Yes, I am at work right now.

Yay for having a computer at work!

... but seriously. I can't lie, hearing the whole thing about Izzy and Nick and the near-actual-breakup and dating someone else for a while freaked me out. I always looked to them, consciously or not, as some kind of model for a long-term, long-distance relationship. They're one of those couples where you expect them to get married as soon as college is over, not get embroiled in some weird kind of drama reminiscent of someone else's life. But in all fairness, that's a whole lot of heaping my own expectations on something that I know absolutely nothing about. Also, That line of thinking involves not dealing with life as it's happening to me and trying to make sense of someone else's life as if it were my own.

Either way, I worked myself up over this for a couple hours, probably, until it dawned on me out of nowhere: That was her choice.

It frightened me initially because the whole ordeal proved that yes, it is indeed possible to get embroiled in this kind of drama even if you've had the steadiest, most drama-free relationship ever for the past six years.

But maybe that's part of it: Six years is a long time. People change between freshman year of high school and junior year of college.

In any event, I was thinking--rational or not, I don't care, this is how I was thinking--that if it could happen to her, then it could happen to me. But not like something I wanted; in my mind that kind of drama happens more like a coconut falling out of the sky and landing on my head, and then a flying monkey tries to drag me off kicking and screaming. And then the light bulb came on: It was her choice. It is not my life. The whole drama-tastic situation isn't a flying monkey waiting for the right moment to drop the coconut; life just turned out that way, and that was her decision in dealing with it. But--and here is the important end of that thought--if the same thing happened to me, I would be free to choose however I wanted.

Sometimes I feel like life is sitting out in front of me, already mapped out, but I'm feeling around blindly in the dark and no one's telling me the direction I'm supposed to go. Kind of like when my sister had to write her first research paper and the teacher wouldn't tell the class what exactly they needed to do, she just told them when they were doing it wrong. I suppose the end result of that mindset is that I feel like there's a flying monkey waiting just around the corner to drop a coconut on my head and steal my wallet. But I'm pretty sure that life isn't that way.

I guess, if I had to pin it down, that you can't ever be sure what life is exactly like. But that uncertainty is something you can hang your plans on. "All I know is that I don't know nuthin'." I have to remind myself of that a lot. There are a lot of fears crowding around inside my head: Unalterable destiny of graduationmarriage, the whole idea of graduationmarriage, my extreme perfectionism that makes me worry about these things that actually have no bearing on present day, present time ... but I constantly have to remind myself, for my own benefit more than anyone else's, that these thoughts are merely thoughts; they can't take substance and hurt me. They can't attack me out of nowhere. Once I actually acknowledge that they're there, they're easier to work around--instead of pulling the strings in my mind, they're just rocks jutting out of the waters I'm trying to navigate: Still there, but separate, complete, avoidable.

Sometimes I think I'm crazy, but then I remember, hey, I'm just a woman. I've got fourteen open windows in my head right now and popup ads intruding all over the place, and that's okay. =P