chaotic, but good @chaoticbutgood - Tumblr Blog

“It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical. And I hope I’m now beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it’ll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be…well, that’s for others to judge.”

George Carlin, 1982 (via austinkleon)

Integrity

Google’s definition for integrity is two-tiered. Firstly, it’s defined as follows:

the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness."he is known to be a man of integrity"

Simple enough. I do my best to live my life honestly, both introspectively to myself and socially to others. I feel that my moral stance is strong and rooted in reason, ethics, and my upbringing.

The devil is in the details of the second definition:

the state of being whole and undivided

Though the example given is contextualized with physical things like nations and their borders, it applies to one’s strength of character as well. I’ll be the first to admit that there are times when I feel very divided. It’s times like this that I begin to question my integrity; times like this when I begin to look back and wonder if things were my fault for telling myself I’m submitting to reason, when what I’m truly doing is avoiding direct conflict. What I truly want is to make decisions that help as many and hurt as few people as possible. It’s difficult not to be short-sighted in this endeavor because certain decisions could hurt a few people’s feelings and help hundreds if I stood behind them... but how could I know for sure that the risk is worth the gain?

The fact that I asked that alone tells me I’m not on the right path. I have told myself all too many times in my life that the risk is always worth the gain. Where and when did I stray from my core beliefs and start to compromise my character?

I need to continue to push. To push myself in the face of discomfort when it comes to worrying about people’s feelings, and to push my ideas further by standing by them in the face of self-uncertainty. I can be so sure about my ideas and vision, but that won’t matter when I'm not sure enough of myself to properly stand behind them.

#personal #career #aspiration #integrity

Sometimes things happen that make you feel helpless. Sometimes large, often times seemingly insignificant; however somehow so dense and heavy that it doesn’t matter.

#personal #life #stuckinarut #rut #helpless

g33klady

So many thanks

What a perfect day, last Saturday! If you don’t know, on 10/10/15 I married @terrancerobb and it was fantastic!

I have so many people I want to thank (outside of the official thank you cards), so I’m going to kind of organize it a bit here. As well as some other thoughts…

Thank Yous

We had so many people helping us to make our special day as amazing as can be. We can never thank them enough, but I can at least call them out here.

Setup and tear down of the Reception Hall:

We had some great help from family and friends setting up the venues and tearing it down, cleaning up, and leaving it exactly as we found it. Everyone’s tireless help made the day go smoothly and the place looked great! Patti, Mom and Paul, Dad and Nancy, Pauly, Jeff and Meghan, Bryan and Melanie, Brian, Matt, Jeremy, Dylan, and anyone I may have missed - thank you so very much for all of your help getting everything set up, and cleaning up in the evening. With your help, we were able to enjoy ourselves so much more, and we appreciate it so much!

Setup of Ceremony:

Patti, I know we’ve said this before but we really can’t thank you enough for making sure the chairs were set up and ready for the ceremony. They were absolutely perfect and we appreciate you so very much! And see above - you were integral to getting that reception going! Thank you!

Hair:

Melanie, you did an amazing job on my hair! It looked so great! I can’t wait to see those pics of me straddling the toilet while you put 600 bobby pins in my hair! Love you SILBFF!

Cake:

Meghan, that cake was BEAUTIFUL and so delicious! I can’t believe you got that much flavor in a gf/df cake! I only wish we would have shared it with everyone else… Love you so much!

Decorations:

The center pieces turned out so great Dawn and Kim! We loved the look on the tables - perfect! Thank you so much for helping to tie the reception decor together and make it look so great!

Videographers:

We used the Wedit service, which sent us 5 HD cameras for our guests to use as they wished. Thank you so much to Mary, Jacqee, Dawn and anyone else that helped to document this special day. We have been watching and re-watching the videos and are so grateful for you guys taking the time to do this for us! These great moments will live forever in our memory now of our special day!

Love and Support:

I could not have done most of what I did for this huge event without my close friends and family. Those of you that offered to assist - even if I didn’t take you up on the offer, it meant a ton to me. Especially to my ladies Ashlee, Meghan and Melanie - I love you three so much and was so happy to have you up there with me.

Everyone that was able to make it, even those that weren’t - we are so thankful for your love and support as we embark on this next chapter in our lives! Each of us wanted to invite over 150 people, but our venue held 100, so we couldn’t have everyone there that we wanted. We are so grateful to those that were there, took pictures, danced, and had fun!

Our Vendors

We had some pretty amazing vendors, and I’d love to call them out here. They were all phenomenal!

Venues

Our ceremony venue was Gallup Park in Ann Arbor. We found a pavilion near a tree that we loved, and had the ceremony there. Perfect location in case of rain, too!

Our reception venue was The Historic Chelsea Depot in Chelsea. It’s a historic train station, next to active tracks. Colleen was awesome to work with, and we had no issues at all. What a great place!

Officiant - Stacey Swickerath, A Simple Ceremony

Stacey created the ceremony that we wanted from our thoughts and ideas, and our vows to each other. She accepted every edit we had, and walked us through our ceremony perfectly. We are so happy with how the ceremony turned out - I just wish I had brought my kleenex with me!

