Life's Changes (or lack thereof)

As of a week ago, this was my plan:

I was moving out of Carriage Cove in August (hooray!). I had three friends to move with, and we were going to find a condo or a house somewhere, preferably south Provo. I had signed a spring/summer extension for CC, which meant I would have awesomely cheap rent for four months. And since I had just paid off my car, I would have loads of extra cash I could use for playing. And saving. I would have four months of summer, during which I could keep myself from caring about the new boys, because I would soon be leaving. I could simply enjoy myself and not worry about whether there was any interest there. I would be moving soon to a new ward full of new guys and new girls and new social circles and new everything. Change would be abundant, and I was thrilled about that.

It's amazing how much can change in a mere week. Here are my current plans:

I am staying in CC through next April. That's eight months longer than I anticipated, giving me another solid year in this place (sigh). By the time this new contract is up, I will have lived at CC for three years and eight months. Since my contract is now April to April, the price of my summer rent went up. It's the price I'm used to paying, but not the price I was expecting to pay. I will still have plenty of cash for playing, but not quite as much as I was hoping to have. This does mean that I get to continue to be Cora and Brittany's roommate (minus the summer, since Cora is leaving me to live with her aunt. She somehow thinks free rent, utilities, and groceries is cooler than paying rent for the summer. Something about how saving money is important. Rubbish, in my opinion).

I'm very conflicted about this decision. I will have you know that staying in CC is the absolute right decision for me right now. The Lord kind of walloped me upside the head by making my original plans fall to pieces. Here's the problem: I don't want to stay. At all. I've loved most of my time at CC, and I have met some incredible people here. The apartments are nice enough, I have my own room, and the pool/hot tub setup is pretty sweet. But I've been here for nearly three years, and another year feels like an eternity. I graduated from BYU in 2008, and I am ready to be out of student housing. The boys don't date. Well, not me, anyway. And they're young. Lots of people here are young. I'm now one of those older people that people reference when they say, "Yeah, there are a few older people in my ward."

The bottom line is that I am craving change. I need it so bad right now. I thought my life was going to take a major turn for the better, and I was so looking forward to it. But now my life has course corrected to the exact same route I was hoping to leave. Why does the Lord insist upon keeping me at CC? What is it that I am supposed to learn from this place?

I have so many thoughts and feelings bobbing around my head:

• When signing my new contract, I felt the need to choose the one that would be the easiest to sell if that became necessary. 
• I feel like CC and my current job are inseparably connected. 
• I refuse to allow myself to think that the reason I'm still here is because of a boy. 
• Part of me is hoping that Der Junge is the kind of guy who refuses to date in his own ward, so now that he's moving out, he'll realize he misses me and make a move. 
• I have this nagging suspicion that come next April, my life will be exactly the same as it is now.
• Our current relief society president is moving out in August. I don't want to think about what that could mean for me.

I don't know if any of these thoughts actually mean something or if I'm trying to impose my own meaning on this incongruous decision I have made. Whatever the case, I'm simply hoping that there will come a time when I understand why I had to do this. I am going to do my best not to complain. Complaining doesn't leave much room for faith, and I refuse to resent the Lord for guiding me in the direction that's best for me. Because this will be best for me. I don't know how or why, but the Lord does, and I have to believe that.

GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAL!

Day Seven: Short-term goals for this month.

My number-one goal for this month is to make getting up at 6:30 to go to the gym a habit. I need to convince myself that I have to get up, because then I can have my whole evening to myself and I don't have to worry about not meeting my gym goal because something fun comes up. I'm sorry, but the gym isn't ever going to take precedence over doing fun things with my friends. If I remember that, getting up might not be so difficult.

Goal number two is to have more meaningful scripture study. I've been feeling more and more lately like I need to pay more attention to what I'm reading and actually write down the thoughts and insights I have. With how much I write in my journal, you wouldn't think that's difficult for me, but it is. Which is why I've decided that I'm going to make my regular day-to-day journal double as my spiritual journal. It should be anyway because I need to write down the spiritual experiences I have in my everyday life, but sometimes it doesn't work that way.

