Home sick, time to scheme, make it your own, etc.

Hey, guys.

I’ve come down with something ominously representing influenza, so in the sanctity of my lonely apartment, I have opened the windows, turned on some chill beats, and I have time to plan. This is the first time in my whole life that I’ve had a bedroom entirely my own to design, and it’s so disappointingly barren.

Now, some of you don’t know me that well, some of you know me TOO well. I need things in my life. I need a cluttered space. Anything too tidy distracts me and keeps me from being able to function. Anything too messy or “full” overwhelms me and causes a near panic attack.

I’ve recently come to embrace the side of me that loves herself. She loves wearing a lot of makeup, looking as pretty as she can, she loves dressing up in fancy clothes and *gasp from former me* wearing high heels. She reads anything she can get her hands on, she cooks for herself and others because she can and she’s damn good at it, she does nice things for strangers because she lives to put smiles on faces. She isn’t sure of her place in the world, but that doesn’t scare her anymore. She knows life is about the journey. She plans to start donating time to others, she dreams of a life away from home, she hopes for everything she’s ever wanted. Because she knows she can have it.

When I was 13, I went to summer camp for the first time. I was gone for 5 days. I had just finished painting my bedroom a shade called “bubbly lavender”. I remember the shade because I picked it out and tortured my mom with many a shrill “please!” before she finally caved and let me have anything but white in my room. She also let me get some yellow bedding, covered in different colored roses. The reverse side of the comforter was purple with green damask stripes. So cool. I had a 1970s brown wicker lamp hanging over a corner of my room with nothing at all under it. I got home from summer camp, had a sandwich and some strawberries, and went downstairs to my room to unpack and figure out which camp best friend to call first. I walked in, and gasped. My mom had painted a desk for me. Yellow to match my comforter, with multicolored rose appliqués under the knobs and on the desktop. This desk, I later learned, belonged to my great-grandma who was the nicest lady I’ve ever known. All I have of her are photos of her smiling down at us so big it looks like her face might split in half, and this desk. It was one of the only surviving members of a pretty devastating flood that I don’t have a lot of other history on yet. It’s old as shit, guys. That’s what I’m getting at. I  was able to borrow shop space from a buddy and get him to help me sand it down and prime it, and this week I’ll be painting it, applying a fun glittery finish, installing agate knobs and a custom glass top and putting it in my room, with a matching mirror above it. It will be something I look at every day and remember how much I am loved. It will be with me and my family for as long as it stands. It will be where I do my makeup and silently remind myself each day that I can do anything I put my mind to, no matter how daunting the task. That’s something I never used to put much faith towards. I have always relied on the reassurance of others that I am enough. Now I feel that from within. I am more than enough and I am here for a reason.

Gosh, these get long quickly, don’t they? Time for another fever nap.

Love, Kelci.

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And Now…..

It is me, once again. I missed this.

I was going to write a bunch this last month, but I wanted to have something interesting to write about. Now I feel that I do.

I just got back from the first paid vacation I’ve ever taken, which coincidentally was also the longest time I’ve ever been away from home, (aside from taking care of my mom in Seattle while she was dying-not-dying from cancer, which really should not be counted as vacation.) I left Friday, September 8th and drove to Bozeman, spent 10 nights and 9 wonderful days with some of my favorite human beings on this earth, and woke up at the butt crack of dawn this morning (the 18th) to pack up and drive back to Billings for work. Ever since I started visiting Bozeman on weekends roughly 5 years ago, I’ve found it increasingly more difficult to leave each time I go. It doesn’t have as much to do with the company I keep there, so much as it is just the feeling. There’s no gross refineries, you’re completely surrounded by mountains and mountain air, it’s a nicer feeling town, it’s smaller; (granted more densely populated during the school year, which does not bother me at all) and don’t get me wrong…. I do quite enjoy the people I go to see when I’m in Bozeman, but I would still be excited to go every time, even if I didn’t know a soul. There’s a feeling of elation that washes over me as soon as I enter the Bozeman Pass, and it passes just as quickly when I leave. I think it could maybe be the anticipation of what I always know will be a fun-filled and happy weekend, whether it entails drinking games and going out and laughing til I cry, or just vegging out and binge-watching whatever series we’re into at the time and lobbing creative insults at each other. I’ll let him fill you in on our week together.

Will and I have been dating for nearly two months now, and absolutely everything about it just feels right. Every single tacky love song I hear walking around the grocery store or in a restaurant makes me restlessly giddy. I can’t shut up about him. He’s my very best friend, and I still cannot believe we are together. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I never would have thought this could happen. Ask me one, three, six, eight years ago if I thought I’d end up with him, the answer was no way, he’s just my best friend. And each time I’ve said that, that’s what I’ve meant. Back in high school when there was a sliver of a chance of us dating, that was all I wanted. As soon as I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I decided I’d kill him if we ever dated, and we should just be friends. We’ve always had a very comfortable line of communication; we have always been able to say anything to the other knowing there’s zero judgement. My family loves him, my friends love him, everyone’s reaction to the big news has just been “Oh, Finally! I was wondering when you two would do that.” I cannot imagine my life without him. He is as constant as oxygen and water. Getting to kiss him and all that gushy shit is just cherries on top. Anyway, enough about the stupid boyfriend stuff. Back to ME.

I currently live downtown with a close friend from high school/college. This is the first time I’ve ever lived with someone who isn’t a parent or a boyfriend. It is the best thing for me right now. We have so much fun together, we cook and clean together, we go out with our respective groups of friends, and we’re both the kind of person that isn’t afraid to say “Hey, maybe clean up your shit?”. Our apartment is a perfectly mixed combination of our two styles. It’s comforting to feel at home for the first time in a very, very long time. I’m not tiptoeing around trying to stay out of anyone’s way, this is our space, our beer fridge, our collection of nail polish on the coffee table carefully obscuring the cover of ESPN magazine’s Body Edition.

This lease will not last forever, in fact it will be up next May, which is far too soon for me to be ready for the next step. The next step is finally, FINALLY moving to Bozeman, which is something I should have done upon graduating high school. As Frank Sinatra says, That’s Life. It struck me last month that I should probably just go to school and do something with my life, lest I let my brain atrophy while handing out 20s to angry retirees. I like my job, and there’s nothing too much wrong with it, aside from the mind-numbing boredom/stress that comes along with doing the same 14 things on auto-pilot all day, with a couple minutes’ worth of crippling panic when/if something goes wrong. I’ve decided I am interested in pursuing a career in Plant Biology, a PhD if I make it that far. I can’t really describe in words why it’s so important to me, but anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always been obsessed with anything that grows in the ground. I want to do that for a living. I want to be in a field that I actually really care about. I hope that if I can’t do anything super important with it, I’ll at least be satisfied with myself for not wasting my chance and not trying.

Let’s see, what else? I started running more (again), I only got sunburned twice this summer, I am working on writing/refining a stand-up set that I’m hoping I’ll have the guts to perform in front of strangers only by perhaps this spring, I am teaching myself to establish savings, I am teaching myself to be a more organized and neat person, I am teaching myself to recognize distress and confront it before it manifests in more toxic ways, I am back to reading at least two-three books a month, I am teaching myself to approach cooking as a creative process instead of a mathematical formula, I am attempting to learn Italian (again), and I am telling people who I love that I love them whenever I can.

Maybe one of these posts I’ll get around to talking about the last six years of my life. Maybe I never will. Stay Tuned, Y’all.

Love, Kelci