General Desserts - Jam’s Gluten Free Bakeshop

Chef Eric is phenomenal. Those macarons, swiss cake rolls, and pumpkin rolls were all gluten free and fantastic! I drove 3 hours to go to Sandusky OH to pick them up! Terry and I had visited Jam’s in 2014 for the first time, while in the area for a conference. There were these gluten free swiss cake rolls that I had to try - I hadn’t had a swiss cake roll in over 7 years by that time. It was a blissful experience! We went back in January of 2015 for more, and put in our order for the wedding as soon as we realized we could make it work. I say that 3 hour drive was totally worth it - especially cuz there’s a few leftovers that we’ve been able to enjoy here at home!

Food & Bartending - The Shimmy Shack

When we had started planning the wedding, we had to find someone that I could at least eat some of the food from. As a Celiac, having gluten free food available for me isn’t a luxury - it’s a necessity. I don’t want to spend my wedding day sick! Terry suggested that we have 100% gluten free food - that way I can hug, kiss, shake hands with anyone that’s there and not worry about getting sick on our wedding day.

The Shimmy Shack food truck was really the only caterer around that could guarantee gluten free food. And they’re damn good! I know some folks were not happy with the choice of a vegan, gluten free dinner. We tried to supplement that with meat and cheese appetizers, and seriously those fries are amazing!

To top off the food, they also offered bartending service. Debra and the crew were so great! We loved having them as part of our day - they even used the photo booth! We are so happy that we got to eat and drink, and enjoy some of those killer sweet potato fries!

Coffee - Bearclaw Coffee

We love coffee! We had pumpkin spice lattes on our first date, and had to have something like it for our wedding. We found Bearclaw had a coffee truck! Debi from Bearclaw Coffee was an absolute pleasure to work with. She came out and saw the reception location, and we found a great spot inside - at the ticket window - for her to serve from. They served our “signature drinks” and even put a little extra in one if you wanted it! The Mocha Kiss and The Kraken were our two fancy drinks - a mocha with Patron XO Cafe, and hot cider with Kraken rum!

Debi was fantastic, going around to the tables to make sure everyone was good, or to offer drinks. What a great, warm presence! And the coffee was great too!

DJ - Our Amps Go To 11

Steve from Our Amps Go To 11 was great - he worked with us every step of the way to find the right tone for the night. He even worked behind my back with Terry, to have a song that Terry wrote and recorded, played as our first dance song! I was so surprised, it was amazing! He played the songs we requested, and kept the stuff we didn’t want away from our party! He really helped the evening go without a hitch! And those lights were fantastic and perfect! Love how they set the mood in the room!

Photography - Yellow Leaf

So I was 8th grade locker partners with this lady who happens to be a great photographer! We had our great engagement photos with Leigh, and we are so excited to see what we get from our big day! We took some silly ones, and of course the standards, but we’re really looking forward to them all!

Wedit

We basically rented 5 HD cameras from Wedit for our guests to help us document the day. We watched some of the videos on our wedding night, and have them available online now for us to edit as we want, or pay for editing services. Terry likes that sort of stuff, so he’s going to make us an awesome video :D There’s some amazing dancing on those cameras!

Photo booth - Rock the Booth

What a great set up! It looked like everyone had a lot of fun in the photo booth, and we got a great scrapbook of the photos and your messages from that night! Some of those faces you guys make are real winners!

Regrets

I only have a few regrets of the day.

I really wish I had said a few more things during my speech/toast. There were so many things I wanted to mention, I couldn’t get to them all. So here’s a few:

Earlier in the day, on the way to the ceremony, my 3yo niece said that I was marrying Uncle Terry because he’s my best friend. How adorable and perfect!

I wanted to mention how much I had talked to Meghan and Melanie about Terry, about our relationship, and how much their friendship means to me. We’re sisters by marriage, but friends by choice. I love you girls so much! Every piece of advice you gave me helped me to know what I needed to do, and helped me to get to where I was that day.

I wanted to mention the time when, early on in our relationship, Terry was changing a light bulb in my house and said to me “I’m totally husband material”

I wanted to mention how much I appreciate Terry’s love and patience, and all of his support. From my first conference talk, to my user group meetings, to my long days at work and he has freshly baked cookies waiting for me at home

Where to stop? There’s so much…

I wish that I had planned better with the drinks. I bought way too much of what nobody wanted, and little of what they did. I’m sorry for the gaps there that our guests experienced. I hope you all had a good time anyway!

I wish that I had offered the cake up to everyone. We ended up with so much at the end, and while we ate 1/3 of the top layer for breakfast the next morning, I feel bad that we wasted any of it when it could have been enjoyed by everyone.

