MAMACADABRA

By 8:45am this morning I was thinking to myself that I’d be a whole lot happier if I were drinking.  That doesn’t typically bode well for the rest of the day.  I did a little market research and found that about 75% of those surveyed (my girlfriends) felt the same way.  Phew…so it wasn’t just me.  The weather is weird (winter where art thou?), it’s not yet Friday, and most of those with whom I spoke felt bleckity-bleck-bleck-bleck.

What a stupid way to start the morning.  No reasonable explanation to drink at that hour and nothing to look forward to.  That is, except for writing later, because I love doing that.  Oh, and, knowing I get to have at least one more Diet Coke today.  So that’s fun. 

I started thinking about what I actually want.  I haven’t been feeling very fulfilled professionally for the past several years, although I do like my job and I’m good at it, it’s just not what I’d be doing in an ideal world.  What would I want in an ideal world?  Aside from a teensy bit of plastic surgery?  And a Louis Vuitton bag?  And a remodeled bathroom?  And a trip to Vegas departing tomorrow morning? 

I started thinking about my history of getting what I want.  And there were some highlights…

Let me set the scene for you.  I’m 17 years old and I am madly in love with one of my really good guy friends (I also still wear my bangs a little too big and wear frighteningly tapered jeans…but it’s 1993 for the love of Pete).  He’s handsome, tall, wears Polo button down shirts and Timberland boots, plays football, is wickedly funny and sarcastic, and I decided he needed to be mine.  Immediately.  There were some complications, primarily that he had a floozy of a girlfriend from a different school, but I didn’t let it deter me.  Please…she wasn’t ME after all (I had an inflated ego even then).

It took some work, and patience (we all know how I do with patience), and determination.  After telling some key people (who would surely blab), working a little magic, and having a WWII size blow out with said guy friend, we ended up dating our entire senior year of high school.  After his ex-girlfriend stopped leaving death threats on my family’s answering machine, we went to Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins Dance, Snow Daze, Prom, the works.  Sigh.

Fast forward to me at 23.  I am an administrative assistant for a nonprofit.  One of our board members works for a trendy Fortune 100 company based here.  I want to work there so bad it hurts.  I become buddies with the board member and when she suddenly has to leave her job, she tells her boss to hire me, and I get a job that at 23 I have no business having.  Especially considering I haven’t yet completed my B.A. (I was on year five of ten).

Through my 20s and 30s I went after jobs for which I wasn’t convinced I was qualified, but they looked fun, and low and behold I got just about every one that I REALLY wanted.  And that is the key.

My girlfriend Ess and I were talking yesterday.  She’d recently read that when you want something, REALLY want something, you think about it all the time.  You wake up thinking about it, think about it throughout the day, go to bed thinking about it.  If it takes work to investigate doing it, you are excited to do that work.  If it’s not something you REALLY want, there isn’t that sense of urgency or excitement, and it feels cumbersome to take-on.

There have been many things over the years that I’ve said I’ve wanted to do that, in retrospect, I didn’t really want to do (Software engineer?  Really?).  I was searching for something to make me happy when other parts of my life just weren’t.  But when the pieces fall into place, and things are looking up, what I truly want tends to show itself.

Today I feel like a teenager.  Sans the Girbaud jeans and plaid button down shirts.  And I think I’ve figured out what I actually want to be when I grow up.  And I’m downright giddy about it.  Now that I know what I want…it’s time to make it happen. 

TODAY:  What if I go after what I actually want to do with the fervor I did when trying to win the affections of my senior year boyfriend?  What if I put the wheels into motion to make it happen?

PS – Holy hell!!!  I just looked online and did you know that Francois Girbaud still makes clothing?!  B-tchin’!