Physical Challenge Life List

As our time here is winding down, I’m overwhelmed with mixed emotions.  Partly happiness about going home to friends, family, grocery stores and farmers markets, microbrews, and a kitchen!  But a big part of me is very very sad to be saying goodbye (for now) to all the adventures, the constantly-changing scenery, the daily challenges of travel, the cheap street food, and the gorgeous hiking.

Feeling victorious after climbing the highest peak in El Salvador!

I do feel like I’ve matured a lot on this journey, and one of the ways I’ve matured is in regards to my outlook on health.  I used to say that I wanted to die before I get old.  I don’t want that anymore, but I do want to be a super healthy, on-the-go old person.  I think it makes sense to say that accomplishing that goal depends a lot on the investments I make towards it now.  I’ve preached about the organic, vegetarian diet on here before, so I don’t need to go into that again.  And yes, I will always have a sweet tooth and a baking addiction, but moderation is the key.

I’ve kind of gotten over drinking on this trip.  I think an occasional, special-occasion, in-moderation drinker is what I would like to be.  I’m just getting too old for the college-type shenanigans!  The less I drink, the healthier, happier, and more alert I feel.  I’m sure this is a normal transition that most people go through, otherwise there would be a lot more 40-year-old running around doing kegstands.  But still I read what I’ve written and think, “Oh my gosh I’m becoming a lame old lady!”  C’est la vie.

Also, all the hiking, pack-carrying, and occasional surfing we’ve done here has gotten me into better shape than I’ve ever been in.  I’ve still got a spare tire but I am stronger than I’ve ever been in my life.  And it feels great!  What sucks is that with our return to Ohio looming, I’m already missing all the awesome hikes, mountains, beaches, and activities available here.  I really want to maintain, and hopefully improve, my fitness level once we get home.  It’s going to be hard in Ohio, because I’m not a big fan of running, and gym workouts are just so boring compared to mountain climbing!  Our time in Ohio will be brief, however, and I’m committed to finding ways to stay moving somehow.  Once we head west again, fitness can become a lot more fun.

Because I love lists so much, I came up with a new goal list of all the “physical challenge”-type activities I would like to accomplish in my life.  This will probably get added to a lot as I think of new things.  Not all of them are super-physical, some are just outdoorsy activities.  Hopefully I can check one or two within a year of getting home.  These are the things that get me excited and motivate me to work out hard (well, other than wearing a wedding dress next summer)!

Physical Challenge Life List
1. Master surfing

2. Master rock-climbing

3. Master snow-boarding

4. Climb Cotopaxi (Ecuador)

5. Climb Mt. Whitney (California)

6. Climb Kilimanjaro (Tanzania)

7. Hike the Grand Canyon, to the river and back

8. Bungee jump at Victoria Falls (Zimbabwe/Zambia)

9. Ride in a hot air balloon

10. Really give yoga a try

11. Learn to swing dance

What do you think of my list?  Way too ambitious or do-able?  Has anyone else ever made a list like this?

I think I need an intervention…

Guys, I am officially OBSESSED with Pinterest.  And I only joined it about a month ago, because I gave into the idea that it is the new be-all and end-all of wedding inspiration.  It didn’t take long for the obsession to develop, once I realized how many absolutely splendiferous-sounding recipes I could find EVERY SINGLE DAY!!!  I am obsessed with food, trying new recipes, and looking at food porn.  So now I find myself, here in El Salvador, when I should be out exploring and hiking, sitting on my laptop PINNING!  I do think it’s a brilliant organizational tool.  But I had over 100 “Recipes to Try” before I realized that a board with over 100 pins was not very organized!  So now, on a Friday night in El Salvador, I am going through re-pinning all my recipe pins to new, sub-categorized boards.  I AM PINNING MY PINS, AHHHH!!!!!  WHEN DOES IT STOP????  Of course I realize that I will never actually try half these recipes, but I can’t pass up adding something that just looks so delicious!!!!

Zach just makes fun of me for it.  “What are you doing, babe?”  “Oh, I’m pinning shit.”  This is a normal conversation between us nowadays.  What was hilarious was a couple weeks ago in Panamá, when we saw a lady cutting out random magazine pictures of clothes and stuff and fixing them to an actual, real-life corkboard.  Zach said, “Look, she’s pinning shit!!!!”

So maybe it’s a universal obsession for women in all walks of life nowadays.  It’s an obsession I should probably get over but I’m not quite sure I want to.  Is anyone else as addicted as I am?  If so, add me on Pinterest!

The Whole Cheesy Story, Part 2

Read Part 1 first!

