Confessions of a girl with too many options.

First Happy Birthday to my best friend Kira Gailey!! Hope you have a wonderful surprise awaiting you tonight!

Second my new thing today is going to be pouring the last piece of concrete with my dad and brother for our new BBQ patio on the side of the house. It is a lot of work and a lot of concrete and I really care about this project and am excited to be a part of it. Almost positive I will collapse at the end of the day today but it will be worth it to have a nice place to have a cookout with the family.

Alright, today was a hard one. For starters, I didn’t have a lot of time. And to finish I really didn’t want to do the thing I planned to do.

I wore a husky T-shirt.

You might be surprised that this was so difficult for me, but keep in mind that I AM A COUGAR!!! I love the Cougs, I wish I could attend every Cougar Football Saturday, I will put my babies and all of my children’s babies in little tiny Future Cougar onesies. I also love football, and my mom’s side of the family are huskies. So we have Husky football tickets. In my opinion some football is better than no football and at least I can carry with my Cougar iPhone cover and smirk because there aren’t any bars close enough to run to during half-time. Silly Seattle.

I decided that I would for once not wear grey (which is by the way one of the Cougars colors) to the game in order to appear neutral. I would bite the bullet and combine purple and gold on my body. Luckily I went with a friend who is marrying a Husky, so my offense was dimmed by hers. But still, I finally wore the colors of UW to one of their football games and I lived. Thank the lord that that is over and done with.

Go Cougs!

This one is actually against the law but I have always wanted to do it. I wrote a note on a bathroom stall. I know, totally bad-ass huh?! I’ve always thought that people who write things on a bathroom wall must not have many people to talk to in their lives. Or perhaps it is an issue of controlling their emotions. Anyway, whenever I am in a stall it is about doing my business and getting on with the day, I don’t exactly hangout and write about my feelings. Who has time for that? Do you write after you’ve flushed or is it something you do while your pants are down? I just don’t know. I was traveling up to North Seattle so I stopped at a rest area and added my little “jessy was here” tag to the rest of the scribbles. Good. Now anyone how is curious will be able to rest easy, knowing that at some point someone with my name did indeed stop and visit a rest area on I-5.

This new thing wasn’t stupendous, didn’t make me feel special or happy inside, but I still kinda enjoyed it. Because I wasn’t supposed to.

My new thing today was conquer a fear.

It is my first failure so far. To be fair, the failure was due to malaria, not backing out. Let’s begin with the fear; I hate blood. Pretty much any blood or pain related idea makes me sick to my stomach and dizzy.

I have tons of stories about passing out because of this fear, much to my boyfriend’s amusement. I think his favorite story is about my 13th birthday when I was allowed to get my ears pierced. It was the girl’s first time piercing someone and she unfortunately had me and my mother in the store. The first ear went fine, but on the second one the back of the earring got jammed in the gun and she made the mistake of saying “oops” out-loud. I went ghost-white and pass out in the piercing chair immediately because I am imagining my whole ear gushing with blood and somehow being ripped from my body leaving me permanently disfigured. Then, my mom seeing that I passed out, helped to wake me up and then passed out on the floor once she knew I was ok (oh yeah, my mom does the same thing). Obviously in the end I was ok, my ear looks perfectly normal – the poor girl probably still isn’t ok however.

So anyway, I pass out frequently. And I admire people who give blood like it’s not taking something vital to their life out of their body where it belongs. I made an appointment, I ate a good meal, I took deep breaths, I stopped the car on the way into town when I felt sick, I found the donation center, I walked though the doors, I accidentally looked over to the area where several people had needles sticking out of their arms, I ducked back around the corner and put my head between my legs, I registered, and I sat down in the screening room where they ask you questions and check your iron levels. And the sweetest lady starting asking me about where I had traveled. Turns out pretty much anywhere in Asia is a malaria risk unless you travel just in the inner cities and only by plane. So I was rejected.

But I decided that I felt good about making it all the way into that clinic full of needles and packages full of blood stacked away. So I would just have to wait for a year and try again. But a least I know I can make it that far and maybe next time it wont be as scary.