Onwards to July

Okay, so there’s still like 11 more days until July comes (I’ll round and say 10 – “Ten is an order of magnitude in a discipline that uses orders of magnitude to estimate things. Ten is an attractive and thus suspicious number.”) but I’m looking forward to that 3 day weekend that we have been gifted this year because the 4th of July falls on a Saturday, so I can’t wait for July to get here.

I realized while talking to my coworker the other day, that this is the first time I won’t be getting a summer vacation. How weird is that? Never mind that my summers were generally filled with things summer ballet intensives, but it was a break from routine and a chance to get dancing out of my system before heading back to another year of school.

And last year, that “other year of school” was more dancing, which was great – looking back on that year at Joffrey, I can tell I’m looking at it through rose-tinted glasses, but I still wish that I had gone back for another year. It’s weird, every time I start dancing again the same thoughts rise up to the surface – What if I had gone back? Would it have made a difference? Am I really capable of being a professional? What would have happened? And I have to beat them back down again with a stick, face reality, and tell myself over and over again that it was my choice to come back, my choice to look for a “real” job, my choice to close one door and try and open another.

I just checked my calendar. I moved back on June 28th, 2014. One more week until my year anniversary back in California. I don’t think I’ve learned a lot at all during this past year at home – maybe surface skills, like how to cut paper using a Silhouette (horrible, horrible, frustrating – but then SO COOL at the end), how to wrap gifts nicely, how to code. How to commute. But internally? Maybe not so much. I sometimes still feel like a sell out for somehow landing this comfortable engineering job instead of living a hard life doing something I love.

Right now, I’m experiencing a recurring problem of mine – what to care about. There’s so many things begging for my attention – Charleston. Warriors winning – and Oakland losing to gentrification. Church. Popsicles at work. New kittens. Dance. 4th of July. How do people do it? I guess this is part of why sometimes I really dislike social media – it’s so easy to just reblog, retweet, share something to show your support. I hate being ignorant, and I hate being fake. But there are only so many hours in a day and so much my brain can handle…