Recalling Pineapples

Question 9/424:  What do you think about intuition, or “following your gut”? I think having and following your intuition or your “gut” is a valuable skillset.  It takes a certain amount of confidence and self-esteem to trust yourself enough to follow your own intuition or gut feeling.  I also think it’s valuable to recognize when and in which situations you actually have enough experience to have an intuition worth following.  I think sometimes people’s egos can be a bit inflated and maybe they follow their gut and it leads them in the wrong direction because they actually don’t have any experience in the situation they were letting intuition lead them through.  I also feel like sometimes gut feelings are not, and should not be treated as, the end all be all, but are instead warning signs from your subconscious to just pay attention and take note on anything that seems off or uncomfortable. I think at a certain point in everyone’s life – whether it be a cert...

Question 7/424:  When you make a mistake that others find funny, are you able to laugh at yourself? My knee jerk reaction or immediate response to this question is: No, I am not able to laugh at myself.  Context is important but generally speaking I think I do not handle embarrassment well.  If I’m doing something completely new to me, and the people around me know that it’s new to me and are being understanding to that and I mess up then I might be able to laugh that off.  Or, if we’re doing something for fun and the mistake is something inconsequential or genuinely funny, well then I think in that situation, too I could laugh it off.  However, I take great pride in what I do whether it be work or hobby I want to do things well, and to prove that I can do them well.  Once, in fact the once and only time, I went paintballing, and the people who invited my friend and I there knew we were newbies and told us they would take care of us as far as gear and k...

  Question 5/424:  What is your most important goal right now? This question is going to produce a somewhat repetitive answer seeing as I already wrote a long-winded blog post about having been in debt since I was 16 and working on paying off the last bits of credit card debt, but the answer is – paying off credit card debt.  Well, technically my most important goal right now is buying a house.  But, in order to buy a house I currently have to focus on paying off credit card debt, paying off my car, and building a savings account so I can purchase a home hopefully before I turn 35 (2027).  While I know that technically I probably don’t have to do all of those things, I would not feel comfortable or secure in my home buying if I still had the rest of this bad credit hanging over my head while also taking on the added stress of homeownership.  I had really hoped I would already be much closer to this goal when I got my consolidation loan back in 2016 but ...

  Question 3/424:  You just became a billionaire.   What will you buy for yourself?   And for others? So, I’m going to be honest in that I don’t feel like I am financially savvy enough to even know how far a billion dollars can be stretched.  I’m not even sure, without searching online, how to write out a billion dollars in numerals.  I know, my first and foremost, would be that I would buy a house.  Ideally, the house I want would never cost more than $250,000 which is pretty much a drop in a bucket of a billion dollars.  I would probably also go ahead and buy myself a brand new car, just so I know I’d be set for a while, which again I would try not spend more than $20,000.  I do also have some debts I would need to pay off but even then we’re still well under the $500,000 mark so there’s still a lot of money left in this imaginary bundle of cash. A lot of people often say that if they won the lottery they would pay off their parents’ ho...

  In March 2021 I purchased this Conversation Starter card set with the intention of going through them with my boyfriend.  That hasn't happened.  Instead this colorful box of cards has been used as a phone stand at work until I decided to use them as prompts for this blog.  I'm unsure if I'll be posting monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly, but I do want to try and get through all 424 questions, possibly two at a time since that's how the cards are set up.  If anyone feels inspired by this, by all means follow along or even buy your own copy of this deck and see if you can use it in real life during in person conversations also! Question 1/424:  Are you a planner, or prefer to be spontaneous? If forced to answer this without explanation, I would say I am a planner.   However, context is everything. I am not a person who could just up and decide one day that I was going to travel out of state for the weekend.   I at least need time to pack a bag, pla...

I signed the seventh lease for my apartment today.  I think some people would say that proudly; that they've been able to maintain their place that long, that they're a resident in good standing, that they're rent is discounted a bit due to being grandfathered in.  I am proud of those specific aspects, but I am not proud of going into my 7th year in this apartment.  If I'm honest, I'm rather morose about it.   I also turn 30 this November.  When I got this apartment in 2016, I was 23 to turn 24 that November.  This apartment was supposed to be a transitional one, a one year commitment.  Just a way out of my then ex-boyfriend's townhouse.  I was supposed to have a friend move in with me, which was why I signed on for a two-bedroom in the first place.  Thankfully, my mother always taught me never to agree to a contract I couldn't afford on my own, so while not having a roommate was annoying it was feasible, and it was "only going to be for...