When I left off last time, I had just met Zach at a sleazy college bar and agreed to go on my first “first date” in a loooong time.  When Friday night rolled around, I was nervous.  I spent a lot of the time on the phone with my BFF worrying about how awkward and weird this might be.  (I am super awkward…like the female version of Michael Cera.)  I mean, I only talked to the guy once, and we had both had a few drinks!  Was this what the dating game was supposed to be like?  I felt so out of things after my long, steady college relationship.  But I kept remembering how cute Zach was and I just had this feeling about him; I knew I couldn’t chicken out.  My bestie just told me to relax and have fun (“It’s not like you’re looking for anything serious!”) and to text her from the bathroom if I needed her to come up with a sudden “emergency” to get me out of there.  What a good friend.

I shouldn’t have been so worried though, because everything went great!  I drove down to Zach’s house and met his roommates, then we took a taxi to the Short North (the coolest neighborhood in Columbus) and went to The Burgundy Room, a classy wine and tapas bar (Zach’s idea).  Neither of us knew anything about wine, but Zach was working at the time as a valet parker in the Short North and after working outside The Burgundy Room many times, he’d rightfully pegged it as a great place to take a woman!  Despite our ignorance, we managed to take down a bottle of red (I honestly don’t remember what kind…I knew nothing about wine at that time) and some creme brulee, while talking and getting to know each other.  The sparks were definitely flying, even though I had told Zach early in the evening about my impending departure for Tanzania.  Zach even spent what I would later learn was his last $50 to cover our bill.  Things were going way too well for the night to end there though, so we moved on to another fratty bar (there’s an overwhelming amount of them in Columbus so they’re hard to avoid) to meet up with the same friends Zach was with when we met.  Luckily, he let me pay at this place, winning him major points.  (I’m pretty modern and I HATE when guys don’t let me pay my share, which my ex-boyfriend never did.)  We hung out with his friends, again yelling above the thumping bass, but still having a great time.

The first picture of us. So young!

Eventually the night had to end and I was in a blur of happiness.  I had survived my “rebound” date; in fact, it was awesome!  Now I just had to worry about whether or not I was ever going to see this guy again…

 

The dreaded “Wedding-Industrial Complex”…

…is what we’re going to try our darndest to avoid during our wedding planning process and the event itself.

But what is the “Wedding-Industrial Complex”?  I realized that some of my readers who don’t read wedding blogs quite as fervently as I do may be unfamiliar with this term.  So I tried googling it, looking for a good definition.  Turns out, there really isn’t a dictionary-type unpacking of the term anywhere on the Interwebs.

But, of course trusty Meg of A Practical Wedding (my new favorite blog) has an awesome post about the WIC that ends up providing a pretty clear definition.  So you should read it, here, and then come back to me.  It’s pretty short and sweet and awesome and if you understand it things will make a lot better sense from here on out, as I’ll probably be mentioning it a lot.  (I mean, the horrible beast is everywhere!)

Our Wedding Goals

Sitting on a park bench in Lima, Perú, drinking some beers while waiting for a night bus to leave, we decided to brainstorm and write out the goals we have for our wedding.  We hope these will help us remember what’s important despite how easy it is to get swept away in the little details and nonsense.  This way, if we’re struggling with a decision down the line we can come back to the goals and use them to help us make the right decision.  That’s the idea, at least.  Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Pay for our wedding ourselves and not go over $2500.

2. Agree on decisions together so that our wedding truly reflects our personalities.

3. Make our wedding more like a fun reunion than a showy formal event.

4. Be selective about our creative projects so that we don’t get obsessed with or overwhelmed by the details.

5. Make our wedding reflect our values: vegetarian, eco-friendly, etc.

6. Have a meaningful and sincere ceremony.

7. Handle any conflicts with courtesy and maturity while still standing up for ourselves on what really matters.

8. Have quality time with everyone at our wedding and involve our guests as much as possible.

What do you think?  Can we accomplish all of these?  Did anyone else sit down and write goals for their wedding before really beginning the planning?

On Doubt

Lest this blog get all “Wedding wedding wedding!” already, I decided to talk about something completely different today.

Faith.  A relevant topic since it’s Easter.  And probably the one thing I am most confused about in life.  See, I was raised as an Evangelical Christian, attending Baptist church, youth group, mission trips, Bible camp, and everything else that goes along with it.  And as I grew up, I “grew” in my faith and I really believed in everything the Bible and the church taught.  I prayed “the prayer” for salvation.  I even read through the entire Bible on my own two separate times before I was in college.  To this day, I think I still know the Bible a lot better than a majority of American Christians.

