Change

It's the last "official" weekend of summer and mother nature seems to be in agreement - yesterday we suffered through 100 degrees and today it's in the 70s. The upcoming forecast has the beginning stages of fall weather written all over it, and honestly I'm glad. Summer is nice for like a month. I'm glad we have all four seasons here in St. Louis.

This year, well, these past 10 months, has been something of a blur and whenever there's a noticeable change or passing of time I find myself stopping and thinking about what's gone, where things might have been, and what could possibly be ahead. Ok, I'm lying, I think a whole lot more about the first two than the latter. I can try to think ahead but I generally get stuck beyond finishing grad school next spring, and even that's a stretch. I'm in more of a day-by-day mode still. I guess that's better than spending each day only looking back.

I don't want to keep feeling like this but I am not sure how to shake it. Nothing seems worth planning for at this point, mostly given my mediocre financial situation. I feel like the walking "bad example" for how to not live your life. Meaning - I'm the person that took out credit cards in college to support herself, pay tuition and books, and enjoy things like concerts, dinners, new clothes here and there. Never anything extravagant so most people wouldn't expect that I'd still be paying the price for the first half of my 20s at the tail end of the second half. But here I am - living the way a poor college student ought to live, except I'm 29. Gone are the new clothes (which sucks when you have a "real" job to dress for), weekends out of town (which would probably be good for my sanity, but oh well), dinners and wine and social events for the most part (again, never an extravagance but those are some of my favorite things to spend disposable income on. And I can't).

It all comes down to making some major changes in how I live my day to day life today, so that tomorrow - whenever that may finally come - will be less stressful, debt-free, and a reflection of who I am in the present, not who I was in the past. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's depressing quite frankly. I'm willing to take all personal responsibility though, and make my situation better. I just can't help but wish I wasn't even here in the first place.

Oh well. Keep on keeping on. Or something like that.