It's Maddening

'Maddening' is a word I like to use in lieu of 'frustrating.' 'Frustrating' sounds so blah. Like a word only tightly wound, anal, obsessive-compulsive people use to describe situations that don't go their way. 'Maddening' has deep violet shades of meaning. 'Frustrating' only messes with your head. But 'maddening' perturbs your soul. Or maybe I'm just making that up.

Anyway, I'm really trying to see this state I'm in in a fun-loving light. Expect the unexpected! or Life is a highway/I'm gonna ride it all night long. Or, better yet, It's my life/It's now or never/I ain't gonna live forever/I just wanna live while I'm alive. Since I don't know what's going on, just kinda carpe diem my way through it. I'm even trying to look at it in a "Footprints" way. You know, I saw one pair of footprints in the sand and I got ticked at God for leaving me, but then He was like,"Cool it, my child, that was when I was carrying you."

Uncertainty is maddening. Facing decisions within that uncertainty is maddening. Trying to figure out what's best: Balancing the fact that you really care about what people you really love think with the fact that whatever decisions you make as a woman who is literally 4 years shy of 30 are your decisions alone and that you are the one who will have to live with them. It's humbling. It's daunting. It's maddening. It makes me cry.

A week from tomorrow, I board a Spain-bound plane. It doesn't even seem like it. But once I get there, WHAM! Just imagine a hefty pack of three intensive, month-long graduate courses in Spanish. Then, as soon as I get back, WHAM! An amalgamation of Meet the Parents, packing, moving, unpacking, and Graduate Teaching Assistant orientation. And what are you writing your thesis on? Durned if I know. Wonderful! And what are you doing once you graduate? See the aforementioned. Here's the kicker: I signed up for this. It's not like life has blindsided me with a rush and tumble of events. I knew what was coming. You can't whine about being unprepared when you were given ample notice, and not just notice, but you prompted this series of events of your own free will. But what could I do to prepare? Other than steeling myself? anesthetizing my heart? (Which is impossible.)

Wait-and-see is maddening. It seems that no matter how much I knock-knock-knock on Heaven's door, "wait and see" is the hollow reply. It's a new and uncomfortable sensation for me. Feeling at the mercy of factors beyond my control. And I suppose I always was at the mercy of those elusive factors, it's just that I haven't been dealt such a raw slice of that reality until now. And this from a girl who claims to relish her steak medium rare.