Being

I'm still reeling from a minor tiff with mascara this morning. It's an ongoing battle between me and make-up. I usually end up losing as I did today. Why do I poke my eyeball with the stupid mascara wand every single time?  You folks with long lashes don't know how good you have it.  I didn't even make it to the eye shadow step.  That's how terribly make-up and I get along.  If I get frustrated enough, I'd rather quit and walk away than continue.  If both eyes have been coated with mascara by that point, lucky.  If only one, that eye will just look bigger than the other, that's all.  My eyes aren't symmetrical anyway - one appears bigger than the other because my skin doesn't crease as deeply over one eye as it does the other.  No big deal.

I look like I'm about to lunge at someone. It's just me annoyed.

I'm in the thirtieth year of my life and I feel like well, nothing.  I don't feel like I'm living.  I'm breathing, yeah.  The heart's ticking, yeah.  So why, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a store window, do I not like what I see?  I don't see grace, I don't see joy, and I don't see fulfillment.

Maybe because today, uhmmah's in Korea celebrating her niece's wedding.  A couple months older than me, Yoon-Joo is the first of my first cousins on that side of the family to get hitched.  The pressure is building for the rest of us.

Maybe because when her brother visited in the fall {+}, I was hoping that I'd have a job lined up by now.  I don't.

Maybe because only a few weeks ago I seriously contemplated selling all my stuff and hopping on a plane to anywhere but here.

Maybe because for a long while now, the one thing that I look forward to at any given moment is writing my rubbish down in this journal.  It's so overwhelming, this desire to run and hole up somewhere with a Wi-Fi connection.

Maybe I just don't have enough stuff going on in my life that I'm over-analyzing and blowing up internally over things that would otherwise be relatively minor introspections.

This is unacceptable and I'm suddenly kind of mildly freaking out about it.  There's so much to do.

One might say that I had a mildly psychotic episode this morning when I popped in one of my sister's workout videos and -surprise!- it didn't go very well.  I had a good laugh.  But it means a lot that I tried. I then hopped out of the shower and decided that I should learn to paint my face in under ten minutes. They say practice makes perfect.  Mascara won today, but there's always tomorrow.

I've got a lot to do to make the next thirty count.