A Busy, Busy Girl....

I've been loaded down with school and work lately, trying to delicately balance the two in my life so that I don't end up throwing myself off a bridge any time soon. Not that I want to throw myself off a bridge; on the contrary, things are going quite well. Its just that often, after coming home from a long day of working with teenagers, I need to sit on the couch and stare at mindless television for about seven or eight hours until the terror leaves my brain.

I jest.

My work isn't THAT bad. I quite enjoy it on most days. But, it is a challenge and I do find myself busy, or overloaded mentally so that I do need to take some extra time for myself now and then.

I'm still in College, although I question my desire to continue attending daily. This semester we are taking a children's literature course, a course on professionalism, a course on current adolescent issues, and another on youth and the law. Through everything I've done for my degree, though, those courses were all covered in one way or another, and the redundancy makes me want to stab myself in the eye with my pen in the middle of class.

I haven't ridden Zydo since the week of Christmas, and now he is acting mostly as a pet. He is too cute, the way the hair on his nose gets covered in frost, and he comes to the gate and puts his frozen nose in my hand and I melt the frost off and he licks my palm like a little puppy, only he happens to weigh fifteen hundred pounds. And the no riding has affected him that way, has caused a large lump of flab to appear on his rump and his blanket to be ill fitting.

The Little Chevy has been running like a top, not needing a single dollar's worth of work since the snow tires and the gas tank. I love my little car, and I feel bad for it, as it treats me so well; the other day, SuperNan was filling up my windshield washer fluid, and she noticed a large chunk of the Little Chevy hanging off the hood. And she ripped it off, tore away this piece of falling of paint, and the horror that stood in my heart during that moment will forever haunt my soul. Because it caused me to realize that even if the Little Chevy seems invincible, she is not. And now I have about ten hours worth of body work to do on her because I noticed that the hood is starting to rust. And OH, how I don't have what it takes to be seen driving around in a rust bucket. Sigh.

Sometimes...

I received a call from Mal in the early hours of the morning today, to listen to the latest in her life. I was awake at almost three a.m., because that's what the Crazy people do, they STAY AWAKE. FOREVER. Amen.

Mal was talking about what makes life worthwhile, and I was trying to explain to her how I feel about it, how no one thing can make you want to keep going on, how it has to be something that is not concrete. That even if you change your surroundings and your last name and get yourself a cat and end up living in the Depths of Hell, happiness might not find you because Hey, you might not have been looking hard enough.

And really, it sounds so trite. It sounds so pathetic and ridiculous to say "Go out and sniff the sunshine, and then your heart shall fill to the brim with JOY." Trust me, if anyone had said that to me last fall, when my life had completely fallen to pieces and I was driven over the edge by everything that was going on with me? If someone had said that to me, I would have gouged out their eyes with a wine corker. No lies.

I was driving home tonight and it was particularly frosty out. When I got on the road that leads me to The Ranch, at first I saw a patrillion little animals in the ditches, because all I could see were what I thought were eyes.

And then I kept driving, cautiously, and I noticed that all the trees and growth were covered in a frozen bit of frost, so that the road that leads me home looked as though it was lined with diamonds.

And sometimes, when this life acts like a giant pile of smashed assholes, you have to see the little things and hope quietly to yourself that everything will be ok, simply because you have no other choice but to go forward.