Fasten Your Seat Belts

Fasten your seat belts kids, this one will be all over the place.

I do a lot of volunteer work: outgoing Chair of the Parent Organization and head of Fundraising at my daughter's school, heavily involved in CSIA (www.coloradosoftware.org) with positions on the Legislative & Public Policy Committee, Education Committee (I architected the CSIA CSU "Inspire to Innovate" Scholarship), the DEMO Committee (where I Chair the Conference SubCommittee, am a member of the Selection SubCommittee, and a member of the Sales SubCommittee) and hold a Board position for the Internet Safety Foundation, which is Colorado's answer to Project SafeChildhood (http://www.projectsafechildhood.gov/). Beyond this, I work full time as a Business Development Manager for a Workplace Misconduct Risk Mitigation company selling incident reporting, internal investigations, and data forensics. For me, I belong to a book club. It is ridiculous sounding until you realize that we are a different sort of breed than most. There are no ankle length dresses or lace. The commercial where the women are making dip for their meeting - does not happen. We meet every 6-8 weeks at Bucca di Beppo where we start the evening with martinis, order lots of yummy food, and drink wine until dessert. There are about 15 of us, with others that come and go on an irregular basis. We know each other because our children go to the same school and otherwise, we are all so different, we would probably never interact. There are conservative Republicans, Liberals,lawyers, business owners, - we are all professional, white collar working women. So this back story sets up my discussion for today.

Our current book is The Next Thing On My List by Jill Smolinski. It is about a 34 yr old woman, June, who meets a 24 yr old woman, Marissa, at a Weight Watchers meeting. Giving her a ride home, they are in a car accident that kills the younger woman. June finds a list of 25 things that Marissa wanted to do before she turned 25 and resolves to complete the list before Marissa would have turned 25.

This book touched me and made me think about my own mortality. But our assignment for the book club meeting is to come up with our own list. So do I shoot for the 40 before 40 or do I shoot for the 36 before 36 (given that I turn 35 in September, I do not think I can do 35 before 35). So what is on my list? I am almost panicked because knowing what I do about myself, I know I will have to complete the list. So I have already completed a half marathon, but had to walk some of it. I know I would like to run a complete half marathon, marathon, and give some serious thought to a 50 or 100 miler. Which takes me to my next set of things which are to lose all this horrible extra weight and come to terms with my body as it should be for my age, height, etc. I am always either too thin or too fat and never middle of the road.
Ok, so I will post my list on this blog and you all can keep me honest!

Next, I had an interesting conversation with someone who has known me on and off for over 20 years. Juarez sent me two pondering thoughts last night: You will find happiness when you realize it is you that is extraordinary." AND " I have learned the hard way that you have to love yourself first. It seems like you feel as if you are being punished for the past and can not move forward. I very well could be wrong."
There are so many stories that go with all of this and as always Juarez is right.
I am not feeling extraordinary and it is all my fault because I do not feel like I am being punished for the sins of my past, I feel like I should be punished and am doing a damn good job doing just that. Let's work on letting go, falling in love with myself, gaining perspective, good health, and living an extraordinary life.

I promise to start telling my stories, because that is why I started this in the first place. To talk about the things that I do not discuss and then read them as a forgiving, loving friend rather than someone sitting in judgement. I will also figure out my list. Please feel free to make suggestions.