Grateful, pt 3

I've been giving this topic a lot of thought since starting this. I've also come up with some things I'm very ungrateful for, and will probably eventually do a companion piece about that. But onto gratefulness!

Cruglethor. I never came up with a better name for my car. I tried out "Carpe" but it seemed too cheesy. I always name vehicles with the same starting letter as their model, so I currently have Cruglethor the Civic. I bought her right after graduating college. Originally I had completely sold myself on getting an Accord and thought Civics were so ugly. Mostly the crazy slant of their front windshield. However, I found a beautiful 2009 with 7k miles on it. We've been through so much together and I am SO grateful I picked her out 4 years ago! She's been so reliable and just great, and I know I've put her through a lot. Right after getting her I drove down to DC with tons of stops to/from. Then, a couple weeks later, I packed her up and drove her across the country with my brother (please please please read about our adventures here, written by Kevin/Tug/my brother). She's taken me on countless Seattle and coast trips, a handful of California trips, and everywhere in between. And saved me from a few deer and kept on running. Cruglethor has made so many adventures possible and I feel like I need to come up with some exciting way of commemorating her 100k (which should happen by the end of year, we're at 94k already in just over 4 years)(I drive a lot, hence my gratefulness for her).

Ugh snow. Beautiful Cruglethor though!

Books. This kind of goes along with the gratefulness for music. I read a lot in spurts, but my bookshelves are bursting at the seems with exciting choices. It's so hard to live this close to Powell's and not be constantly buying things. Reading is so great. It can take you to a completely surreal place, describe things you could never imagine on your own, and be able to make you feel things that can be so outside your realm or describe something you're going through perfectly. I remember being in high school and doing book reports - senior year you had to do 3, but could be pretty much any book you wanted. The thing that sticks out to me is realizing that I OWN this book. I can write in it, I can highlight it, I can leave my own notes in it. This may not seem like some huge revelation to some of you, but it was to me, and still kind of is. I underline passages that are meaningful to me, I write page numbers in the back, and I scrawl notes in the margins. There are some specific books I go back to at certain times and know there passages or notes I want to re-read that may currently be helpful to me. There are some books that are super meaningful to me that I've written all over and I'd never let somebody borrow because of the same reason I don't share some music - too personal, too private. I'm grateful books can do that for me. On a larger scale, I'm grateful I have the ability to read and enjoy books, and thankful I had parents who encouraged me to enjoy reading.

24 Hour Stores. Or stores open late or on holidays. My pharmacy only closes on Thanksgiving and Christmas, which sucks, but I am SO grateful for those people who work holidays. I do NOT think that people should work on major holidays like that, and I make it a very specific point to not go shopping on holidays. However, there have been times where I needed to go buy something on a holiday. My clearest memory is this past Christmas when my smoke detector battery started beeping incessantly at me. I went to a 24-hour store to buy a battery and made it a point to thank every person I saw working. When I can, I try to volunteer for holidays so that others with family in the area they want to spend time with are able to do that. Also, sometimes I get out of work late or far away, and appreciate going to a store that's open when I get home.

Games. Board games and Holy Board made up the vast majority of my summers for a few years. I feel like while my friends were out getting drunk and doing stupid stuff in Albany, I came home, worked, and hung out with my brothers and hometown friends. At least once a week we would have people over and play Holy Board (a game with washers our Uncle introduced to us) and various board games - our favorites being Apples to Apples and Balderdash. Sometimes Cranium. And Price Chopper! And often get IGA chicken wing pizza (BEST STUFF EVER). Holy Board Summer League was so epic! We had our own teams, tournaments, and theme nights, and it was so fun getting everybody together once a week. We even had t-shirts and keychains made and had a pretty eventful Holy-Boardapalooza.

Kevin displaying our shirts. And his mustache for our Holy Board calendar.

I'm grateful for the memories of those summers (and winter gatherings we had), being able to spend time with my brothers and friends, and some of those nights were the hardest I've ever laughed! I still have my mini-washer keychain on my keys, even if the paint has completely faded! I also remember one time Andy and I took our Holy Boards and played all around the Hobart campus before Kevin became a student there. Just lugging those bad boys around from open field to open field! They were always a hit at graduation parties, too. Such awesome memories!

That's it for today. My next one might get a bit sappy... fair warning.

Gratefulness 2

All right. Day 2. Let's do this thing.