A third goal is to listen to conference talks while I get ready in the mornings. It's a perfect time to do it because I'm not doing anything else. I usually just listen to music, but if I switch to conference talks, I can listen to two a day. I used to be really good at it about a year ago, and it was so cool to see what things in my daily life reminded me of talks that I had listened to recently. It was a great way to listen to the counsel of the prophets again and to be reminded of the things that I need to work on.

A fourth goal is to get some quality one-on-one hang-out time with Der Junge. I tried on Friday, but he was hanging out with his roommate, who got invited along on our excursion. It's not a big deal, since his roommate is my friend too, but I really wanted to just hang out with Der Junge. That's proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be. However, Der Junge let it slip that he has never seen any of the Indiana Jones movies (a travesty, I know!), so I promptly borrowed all three of them from my parents and I will force him to watch them with me. So maybe that will work in my favor one of these days.

So there you have it. My goals. I didn't realize I had so many.

A new year, a new me.

Or something along those lines.

Hey look, it's the obligatory resolutions post. Sure, I'm about two weeks late, but I'm close enough, right?

So my resolutions have been rather fluid for this year. I have goals, but I don't think I thought of any of them as resolutions, per se. There were just things I knew I wanted to do with my life, and I happened to be thinking about them at around New Year's. So I guess they qualify.

My main goal is one that has been on my mind for a few months now, and I am proud to say that I am going strong after two weeks. I decided that I wanted to switch back to 24 Hour Fitness (mostly because I detested going to Gold's) and buy a few personal training sessions (if not more). In the last two weeks, I have only missed a single day of going to the gym. (Not counting Sundays, of course.) I'm pretty proud of myself, and if the scale is any indication, I've actually made some progress. Awesome, no? I sure think so. I'm also rediscovering that I quite love hopping on the elliptical and just going for an hour. It feels super good. I also enjoy that the machine tells me I burn about 700 calories when I do that.

Another goal I've been kicking around is blogging more. I was supposed to blog about dating and all that jazz, but right after I decided to do that, I actually started having real dating experiences. Well, more like hanging out experiences, but there were actually guys (er . . . guy . . . [you know, Der Junge]) that I was interested in. And as soon as I started thinking about writing about actual people, I chickened out a wee bit. I was mostly just terrified that things would get back to Der Junge and that I would be mortified. A bit juvenile, it's true, but alas, I can't help myself.

Instead of writing about dating, I've compiled a couple of blogging challenges to create one big challenge that should cover about 45 days. I've been meaning to start it, but I swear the amount of free time I have has been severely diminished somehow. It's probably because I've been getting up at 6:30 (most days) to work out and not getting home from work until 6:00. Any social activities usually take up my extra free time. However, I will find time to fit blogging in!

A third goal is to finally change my boy situation. Yes, I'm saying it: I WANT A BOYFRIEND. At some point this year, I want to end my drought. It's been coming up on five years (wow, look at me divulge potentially embarrassing information!) since I've been in a real relationship, and you know what? That is plenty long. I'm ready for something more than hanging out and flirting. Unfortunately, I am not in complete control of this goal, and I honestly have no idea what more to do to help my cause (with Der Junge in particular, but I'm definitely open to other prospects).

And there you have it. My goals for this year. Well, the biggies, anyway. Here's hoping I can make 2012 freaking awesome.

Pies in the Sky

Three years ago, I was super interested in this guy, and he seemed to at least marginally return the sentiment. Things were going well. We went on a date. We hung out all the time. We flirted. We texted. We made grilled cheese sandwiches. (That's a funny story. Maybe I'll relate it at some point, but not in this post.) And then he decided he didn't want anything more than to be friends. He took me on the walk to have the discussion. It sucked hardcore.

