Happy Birthday!

You mean the world to me.

Life, as we know it, is nothing short of a miracle.

Happy birthday my love.

Onwards and upwards, another good year.

Better person

Blake is a Spring-breaker. I'm a Spring-no-breaker.

While he's skiing in Sedona, I'm catching up on reality TV shows.

A text from me to him:

"I feel more American today. I ordered Chinese takeout for dinner."

TV + Takeout. That's how I spent my spring breaks in college.

My life is too predictable.

********************

There has been quite a lapse since my last update.

But things are good. At least the marriage thing seems to be working. (I recently discovered an aisle of self-help books in the library with those cheerful titles: "Divorce Busting," "Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts," "Saving your Second Marriage Before It Starts," etc.)

I still haven't made any New Year's resolutions. That's probably why I felt I couldn't start writing my first post in 2013 without talking about my grand plan.

I can maybe recycle some of my past ones -- lose weight, find love, and be happy (in that order, because I used to think one thing led to another; and of course, I blamed everything on the Chinese takeout I consumed).

Well, those kind of resolution was a product of its time (college!) and rose out of the misery of being single, unloved, and unloving.

But I also used to have another resolution: be a better person.

I think I can re-use this one.

I think I have come a long way since my time of slurping noodles while watching Sex and the City without a blink. I don't like that memory, but revising it makes me grateful.

My time at Yale is the most defining time of my life. It made me feel vulnerable and insecure all the time. I was always shy, and never good enough for anything. I had no skills, and few friends. I ate too much, and slept too little.  I could remember the long hours in the library, the Friday nights in the gym, the uncomfortable moments when I had to tell other people my plan for summer/next summer/the summer after the next, the painful trip of hopping with a broken ankle to campus health and hopping back -- alone, both ways, and the desperate meals at the graduate dining hall to avoid the awkwardness of eating by myself in my own college's dining hall.

Long story short, even when I struggled with being lonely and alone, I still wanted to be a better person and hoped for a change.

Now I'm in a much better place. The worst days always give me perspectives. I could have done so many things differently. But, in the end, I did become a better person. I had lost weight, found love, and started being happy again.

What makes things work never change: be brave, say yes. It just took me some time to realize what didn't work.