  The first thing he did upon meeting her for the first time, was to ignore the fact that the two girls were taking sips off of his drink. He winked the first time her friend took a sip which let them know that he was allowing them to get away with something. The girls of course had no idea the alcohol content of wine coolers and so when the girls acted bubbly and drunk off of a few sips he just laughed and played along, though of course he knew better. His drink of choice at the festival was only 7% alcohol per volume and so the girls would have had to drink a lot more than a mug full to be falling over drunk, though they didn’t realize this. He almost took a kind of pride in knowing that these girls just wanted to be near to him and be seen with him. However prideful he may have felt he also needed to be careful that no one got the wrong impression considering the age gap between them. If you’re the type of person who believes in the theory categorizing people into two disti...

They May Never Understand So here’s to being the youngest person in your grade. And here’s to the class - that helps your career- and you’ve wanted for years. Here’s to the class you knew you’d hate, but a friend convinced you to take anyways. Here’s to the foreign language you now consider your sanctuary. Here’s to having no one to sit with at lunch and looking like a loser. Here’s to the second year of Algebra and the complicated equ -- everything. Here’s to the choir that your better than, but nevertheless are stuck in. And here’s to the English class taught by the “best” teacher in the district. So here’s to a friend switching schools before the choir‘s first big day. And here’s to hating the class you’re now financially obligated to take. Here’s to making new friends with people you knew all along. Here’s to loving your third hour because it feels like the only place you belong. Here’s to sitting with a guy, you kind of like, because he doesn’t seem to mind. Here’s to walking to c...

They're Trying To Accept So here's to the guy who drives you to school each morning. Here's to a new math teacher that doesn't teach any better than the last. Here's to the English teacher, that is now teaching Spanish. Here's to the crazy old guys in the hall that were actually teachers. Here's to varsity chorale and the difference between the two. Here's to eating the same thing, every day…when you have money. Here's to biology and never actually learning anything. Here's to public presentations of poetry and the confused looks from faces of ignorance. So here's to your next boyfriend before your next birthday. Here's to barely scraping by in a class you should be passing. Here's to sitting next to guys you think are pretty cute. Here's to dreading your third hour because the teacher is so loose. Here's to standing next to basses and falling silently in lust each day. Here's to changing tables to sit with older friends. ...

They Wouldn't Believe So here's to pointless threats, and fights that no one won. And here's to Newton's laws, and the teacher who never gave up. Here's to US History, and the teacher who made it somewhat fun. Here's to Algebra, and the tutor I had because I couldn't learn. Here's to choir, and the songs that people won't remember. Here's to the food that we traded because the lines were far too long. Here's to laps around the gym, and learning new sports every hour. Here's to the English teachers, how they swore that I could write. So here's to heavy text books, and classrooms I forgot. And here's to Pluto no longer being a planet. Here's to my assigned partners, and crushes, that I suffered. Here's to the estimate if PI and the amazing way I remembered (3.14). Here's to singing in the choir even when you aren't first. Here's to the reject table we sat at in lunch. Here's to the changing season that also c...

My relationship with my sister was - complicated.  The reason for any strain in our relationship is difficult to explain, not because I don’t understand it, but because it feels like blame shifting - as if it was someone else’s fault or beyond my control.  And even in the ways that it was, at times, beyond my control, I know in my heart there was more I could have done to maintain a relationship with my sister.   The last time I saw Marlene was in 2012; that was 6 years ago, two break-ups ago, two moves ago…  At the time, things for both of us seemed so good.  We both had our own places, we both had relationships, we both had jobs, we both promised that we would build from that point on.  That whatever damage had been done, whatever time had passed, could be pushed back and we could start fresh, from that moment.  But life happened, as it does, and we both got busy and didn’t find the time.  It was a little over a year from our last meeting t...