Needless to say, I was bummed, as one would expect. Then the next day, my brother called me. My brother served his mission with Travis Bright, who was a starting offensive lineman for BYU. Travis had a friend on the football team who wanted to be set up, and I was the only single girl Travis could think of. So my brother called me and told me that I was going to be set up with a football player. It's amazing how quickly my mood changed.

I should tell you right now that I never actually went out with the football player. He apparently had some girl issues and didn't want anything to do with girls for a while (lame, I know). But the prospect of going out with a football player was so exciting, and everyone told me repeatedly how awesome I would be as a football girlfriend. I would be able to talk football if he wanted to and I would go to every game to cheer him on.

Ever since then, I have had a desire to date a football player. (Don't worry, I'm not being exclusive. I'd date baseball players, basketball players, rugby players....) There's something about football players that I find incredibly attractive. There's only one little problem.

I turned 24 this year.

That means I'm older than pretty much everyone on the team. The only people that are my age are the seniors that redshirted a year and went on a mission. And pretty much all of those guys are married. So this post is basically me lamenting the loss of a dream. (I don't care that even when I was younger than the football players I never met any of them. Just because it was never going to happen in the first place doesn't mean I can't lament it when the dream truly goes down the tubes.)

It's a shame. I really would have been the best football girlfriend ever.

I Want to Get Lost

In a new city, a new place, with new people and new things and...and...and new everything. I want to live somewhere I haven't spent the last six years of my life. I want to live somewhere outside of Utah County, where pretty much every town is just like the last, and I know where to go for anything from Lehi to Spanish Fork. I want to get out of student housing and meet different people who are closer to me not only in age, but also in stage of life. I don't want to feel like I'm floating on the surface of a life that I no longer live, watching students go to class and do homework while I watch Netflix because I have nothing else to do with my evenings.

People try to convince me that Provo is the place to be for single Mormon twenty-somethings, but my experience has taught me otherwise. In six years, I have been on a handful of dates. I have come close to getting into relationships, but never made the full leap. Boys in Provo just don't seem to be interested in me, and I am fast losing interest in them. I'm ready to try my hand at the Mormon boys in other places.

I've had these ants in my pants before. I've felt the need to run away and do something different with my life. But the feeling never lasts. Some other Provo opportunity would present itself and I would grab it and feel satisfied. That's not happening this time. Ever since I first felt the itch, it has only gotten stronger. I don't know how much longer I can go without scratching.

It's hard to decide what to do, because moving someplace else requires a complete upheaval of my life. New job, new place, new friends. And right now, all that change is incredibly enticing, while also being absolutely terrifying. I don't usually deal well with change, but I am craving it more than I have ever craved it before.

I want the experience of getting my own place in a city I've never lived in before. I want to buy my own furniture, decorate my own apartment, dirty my own dishes, and clean up my own messes. I don't want a cleaning check nazi forcing me to scour places that never see the light of day. I want to feel like a legitimate grown-up, one who pays her own bills and comes home to an empty apartment because that apartment is hers and hers alone.

I would love to be able to come home after a rough day at work and know that my TV is ready and waiting for me without wondering if my roommates are watching something or cuddling with their boyfriends. I want my own bathroom where the shower curtain always stays closed and I don't have to clean hair out of the drain that isn't mine. I don't want to have to try to read a book while wondering when the guys across the courtyard are going to stop blasting their annoying music.

Don't get me wrong; I don't hate Provo. I don't hate my roommates. I don't regret that I've stayed in Provo for as long as I have. It's just time for me to leave. I need to be done with the student housing scene, and starting now, I am going to start taking the steps I need to take to make that happen.

Controllable Change

I've been craving change lately, and since most of the things I want to change are out of my control, I focused my energies on something I can control: my hair. So, I went from this:

To this:

Quite a big change, it's true, but so far, it's been a good one.