Facebook. It almost physically pains me to say I'm very grateful for Facebook, considering how many times I've thought about deleting it for various reasons. Facebook is frustrating, time wasting, annoying, and jealousy-inducing. However, I am so grateful for it. Without it, honestly I'm not sure I would have had the guts to move across the country. I would have been so sad to leave everybody I've ever known and basically just drop out of their lives. It's let me keep in touch with friends from high school, college, HOBY, etc. without being in the same state, or even same country. I've been able to stay in their lives and keep them in mine. I've been able to share my adventures, crowd source questions/opinions, get recommendations, keep up with friends, and basically let people know I'm still alive! Not to mention staying in contact with HOBY groups. I can't begin to count the amount of laughs I've gotten from our various groups (Matteson Family Summit, The Business, Morning Motion Club, plus a ridiculous amount of others). Also, seeing HOBY alumni thrive and do amazing things is so worth keeping my Facebook. It would suck to not know about Morgan's Girl Up and all the incredible things she's doing with that, all of our South Canadians and their Hospice swim, or to miss all the inspiration in our Motivators group. They make me laugh, they inspire me, and I'm grateful social media is around at least so we can stay in touch.

Can't imagine not being able to keep up with these fools (and all the other HOBsters)! Photo courtesy of Heather :)

Kindness. I have kind people all around me, and I try to be kind to others. From holding the door for someone to letting someone at the grocery store with only a few items go ahead of me to paying for the person behind me in a drive-thru. A lot of kindness has been shown to me throughout my life and I try to pay it back when I can. Picking up a piece of litter on the sidewalk. Leaving a few quarters behind at the car wash. Tipping 100% on a small bill. It makes me feel good, even if I never see the person benefitting from my kindness. I'd like to say it's selfless, but it puts a smile on my face, too, so unfortunately I don't think it's completely selfless. I hope it brightens their day, especially if somebody isn't having the best time. I've been there, where I've been down and out and just something small has completely lifted my spirits and reminded me of all the good things in the world. A lollipop moment relative, if you will. I've been offered help from strangers, received surprise postcards/birthday presents/art/etc, had friends show up at the airport with signs and gifts, and had friends/family donate to causes that I believe in to support me (sometimes without ever telling me), among SO many other examples. I've definitely received my fair share of unsolicited help and kindness, and I like to keep that in mind and try to give back a little bit of the kindness that's been shown to me throughout my life. I'm grateful for kindness I've been shown, and the ability to show kindness to friends and strangers.

Surprise postcard!

Mail. I think it started in college, where I made up the saying "Mail - the 3rd best letter you can get in college." And now that my mail is mostly made up of catalogs and advertisements, I am super grateful for any mail from actual people I get. I love the random postcards I get from friends that I don't expect. The unexpected paintings. The Something Store surprises. I try to return the favors and send out random postcards/art/friendship bracelets/Something Store stuff as well, and it's always fun to hear somebody be excited and surprised about receiving it unexpectedly. But if you just think about it - how cool is the mail? I just drop something in a mailbox and it gets shipped across the country (or lost I guess... womp womp) and shows up at my friend's doorstep a few days later. Thank you to everybody who's sent me surprised mail, and to everybody else - I accept surprise mail!!!

Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I can come up with some more exciting stuff for tomorrow :)

Gratefulness

I've seen the "gratefulness challenge" floating around Facebook a little bit, and when I saw Sarah B post it, I KNEW it was about to blow up with the HOBY NYCentral group. It's so Randrew! (I feel like that should be an official slogan or something). I lot of people have posted about the stuff that immediately came to my head - friends, family, health, access to clean water/housing/etc. I am super grateful for all of those (and touched on a lot of them in my Thankfulness post), but I wanted to try to come up with non-typical things and explain them a bit deeper, so I decided to make a few blog posts about it. Here are a few things I'm grateful for!

Music. Whether it's making music or listening to it, music has always been a huge part of my life. In elementary and high school, I was involved in pretty much every band we had. It was such an amazing experience, and I met such great people through it. I can't even explain what an awesome feeling it was to be with a big group of people, playing their own parts completely separate from mine but working together towards making something beautiful. I still listen to some songs we did in HS and can remember my parts, and remember playing them, and remember what parts I loved listening to and how my part intertwined with others. I get goosebumps sometime, especially listening to "October." The technically difficult songs, the songs that really made you be patient and pay attention to the feeling of the piece. It taught me a lot about hard work and perseverance, and how much that can pay off. It taught me to find a way of learning and practicing something that worked for me, which was kind of difficult. It taught me I didn't have to be the star, and how much teamwork and being the part of a larger whole is important and how good that can feel when you come together to accomplish something. It taught me to support my "teammates," too.

