42

42... that's the number of miles I will be biking throughout the five boroughs of NYC in about 50 days.

yikes...

I feel bad because I wasn't exactly as supportive as I could have been when Sarah first mentioned the bike tour... honestly, I thought she was nuts to even consider doing such a thing, but after hearing more about it and looking into it more, I decided to sign up with her. It is daunting, but it is something to look forward to too, and I'm excited to be able to say that I did it once it's all over.

I really wanted to use the tour as a way of raising money for a charity or small non-profit organization, and while I haven't given up the idea, I'm really not sure how to go about doing it... I have ideas, but I'm not sure how legitimate or legal they are...


Aside from signing up for the Five Borough Bike Tour, there isn't too much else to say for my life... That I really feel like talking about anyway...

I made a huge change in my life last weekend, one of the biggest steps I've taken in finally taking my life into my own hands and bettering myself... While I regret the pain that it caused, I don't regret doing it. In some ways it was a signal to myself that there are a lot of things that need to happen and it was a sign that I could handle it.
I spent the better part of last Sunday making art, something I haven't done in a really long time. Then this week I signed up for the bike tour - something I don't know that I would have done before - and I've started looking for another job. No luck, yet, but at least I've started... I keep reminding myself that it would be a lot easier to look if I knew what I was searching for, but I don't. I would love to take off somewhere and go do humanitarian work in another country or part of the states, but I still feel very tied to home. It has only been a little over a year that I have been this close to home for an extended period of time and while I told myself that I wanted to stick around and actually get to be a part of my friends' and families' lives, I can't help but constantly feel like this isn't where I'm supposed to be. I feel drawn elsewhere, I just don't know where that elsewhere is yet... and I don't know if I feel drawn elsewhere because I'm really not meant to be here, or if it is because it is just another way of me running and not facing whatever I need to face here...

Sarah and I took a trip down to Savannah recently to surprise Siobhan for her birthday. I can't remember being as happy as I was that weekend in a long time... The change was incredible and I don't understand it, it's like I cross a certain line on the east coast and my mood automatically shifts. I should force myself to find the happiness I had down there up here somehow, but I'm not sure how to do that... I don't know the trigger...

perhaps I do... being in Savannah allowed me to be Me. I don't know what switches inside me when I start getting closer to the place where I grew up, but something does and I switch back to being a complacent shadow aiming to make everyone else happy.

The problem in striving constantly to make everyone else happy day in and day out is that you never have time to make yourself happy. I need to work on that, but I'm afraid of becoming selfish...