In college I started doubting and straying from the religion of my upbringing.  It’s a typical age for this to happen, I know.  Nevertheless, when I was in high school my faith was so rock-solid that I never thought that this would happen to me.  Neither did anyone else, I think.  I was sure that I would be one of the few that made it through the dangerous college years unscathed by the debauchery and unshaken in my beliefs.

Yeah right.

It was never any one thing that happened or one moment when I stopped being a Christian.  I really tried to work through my doubts and keep trying to believe.  I was the Vice President of Hofstra (my alma mater) Christian Fellowship my sophomore year, and I went to church almost every week until I was a junior.  But the whole time it was feeling less and less authentic to me.  Friends, learning, travel, everything I experienced, in addition to my own soul searching, seemed to cast more doubt on things.  It was a slow process, but one that eventually brought me very far from the faith of my youth.  It brought me to the place I am today where I know I am not a Christian but I don’t know much else.

And it sucks.  Know why?  Because it’s scary.  Being a Christian provided this awesome security blanket that was the declaration that if you accept Jesus as your savior, you are going to heaven!  And when you stop believing in it, your security is gone.  If I don’t know what I believe, then I have no freakin’ clue what will happen when I die.  And that scares me to death.  But I think the beauty of faith is that you can’t fake it.  So even though I often wish that I could still believe in Christianity, that I could cover myself with that security blanket again, I can’t right now.

I do believe in God.  I’m trying to figure stuff out, slowly but surely.  Maybe the first step is knowing why I stopped believing in Christianity, and I think I’ve gotten that main reason sorted out in my brain.  It’s a larger problem with religion in general.  It’s this:  How can any religion confidently insist that they are the only ones who believe the truth, when almost all (every?) other religions out there insist upon exactly the same thing????  Everyone is yelling “We’re right!” “No, we’re right!” yet the Bible and most other religious texts also state that humans are fallible…aka innately wrong.  So how do you know?

I could go on into a lot more of my spiritual/religious musings and problems, but I think this has hit my main qualm and that’s all I wanted to do for now.  So tell me, kind readers, does this make sense to you?  If you have a particular “faith” how do you know that it is the truth, as opposed to all others?

Mr. Fat Knuckles and the Wedding Band Dilemma

So, last night we realized an interesting problem.  Zach has the fattest knuckles ever!  Like, any ring that fits over his middle knuckle is way too loose around the base of his finger!  He’s never worn rings before and thus never thought about this dilemma.  I know nothing about jewelry and have no idea how to solve this problem.  I just know if it were me I would be really annoyed by a ring jiggling around all the time, even if it wasn’t going to come off.  Has anyone else out there ever had this problem, Internet?  What do you do to get a ring that fits???

Another thing I said a lot of back in the day:

“I don’t want to get married until I’m 30.”

Welp, I’m about to turn 25, and if our plan to get married next summer works out, I’ll be saying “I do” at 26.  According to the statistics I just googled, this is just about the average age of first marriage for women in the United States.

So while I guess I am “average”, we are abnormal because Zach is almost one year younger than me!

The reason I wanted to wait until I was around 30 was because my mom always emphasized to me, and I always believed in, the importance of living on your own for awhile and establishing your independence.  I also definitely viewed marriage as a sign of “getting old.”  Back in the day I envisioned myself as a mostly-single chick throughout my 20s, living in a fantastic apartment and galavanting around NYC with my many friends and many dates.  Dreamland, ha.

As it turned out in the real world, I got my stab at living on my own and being independent; in fact I experienced that in a much more extreme way than most people ever do.  (But that part of the story is coming later.)  For me it turned out that the phrase “When you know you know…” really was true.  As I fell in love with Zach, all of my preconceptions about age and marriage changed.  I think the first time I knew that he might be “the one” was when I realized that he was the first guy I had ever dated that I could see myself totally scrapping all of my future plans for.  Not that he asked me to do that.  But waiting until 30 to get married suddenly didn’t matter anymore.  Not that we rushed things; as I said in the beginning of our story, we met over three years ago.  In fact, I know a lot of our family members think we should have gotten married a long time ago.  But we wanted to wait until we were ready.  And it turns out, I’m ready a lot sooner than I expected to be.

What else could I possibly close this with besides the most perfectly cheeseball quote ever from “When Harry Met Sally“?

“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

The Whole Cheesy Story, Part 1

Disclaimer: I’m probably going to talk about wedding-planning a lot on this blog.  BUT fear not, it is not going to become exclusively a “wedding blog”, especially because our wedding is probably not going to be particularly blog-worthy.  (The very wise Meg says it doesn’t have to be.)  I’m still going to write about a little bit of everything.  I’ll be back more once we’re back in the U.S. this summer.  But I’m going to want to write about the planning process here, as we try to have an “awesomely-us” and very A-typical wedding.  So what better way to start that with our whole cheesy story?