Now, even though I'm not in band anymore, and I can't remember the last time I opened my saxophone case, music still plays a huge role in my life. I love listening to music and going to see live music. I can't even fathom the number of shows I've been to since college. For me, I connect to a lot of music through the lyrics, and I think that's a huge reason I love of Montreal so much. His lyrics sometimes are so crazy and out there, but there's SO much that I can listen to and think, "yeah, that's EXACTLY how I feel." Sometimes, when you feel like no one understands you, music can just make sense of what you're going through. You know other people have those feelings and you can relate to that. Songs can get so personal that sometimes I don't want to share my favorite songs because I feel like that person will somehow know too much about me and what that song means to me. Then, there's also the nonsense fun music that just makes you smile and bop your head (of Montreal makes plenty of that, too, and often their emotional songs and their fun dancey songs are the same).

Man Man at MFNW

Then there are concerts! Concerts are SO FUN! You're in a room full of other people who love the same band and their music. You get to actually see these people that you've been singing along with for months, and sing and dance along with them in person. The energy of live shows is pretty amazing, and a lot of the bands I like a lot just have great live acts (confetti, stuffed animals, pig costumes, masks, band members crowd surfing, beach balls, confessions, etc etc). I try to get there early and be up front if I really like the band, and have been sung to and headbutted and handed setlists by lead singers and it's such a high. You basically forget everything else going on in the world and your life and just let go and enjoy the moments you have with these people who have made your life better and who you feel a real connection to through their music.

Art. Honestly, this one shocks me. If you could tell 7th grade me that I'd actually ENJOY art some day, I would have laughed so hard. I think I illegally got out of a year of junior high art because I hated it so much. It made no sense to me, I saw no purpose for it, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I'd look at "famous expensive art" and think "what the heck are you serious someone gets PAID to paint a canvas red?!" Now, I still don't understand a lot of art, but I appreciate having it in my life. I think I already told the story about how I got into arting (yeah I love that made up word so what), so I won't rehash it all here. Basically my brothers and I decided that we could make art as good as some of this famous stuff, and we didn't want to spend money on that decorating our walls when we could make it ourselves. So we did. I never thought I could enjoy creating art, and I was convinced I was just no good at it. I think that's the biggest hurdle I, and most people introduced to the Oswego County Art Collective, have to get over. I always tell myself - the worst that happens, I throw the painting away. Big deal. And I feel like that's a really good life lesson about trying things you're not sure you're gonna be great at. But now I love it and have been painting for a few years, and am so grateful I have found this kind of creative outlet.

A lot of the paintings I do are quotes or lyrics that mean something special to me from a band I really like. For me it's kind of been a way to tangibly have music that means a lot to me. The above painting is one I did of an of Montreal quote. (I showed it to Kevin Barnes, and he was like "Whoa, cool, really going back for that one huh?"Another reason music and live shows ROCK) I've tried the abstract "paint whatever" that Andy has mastered, and I've never felt all that good at it. I'd look at Andy's paintings and be like "I love that. I want to paint that." I wanted to do something of Montreal related, so I took a pile of their quotes and painted them on a canvas in different fonts. It came out great, and I really really enjoyed doing it. So I did it again. I enjoyed the planned creativeness of it moreso than the spontaneous creativeness. I could mull it over and come up with a cool design and quote and font, and make it come to life just how I pictured it. There's a lot of fine detail work, and I find that when I do that, my mind blocks everything else out except for what I'm painting and it's so refreshing. I am completely focused on the task at hand and can totally shut out the person who yelled at me for no reason at work earlier, or that I'm a little bit homesick, or that I have to deal with a broken window. It's a great stress reliever and allows me to try new things creatively. I think I was missing that for a lot of my life (one of my professors in college told me to stop being so creative once actually which kind of blows my mind because I'm not a naturally creative person - or at least I never thought I was!) and it's allowed me to think in different ways, really step out of my comfort zone, and explore something I never thought I'd want to explore. It's become something I really enjoy and look forward to, and I'm grateful I have that in my life now.

I know the list was supposed to be 3 things every day for 5 days. I feel like this got pretty long winded, and I have to be back at work in 8 hours, so I'll pause here and add a few more things throughout the next week or so!