The perfect Friday night

Me, a bottle of bohemian highway merlot, edamame and some sushi.

I have yet again gave up sweets for lent (minus the one hershey kiss I ate today. Yes, only one, I swear)! But today made me realize that I need to give up two other things...even if I am two days late.

Drum roll please.....

1. Sushi

2. Shopping

That's right. Two of my latest and greatest vices. Paying bills tonight, as I ate my sushi, I realized in checking my bank account that I could have made my car payment with the amount of money I have spent in sushi this last month (ok maybe not that much), but I definitely could have paid my cable bill, or bought a really nice pair of shoes. So tonight I ate my last sashimi for 38 days. Ok I'll add two for cheating.

And shopping, well it's no surprise that I am a shopaholic. But this week alone I bought myself some Juicy, Gucci (possibly Pucci), and Nike. Um, hello Michele! You just dropped enough money to feed ten children in Africa for a year!

So no sweets, no shopping, no sushi! Ugh I am doomed! And I am embarking on a new project. In the next 40 days I have to volunteer somewhere. I have to give back. I have been so blessed in my life and I need to respect that and so I am going to find something I am passionate about and give back (not through money), through time, my time, the time I waste oh too often on tumblr and facebook. I also am going to embark on a positivity path! That's right. I will not say anything negative for the next 40 days. If I have a negative thing to say about something I am going to keep it to myself! We'll see how this goes because in my experience the only thing people hate more than negative nelly's are positive polly's!

Toodles for now. Going to finish my manicure and start packing for my descent home tomorrow afternoon. I am so excited to be going home!!!

Is the grass ever really greener?

I am a firm believer that there is a balance to life. A yin and a yang, take the good with the bad, the ups and the downs, and any other cliche saying that comes to mind when you are trying to make yourself feel better about a decision or choice gone array.

This is life right? Whether we can justify its purpose or we just go with the flow, we as humans have to come to expect that sometimes things may not always turn out the way that we wanted them to. We can admit defeat or we can try and do something about it.

I feel like sometimes you start out in life with a vision on the type of path you want to travel down and then of course life happens, shit happens, you fall off wagons, you stumble, you screw up, you get up, you dust off, you jump, you leap, you make mistakes, you correct them, you face them, you conquer, you submit and soon you have taken so many short cuts and long ways home that you don't even know which direction you are facing anymore. So you have a choice. You can either keep going forward, hoping to find the path you seemed to have lost and pray that perhaps you actually find a better one to follow, or you can turn around and weep on your way back home. Either way, you are off course and sometimes you find yourself doing things you love that you never realized you would ever be able to do.

Then there are days, like today, when you wonder if you made the right choice to continue walking forward on the path that you found yourself on so many years before. At first the path looked so promising but even the calmest of seas have their storms, and each night the sun sets, and then there is darkness. It can be eerie and you find yourself walking alone and nothing looks familiar anymore and you wonder if turning around would have led you to your destination quicker. And is turning around now too late? Should you keep moving forward? Keep hoping for a sign, wait for the sun to rise, for the fog to clear?

Perhaps the solution is to find strength in your moment of weakness. To build a fire and create your own light. Maybe it won't stay lit for long, or maybe it will be just enough for you to catch a glimpse of where you are to go from this point, and then again maybe it won't. But truly what else is there to do?