Instagram this Week!

Hey Reader-Friends, with spring break around the corner, I hope to post a few more interesting posts besides the weekly Instgram post! Nonetheless, it’s a great time with Jenni! Link up with us!

1., 2., & 3.) The eats this week! Tomato, spinach, mushroom, and pesto sammie. Fish tacos Friday night with Chad. And chicken fajita quesadillas from camping on Saturday.


4., 5., & 6.) The fun this week! Cash stash in the sock drawer, new nail polish, and “the broom experiment”…I’m sure you tried it, too!

7., 8., & 9.) The friends this week! Jenn-Jenn and me at Trivia, followed by a shot of me with one of the cutest couples I know –Liston (the goofy one, obviously) and Meri Ansley..and finally, one of my very best friends and me (snuggling by our campfire this weekend :)




10., 11., 12., 13., & 14.) The adventure this week! Chad and I took a weekend for ourselves and went camping and mountain biking in Ackerman, Miss. We sweated, we laughed, we snuggled. It was perfection.

Unearthing Original Answers

I instagramed (new verb) this picture a few days ago with the following caption:

Delta dirt roads make sense of my life.

I’m sure others do it too. Drive the back roads and figure out your life? I had plans to get “a lot” done over the break while I was alone in Cleveland. Well, I don’t know where the last two weeks went, but they have gone very quickly! And though my house still needs a very intense cleaning, and the to-do list looks a lot like it did two weeks prior to now, I think I have made some monumental progress in the figuring out what’s next department.

Disclaimer: I’m putting my foot down. I’m going to be a little wenchy about the following topic, because I feel like my polite nod at many people’s advice isn’t communicating what I think about my future. So here it is.

I’m going to take a little time off of school between undergrad and graduate school. I have busted it for 17 years of academia-not just got by with a C average, but killed myself to be the best. I’m a determined person, and if I want to go back to school, I will. I understand the logic behind everyone’s advice to go straight through, but I also find the wisdom in my decision to want to breathe for a second. I thought I wanted to teach for years, and merely two semesters before I graduate I found out that it was not what I wanted at all(and found the courage to admit that, by the way). I made that decision because of the very strange convention that pushes 17 year olds to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives without ever having any experience in life outside of their high school microcosm of the world they think they live in. I’m not about to do that again. I know that I want to get into the recreation/outdoor/health field, but I’m not going to invest time, energy, and a whole lot of money into something that I find interesting from a storefront window view. I have gone on a few adventurous recreation trips and stepped up my health and fitness levels as of recent, but it just isn’t quite grounds to jump head first into anything. I would love to be able to mesh my English degree with the recreation field…write for Backpacker…Rock and Ice? But what is that going to take?

Well, it’s time to find out.

I know this: our job market is sucky. And competitive. Degrees only mean so much. It’s about what you know (mostly who you know, really) and what you can do with what you know. So, while, yes, I’m in pursuit of finding a degree program that is going to offer the specific credentials I need, I’m also looking for personal connections and relevant experience during the time I take off from school. The way I look at it is I have a nice place to stay with cheap rent in a town where I have a few friends that I like and appreciate. I have a job—yeah, a waitressing job, but nonetheless a job to be thankful for when there a lot of people with superb degrees sitting on their couch and barely paying the bills with their unemployment check.

Grad school (especially outside of Mississippi) is expensive! Every time I think about looking at schools out of state, I’m overcome with fear and doubt. Do I really want to risk all that money in this kind of job economy? I mean, am I really going to see what I do turn over in any kind of way? But while I was driving into the sunset the other day, it hit me. This is it. What I’m about to embark on—just my age and situation— could be the time of my life. I’m not getting married and moving back to the town I have known for my entire life. I have a rare opportunity for a small town southern girl: go somewhere and do something different. So yeah, I’m probably going to get myself into a lot of debt, but is it worth the experience? I’m thinking so. It’s not just about a goal anymore; it’s about being happy right now, in the middle of it all.

Cheers to that, my friends.

Earth and Sky

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

-John Lubbock

One word. Walden.

Lately, I have not been able to shake the desire to get out there in the well, “out there”. How do I talk about this without sounding like a hippie? Maybe, I can’t. So, I will risk sounding like a peace and love kind of gal (without the whole being stoned thing, of course), to say I want to drink in all the Mother Nature I can! When I’m “out there” I just look around and think about God. I think this is for us. We’re in our cities with our made-to-order commodities all the time and we think that is natural. But I breathe in unpolluted mountain air and I know that I’m where I belong. Oh, I know I sound whimsical and that if I had to rough it more than a few weeks, I would probably miss my bed and running water. But you see, that’s the problem: I know that would happen.

 

I’m not going to pretend that the circumstances in my life have left me with nothing but independence to pursue. Well, that’s not entirely true; I could also pursue a death grip on anything and anyone that ever so crossed my path. And that would be so easy to do in my vulnerable state, but no I refuse. You only get so many opportunities in life to become the person you truly want to be before you’re so buried in conveniences and comforts. I want to be able to take care of myself no. matter. what. If you haven’t noticed, I’m talking on a few different levels now, but nevertheless I truly believe that spending time out in nature, depending on the raw elements for survival allows one to do the same individualistically-depend on their own raw elements.

I just wonder: What am I made of?

That may be a struggle to truly discover. Maybe even a fight. And when it comes to that, it’s best to…

{All photos via this pinboard}