Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Final Reflections on July 2013


It’s the last day of July. It’s been a fairly uneventful month, but holy cats, has it gone fast. I don’t have a whole lot to report. If you’re a friend in real life, you’ll know that the two big news items this month were my birthday & paying off my car.

The car thing was exciting, especially since I paid it off a year early. That means we knocked out three pieces of debt in less than a year. Now we plan to focus on our two credit cards, which will probably take a couple of years. Once that’s done, we’ll be mostly debt-free, except for my student loans, which I anticipate paying on until I die (and, compared to most people, I hardly have any, how sad is that?).

My birthday was basically a non-event. I had a rough time emotionally in the week leading up to it. I was feeling really lonely. Loneliness is something that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. It comes and goes, but it’s definitely been stronger since we moved to Dallas. Since it’s something that’s followed me everywhere I’ve ever gone, it seems obvious that the problem lies somewhere deep with in me. Obviously, I’ve never figured out how to fix it.

There’s this song by fun., “All Alright,” where he sings in the chorus, “Yeah, it’s all alright. I guess it’s all alright. I got nothing left inside of my chest, but it’s all alright.” That’s a pretty accurate description of how I felt for most of July. I guess if you’ve never felt hollow on the inside, then you don’t know how easy it can be to pretend on the outside that everything is fine, but I’ve gotten fairly good at it.

Anyway, it got better, although it’s still a problem that I’m puzzling over. I’m considering writing a blog series on loneliness but haven’t gathered the courage to follow through on it yet. I don’t know that I want to lay my soul bare in public like that.

In world news, I have to admit that I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. There were political scandals. Aren’t there always? That stupid abortion bill passed here in Texas on the second try. And they banned women from bringing tampons into the state capitol during the session? Okay, weirdos. That guy from Glee died, which I thought was sad, because dying young is always sad. And some jackhole train driver in Spain decided that speeding was more important than people’s lives. That was both sad and infuriating.

Huh, I guess maybe I paid better attention than I thought.

Despite how this post may sound, I remain optimistic that things are not only good, but also continuing to get better. I’m looking forward to August. I have a lot of plans & a lot of good things coming up.

It's the end of July 2013 and that's what's been going on in my crazy head. If you're stopping by to read, why don't you tell me what's been going on in yours?

4 comments:

  1. Seriously, they banned tampons? What are they going to do, check women's vaginas?

    Almost scared to ask.

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  2. They made them take any tampons/pads out of their purses (not out of their vaginas). Ridiculous in any case. They said it was because they were afraid they were going to throw them at the lawmakers, but guns are allowed in the state capitol, so it was obviously just a ploy to make women who wanted to protest the bill uncomfortable.

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  3. I think doing posts about loneliness would be very excellent and I say that as a person who is often lonely. It's hard, at least for me, putting the more personal stuff on the blog, but I think things that are hard for me to write about are some of my better writing. So I say go for it!

    July also went by quickly for me. There was a lot more processing the reunion and some catching up with people from High School. It was a good month, mostly because any month that is summer is a good month, but also because I was so happy to connect with so many people again. (See above re: loneliness.)

    If you lived here you would have gotten to enjoy the Jeff Cogan's (Multan County Chair)term erupt in scandal. You might have also gotten to become infuriated at his sexist response to the scandal. Much more fun than banning abortion. MUCH MORE!

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  4. P, you're right. Sometimes we need to push ourselves to do the things that are hard for us. I think I'll start putting my thoughts down on paper re: loneliness and see if it gels into anything. If it does, I'll start the series.

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