Hey boo! Welcome back! If you’ve been reading this week, you know it’s been a powerful one for me. The sage, savvy, sympathetic, socially responsible (and worthy of gratuitous alliteration) Gena of Choosingraw.com featured my piece on eating disorders over on her blog as a part of National Eating Disorder Awareness, or NEDA, week… and that really pumped me up. I’m also travelling/chilling with my sister right now in the Copper State which is a fab change of pace, though you all know that the Midwest speaks to me (with nasal A’s but an otherwise region-neutral Anchorwoman accent.) Despite the uprooting and internet-ruckus going down at Rosie Glow, though, I’ve learned to maintain an oasis of calm deep in my core where I can retreat to and process stuff no matter what insanity surrounds me.

…Oasis of calm? Ha! Who am I? The Midwestern girl in me has re-coined that hooey: “pocket of normal.” Friends, a PON is everything you inherently know and value. It’s a soul pouch where you keep your sanity when enveloped by entropy: a home inside yourself. Does anyone else out there get overwhelmed, like ever? When traveling/prepping to travel, delving into side projects that make my spirit bloom but screw with my REM, embarking on new relationships or anything else that causes distress/eustress/stress period, my instinct is to work myself into a veritable tizzy. Throw exhaustion into the pot and I become little Miss Meltdown. Or I did, before I discovered the pocket of normal.

Picture this: an invisible fanny pack (they’re back!) where you store all the practices that ground you. (I keep my Smashbox Melondrama and CTA pass in my regular fanny pack.) My PON artillery looks like this:

1. Morning pages

2. A daily workout

3. Three meals a day… even if they’re piecemeal (ackhem, traveling as a vegan.) Example: if I go out to dinner and my meal is a meat eater’s salad hold the chicken, bacon and bluecheese; as many of my dining companion’s sweet potato fries that I can nab without her noticing, and a few “Spa-tinis” (because that’s a thing), I make sure to come home and eat a satisfying, protein packed vegan snack. Maybe it’s a mental thing, but I’m just not a snacker and you can’t make me one.

4. Regular contact with my loved ones. Example: my mom keeps me from floating away into the spazosphere (Hey! I invented that word!), so I make sure to talk/email with her pretty much every day. It’s harder to succumb to frenzied melodrama when there’s an angel on your shoulder pointing out your crazy. My mom’s totally in my PON.

5. A sense of purpose. The knowledge that I’m going somewhere… somewhere specific that I’m meant to occupy. I’ve only recently started to believe this idea and DAYUM, have I calmed down. For real.

6. Good spirited whining. Sometimes, you just have to let it out at the risk of being a royal pain in the butt. So here goes: My routine’s both shaken and stirred right now… I’m also doing that thing where I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and stay up. Remember when I thought I’d found my hair groove? Well, it’s not looking so groovy lately – I swear it was healthy and lush just last week, and now it’s like hay. It felt crunchy underneath the weight of my head while I was NOT sleeping at 4:00 a.m., so I groggily chopped off my frayed ends in my sister’s bathroom. (Hey sister, if you never ask me about this, I’ll know FOR SURE that you don’t read my blog.)

… that’s it. Those are the only things plaguing me right now. How fantastic is my life if the STATE OF MY HAIR occasionally keeps me up at night?! Yes, there was that whole sequester thing today and there are all sorts of wrongs in the world and said whining is conceited and trivial… UNTIL you come to the conclusion that you have it really good if you have nothing major to cry about. Do it. Be a big baby for a second if it leads to…

7. Making love lists!  This is about to be a list within a list: meta-police take note…

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… Coursera. Do you all know about this?! FREE online courses taught by professors from Ivies, almost Ivies and International Universities… I believe there are 93 classes being offered in all right now. I think this is just about the coolest thing since sprouted bread, as evidenced by the fact that I immediately signed up for seven classes. I sh*t you not: Songwriting, Principles of Obesity Economics, Know Thyself… and Idk what else. Do. It. I’m so excited.

…  These shoes. Fourteen dolla Jeffrey Campbells, yo. Woohoo desert shopping!:

… This bag. Purchased in Italy and gifted to me for my last birthday – thanks sister! I wear it every day but it still makes me happy/acts like a safety vest and prevents me from getting run over:

… Celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday with little people! Wish I’d taken a picture of the paper hats we made! THERE IS CUTENESS EVERYWHERE.

… Family, friends, and new supporters who loved up on me after this post… #stillnotoverit

… Guffawing, gesticulating wildly, and other familiar sister silliness. I love you even though you don’t read my blog or notice my haircuts.

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Happy weekend everybody! I’m banking on local culture, exploring the great outdoors, and POOL TIME whaaaaat!

XOXO,
Rose