Usually when I sit down to write I have a good idea of what I am going to say. Tonight I'm just winging it. I'd like to be able to say I'm being fueled by a glass of wine but thanks to those pesky yeast and sulfite allergies, no wine for this chica. Actually, I'd like to be drinking a (virgin) pina colada on a beach in Mexico, truth be told, with a slight breeze in the air and samba music playing in the background. Yeah, I also have the perfect tan and sun-streaked hair in this fantasy. And of course, there's a magnificent sunset. My beverage of choice this evening is a good ol' glass of water. 9:30 on a Friday night, sitting in my living room, drinking water. Yep, I am quite the social butterfly!
Actually, I will be a social butterfly tomorrow when I have a house full of people who have many options for their evening and are choosing to spend it with me, helping me to celebrate turning 30-something (which doesn't actually happen until Tuesday) with a murder mystery dinner party. I have no clue how to host a murder mystery dinner party (which is why our elegant "Captain's Dinner" for our 1938 disaster at sea is tacos), so luckily most of my guests are used to my game nights in which I basically just say show up and the rest just magically works itself out. And there will be ice cream cake. From Ben and Jerry's. Take that other events. I totally just upped the ante.
And I was a social butterfly last night when volunteering at the Food Bank led to late night happy hour (when the heck did 9:00 become late night?! Oh right, when I didn't get home until after 11:00 and had to drag my butt out of bed at 5:45 this morning to get ready for work. I'm too young to be too old for this!). So last night's social butterflyness coupled with that pesky borderline insomnia issue has me too dang tired to do anything tonight. And I'm okay with that. I'm just waiting for it to be a respectable time to go to bed on a Friday night and then I'm hitting the hay. What I'm not okay with is that I keep saying "This is the last Friday night I spend home alone!" or "This is the last Friday night I spend cleaning the house for Game Night!" and before I know it, it's a week later and I'm home alone on a Friday night. I don't feel life is passing me by, but at the same time, I don't want to get to that point either. Because in a sense, life really is passing me by. I'm not getting any younger, after all. Well, at least not chronologically, anyway. In spirit, I sure seem to be-not that I'm complaining! Hopefully, staying young in this respect will keep me from ever really growing old. I was thinking about this the other day and I'm not really sure I ever want to be old. (I was also thinking about what they put as the cause of death on your death certificate if you are executed so there you go). Mainly because it's scary to think about being old and not having anyone to take care of me, which is the position I am in now. It's hard now to think that I could come home on a Friday afternoon, slip and hit my head and no one would know something was wrong until I didn't show up for work on Monday morning. Fifty years from now, who knows how long it would take for someone to find my limp, lifeless body?
It's funny, I will have a house full of people here tomorrow. But on my actual birthday? Well, I'll be celebrating that with me, myself and I from the looks of it. And my dogs. (There's a very slim chance I will be taking a beginning fencing class. Like half the group signed up for it needs to back out slim). Part of me thinks this royally blows major chunks. And part of me is quite alright having the day (okay, evening. I do have to work that day-well, hmm...I do have plenty of vacation time...) to myself to just do things I enjoy-like eat cheesecake and then take a nice, long hot bath with a good book to keep me company (currently "Heat Rises" by Richard Castle. I want to know who that really is, but at the same time, I think that might ruin it). Or go see a movie if by some miracle "Wreck-It Ralph" magically appears at the $3 theater. But at the same time, I don't need my birthday for that. I can do those things whenever I want. The upside of being single is I can pretty much do whatever I want whenever I want. I'm not dependent on anyone else's schedule or opinion as to what to do with my free time. It would help if I stopped finding reasons to talk myself out of some of the things that cross my mind as things I would like to do...
At any rate, I'm curious, as always, what this year has in store for me. I've decided it's going to be the Year of Heather. It's going to be (another) busy year and hopefully a very rewarding one. Might as well take advantage of not being tied down other than my dogs. I have goals (which is a post in itself) which I think are pretty reasonable and certainly attainable. And which will get me off the couch for at least some of my Friday nights.
