two posts in one day!!

Change is hard, especially when you encounter resistance from the people you expect to support you. I was reading a book called Do the Work by Seth Godin and I came across this:

"The problem with friends and family is that they know us as we are. They are invested in maintaining us as we are.
The last thing we want is to remain as we are."

Very close family ( I include friends here because if they are that close, they're family) is comforting. They know you and you know them. You know that when you go to IHOP with Uncle James he's going to order the pancakes with no butter and extra bacon; he knows you never make up your mind until the last minute. it's comforting and safe to stay in those routines, so when you tell him you know what you want as soon as you sit down, he'll give you an odd look. So when you decide to make a huge life change resistance is often encountered from the people we love most.

I want to spend a year working in Europe, and most everyone thinks I'm nuts. I'll lose my job, I won't have a home to come back to, what kind of person leaves everything, they'll miss me, Johnny won't even remember me...even worse, I want Danny to go with me. At least I have family who will mostly understand but I don't think his will. Everyday I feel like I need to change, I need to grow, I need to live my life to the fullest instead of slitting through from day to day....

disclaimer: I received this book for free through the domino project and bzzagent.

no more wedding.

these last few weeks have been very difficult. I've been wrestling with how to plan this wedding and honeymoon, and along with that comes certain people and their drama. my dad unexpectedly told me he would be willing to pay for the wedding, so now we have that option as well...

I didn't want this to be a wedding blog, I wanted it to be a train blog since I'm trapped on a train for an hour each morning and afternoon. this hopefully will be my only wedding related post. if you want to read my wedding blog, it is a private blog on offbeat bride, which brings me to my next point...

I'm not 'normal' 'traditional' etc. etc. the status is NOT quo with me, and it has never been for me, ever. why do things because of tradition? if the tradition works for you, sure, that's awesome and wonderful. but what if tradition is strangling you, if you really want to do something different? that's when you throw convention to the wind and do things your own way, or at least I do. apparently this makes me weird.

my whole life I've struggled with the need, no the urge (imagine italics), to be not weird. who wants to be different if different means alone? not many people, I have never been one few of the people who wants that. I have been forced to become self sustaining, to not need other people. I don't need their ideas and I sure as hell don't need them to criticize my 'strangeness'. I've grown into what I thought was a person who firmly knew who she was and what she wanted, a person who really couldn't care less about what other people thought and who didn't get hurt anymore by people's thoughtless remarks. and I was that person, up until I got engaged.

when we got engaged I had about a week of freaking out until I talked things over with my future sister in law. she helped calm me down and get me excited for wedding planning- in hindsight, I think the fact that I heard wedding planning and thought 'YAY!" is just another sign of how truly freaked I was.

I spent the next two months alternatively crying and maniacally reading wedding magazines, and something strange started happening.

I started to go back to being excruciatingly sensitive, which is something that I've managed to overcome in the past through years and years of conditioning. every small remark cut me to the core, enough that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night because of it. one of my friends told me my boyfriend was geekier than me and I cried about that for an entire week. in my mind, it felt like a rejection by my friend, that I wasn't good enough for them.

then when I told my FSIL about my dad possibly paying for our wedding, she told me that now I could have a real wedding. also she said that I should use her wedding planner because she specializes in weird weddings. these comments were devastating to me. It was like the culmination of years of teasing, and now this singular event that supposedly means EVERYTHING somehow, has been branded abnormal and weird. I felt like somehow I ruined our wedding by being, well, me. then I read this post on offbeat bride and I realized a lot of things.

1. I really don't care about having a 'wedding'. I haven't picked colors, or place settings or my dress.
2. this whirlwind I've been caught up in is because I'm so worried that if I don't have that traditional wedding, I'll miss out. I had to stop and really consider what i would be missing out on. spending as much as I make in a year for a party for family I never talk to? Buying a dress that costs more than a macbook air that i only get to wear once, and then shove in my closet to take up space i can't spare? to spend a whole day sick to my stomach because everyone is looking at me???

3. So many people keep telling me, its YOUR special day, you only get one day to do it right, etc. etc. If its my day I want it to be amazing and fun and who cares what anyone else thinks.

4. in everyone of those fantastically detailed daydreams I've had of our perfect wedding, one this sticks out in my mind-its always just me and Danny, no spectators, no one who needs us, just me and him in our perfect outfits at the perfect wedding. All I need is him for our perfect day, and everything else, whatever that everything else is, is just gravy.

A quick angry birds Rio review

When a game is tied to a movie release that is almost a guarantee for suckiness. fortunately for all of us mobile gamers, angry birds Rio not only doesn't suck, it also might even be better than the original.

-I play angry birds on my android phone- Jesus phones may experience differences in game play-

first off, the game is free through the new amazon app store. i thought that the game would be hampered by the ginormous ads like the android marketplace version (seriously, video ads in the middle of my game? not cool) but this version has NO ads at all. yay corporate sponsor (fox)...I love how the gamers reap the benefit of the movie tie in.

The intro and menus are slick, very well designed and I really like how the level grid shows you exactly when they're planning updates/more levels to be released. if you've played angry birds before the levels themselves aren't mindblowingly new, but there are a few really cool changes. for one, I experienced none of the crippling lag that the last few updates have brought to the other games, which makes it much less frustrating to play. You also are rescuing birds and knocking out adorable monkeys instead of pigs.
this initial release includes 2 worlds- smuggler's den and jungle escape. I'm assuming that it follows the movie's storyline, since the birds are in cages in the first world and you save two handcuffed birds at the end. its very easy to forget that this isn't just a brand new game instead of a movie tie in.

There are now three layers to level design instead of just background and foreground, reminiscent of the white walls you can fall through in super Mario bros. 3. sometimes you'll need to hit a hanging light or chain to help you complete or three star a level and possibly to find hidden items.

the hidden items so far are golden pineapples in Smuggler's Den, and golden bananas in Jungle Escape. I liked the way they put the pineapples in progressively more difficult and hidden places as you progress through the levels. once you get to the jungle levels it continues to be difficult- you really have to look for them! I also like how they've marked where the hidden items are if they're not in plain view and how the marking disappears after the item has been found. this way I know exactly which levels contain a hidden item and whether or not I've managed to recover it.

overall, angry birds Rio is definitely a game worthy of too much of your time, and its extra great because its free.

Danny finally woke up, my adventure is over! just in time for me to enjoy American idol too (yes I watch that)

i have nothing better to do....

after walking home in the rain yesterday I was completely and utterly drenched, and I somehow managed to drop my keys somewhere that is NOT my bag. I find myself locked out of my house, with Danny asleep with his phone on silent. how do I know? I can hear it vibrating when I call. I'm tired of knocking and kicking our door, and out neighbors are starting to get annoyed- I know because I keep seeing them open their doors. I figure now is as good a time as any to finally start my eleventy sixth blog that I never keep up with, since it doesn't look like ill be inside my house anytime soon. at least I can connect to my own wifi network- too bad we don't have a public restroom nearby. :(

I apologize for any odd words or random orphaned letters- I'm using my phone to post and my autocorrect has a mind of it's own. certain words are verboten, other are always capitalized- the word 'you' or 'guy' , for example. I had to do some keypad wrestling to get those lowercase letters for y'all. and yet the apostrophe in y'all automatically inserts itself. maybe I have it set on southern?