't just handling the demands of one, but TWO.

And I think about this and about how tempting it is in life to put more descriptive terms under one's name, things that show the world how much of a load we can handle, and how impressive we are. And then I think about how if you ask a person what they actually value, I mean really value, it doesn't usually have much to do with what they spend most of their time doing.

A friend was telling me a tale of her friend's educational experience while we walked home from a gelato date last week. We were passing by a community college, and I was probably lamenting how much my student loans hold me back from doing cool things in life. I do this a lot. Her friend, she informed me, pays SEVEN-HUNDRED dollars a month for his student loans, and he works at a burger place. She also said he's considering graduate school, as he can get his loans deferred. And this is exactly why I didn't ever want to get a masters degree. Because while I am NOT paying on my loans I am ACCUMULATING MORE DEBT that would eventually get me even further from doing more fun things in life and also not guarantee that I would get to spend time doing what I love. I have friends that took their graduate degree OFF their resume so that they could get a job, all the while paying money for the training they were having to hide.

And I think about both these things, what we value versus what we actually spend our time doing, and and also about what we pursue and invest ourselves in against all logical reasoning, and about how BACKWARDS the world can be, and it all makes me want to just go lay in a hammock under the trees with an optional read alongside an optional nap.

Lucky for me, I have a friend with a hammock; I've also got a book and a free afternoon.