This is how much life has reinforced to me that my plans don’t mean anything.  I distinctly remember being 18-years-old, sitting at Hounddogs Pizza with two friends from high school, our departures for various colleges imminent on the horizon.  We were talking about the exciting possibilities of college guys, of course.  I remember saying something almost exactly like this: “You’re not going to meet any decent guys at parties or bars…that’s trashy.  We should try to meet guys in classes or clubs or something.”  Oh, how wise I thought I was!

Fast forward 3.5 years.

February 11, 2009 was a pretty average Wednesday night in Columbus, Ohio.  I had recently graduated from college, finally broken up with my way-too-long-way-too-wrong college boyfriend (who I met at orientation…how wholesome!), and moved back home to my parents’ house for the six months I had before I would be leaving for Peace Corps Tanzania.  I had just gotten my first serving job to fill my time, and was focused on enjoying my friends and my newfound freedom before leaving for Africa.

This Wednesday was to be a girls’ night with my BFF and some of her college friends near OSU campus.  And as much as I hate to admit that this was the scene of the crime, where else would we go on a Wednesday night but out for $10 fishbowls????

Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10707024@N04/3581511782/

Yes sirree, we went to the oh-so-fratty Ugly Tuna Saloona!!!  An OSU legend.  What can I say, we loved fishbowls.  (Still do.)  We managed to snag a high-top table, and were just enjoying ourselves chatting and dancing.  At the table next to us was a group of three guys.  Eventually somehow these guys ended up at our table, introducing themselves.  (Zach claims he was the one who made it happen.)  The first guy I talked to was one of Zach’s friends, but somehow in the middle of our conversation I got distracted by the curly-haired blonde kid talking to my BFF on the other side of the table (Zach).  There was probably some liquid courage involved, because I’m normally not at all outgoing, but I found myself moving over there and sidling up to him.  We talked for awhile (more like shouted at each other over the blasting music) and discovered a few common interests in movies, music, etc.  And I definitely thought he was beyond attractive.  Eventually Zach’s friends wanted to leave (guess they weren’t having as good of luck as he was!) but before they headed out, Zach asked me if I was free to go out on Friday night.  I told him sure I was, trying to act all cool like I was a pro at this dating game (I definitely was not), and we exchanged numbers.  Of course at the time I was not looking for a relationship (I was about to leave for two years in Africa!) but I was excited for a date (my first after breaking up with my ex, so I guess you could call it a rebound) and some casual flirtation.

Another funny tidbit: I must’ve been on fire that night because after Zach left some other guy came up and offered to buy me a drink.  I got him to buy us all another fishbowl (after Zach had totally mooched a lot of our first one!) and then told him to go away.  He was a frat-guy greaseball.  Lol.

That night when I got home I got a text around 2am.  ”Don’t forget you’re hanging out with me Friday night!” from the newest contact in my phone, Zach.

The Big Question with Only One Answer

Well, for me at least.  If you haven’t guessed it yet by the title, I’ll just let it out now.

Zach and I are ENGAGED!!!!!!!!!!!   Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!  Happy dance!!!!!!

Think I’m thrilled enough?  I’m pretty freakin’ happy.

I kind of knew/hoped that the question was coming sometime during our South American adventure.  Of course we talked about wanting to get married many times before he proposed, because really, if you don’t already know the answer, you have no business asking.  That’s what we thought.  But although we could have just diplomatically decided to be engaged after so many discussions, we both wanted a proposal.  We wanted the fun and the surprise of it.  And so for many months we (I, mostly, I think) suffered through the awkwardness and slight tension of the “pre-engaged state.”  (This was totally me.)  I had this like, insane itch to talk about a wedding, plan a wedding, I just was so freakin’ happy at the thought that I HAD FOUND my person that I was going to spend the rest of my life with!!!  But without an official ring on the finger, society makes us women feel like we are desperate and obsessed if we start thinking at all about the wedding before we have the ring.  I call a bit of BS on that.  But I kept trying to pretend I wasn’t reading wedding blogs obsessively and I tried to keep my daydreams in my head.  ”We agreed that this is Zach’s thing that he gets to do and he gets to do it on his terms…so chill,” I kept telling myself.  I think I did alright…I’d give myself about a C+ in the chilling department.

Well, finally, all my patience finally paid off.  March 13, 2012, in the gorgeous Cañon del Colca, Peru….

Yes, we probably should have found a flatter rock to set the camera on for this reenactment shot.