I wish that I had gotten to speak to everyone! I wasn’t even able to say hello to everyone that attended, and I feel horrible for missing folks - I see them on the videos or in pictures, and recall that I never got to say a thing to them, or only said a few words. I know everyone understands how busy the day is, but it’s still a regret…

Finally…

We had an amazing day and feel so incredibly lucky and dare I say it, blessed, to have such awesome family and friends to support us, help us do the heavy lifting, and celebrate with us! We are overwhelmed with your love for us, and with gifts! This is *not* a thank you card, but a way to express a few things about a huge event! I’ve always been a bit better with written word than spoken, so hopefully this gets some of my feelings across.

Life is pretty amazing. #honeymoon #amazing #washington #nature #creek #river #peaceful #naplife

#creek #nature #naplife #honeymoon #washington #amazing #peaceful #river

The beginning of autumn

As I walk

Beautifully chilly breezes

awaken lost memories

The shade of the trees, childhood emotions

Everyone acts like nothing is out of the ordinary

If only they'd stop

and feel this too

#personal #writing

Why is it so hard to just close my eyes and let all of the distractions drop away? Maybe I’m expecting too much of myself, maybe I’m expecting it to happen every time that I try.

I closed my eyes in meditation and eventually came to see myself surrounded by a dark swarm of thoughts and emotions. Latent fears and daily stressors. Each one of these distractions scraping away at the blank slate I continually try to keep clean. Flinging ink across my mind; clouding the waters that it seems I can only manage to keep still for barely a heartbeat.

The narrative within my mind; the nonstop, constant, often self-effacing yet typically egotistical voice that I’ve lived with for 27 years simply will not rest idly. It’s a part of me that I hold a bitterness toward and a love for--like a familiar enemy in a centuries-old war.

I find difficulty in having a single train of thought. Typically there is a circus being conducted within my sub-conscious and involuntary thoughts and feelings, and my conscious mind is one man in charge of managing every stampeding elephant, every trapeze artist getting cold feet, every smiling clown living out of his truck. All to keep the crowd entertained.

As a child I often cursed this ‘frenemy’ for what it did to my social life, my mental state. I just ‘wanted to be normal.’ I was always too uptight, too worried about what people thought of me and so completely defensive to let any genuine relaxation or general good times occur. I still have to struggle a bit just to let myself relax even now, if I’m being completely honest.

This aspect has manifested in many ways, for better or for worse. Pain and disappointment that left me questioning what my own fundamental values and my relationships even meant to me. Addiction to performance and positive feedback leading to incredibly fulfilling creative work. Mentally crippling and sometimes physical health-threatening anxiety. Love deeper than I ever thought I was capable of. The intensity of my mental inner-workings covers a very wide spectrum, and things have a tendency to fall far from the middle (even if the results tend to be faceted with the good and the bad).

I’ve grown on a personal level very significantly in the last few years. I continue to every day. My understanding of the world I live in and the life I’ve created for myself grows deeper. As time passes, my mind continues to change. I see more. I feel more. I understand more, and I have a real grasp on who I am in my own eyes.

I have someone that I care about very deeply to thank for her hand in that. I’ve never really been capable of sorting things out, or seeing myself from the outside in a way untainted by my ego and insecurities. She continues to show me my true value--not in the vapid, shallow sense... but my value as a human person.

She’s that one piece that you put into the puzzle, and suddenly everything seems so much clearer. When I look into her smiling face, the waters are clear and still, the canvas blank. She has such a way of untangling my mess of old wires with her eyes. I don’t know how I ever got along without her.

#personal #personal thoughts #love #life #emotions #emotion #feeling #introspective #introspection #pragmatism #meditation #happiness #complete #heart #passion #everything

The sun comes up again each morning, and I too will rise after every fall.

Life certainly isn’t without its struggles. While I’m thankful that mine are fewer and farther between than ever before, I can’t let that invalidate the need to address them as they come.

What I’ve found is that it’s never easy to get back up after you fall. Whether you’re flat on your face, or just down a rank or two it’s still difficult to recover. These failures aren’t what define you; it’s how you react to them that reveals your character.

Some of us choose to accept life’s challenges as signs that we should give up and get comfortable at the rung of the ladder we’re already on. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been tempted to make that choice myself. I don’t know how it got there, or if it will last forever--but there is a spark inside of me, a pilot light that has never gone out that always lies waiting, dormant until I am ready to pick up the pieces again and resume climbing. There have been times that I’ve lost what felt like everything I had to lose, but there was always that small part of me that somehow had the tenacity to hang on no matter how hard life tried shaking it out.

I’ve spent the past month or two like many before: feeling like I wasn’t quite there, that my passion had waned and I was incomplete. Today marks the day that my motivation has returned. I can’t stop pushing, I can’t let myself slip anymore. I’ve gained 15 lbs., it’s time to lose 30. I’ve been loosening my grip on things, and it’s time to get my second wind. A positive outlook has the power to change everything, and I’m not planning on letting go of it. Let’s do this.

#personal #life #motivation #justdoit #fuck the naysayers #fuckyeah

Surface tension. #nature

#nature

I guess time will only tell

The passage of time. I exhaled deeply after typing that first sentence. Why is this so scary? For me, and I’m guessing many people, it’s because there’s no sure way to know we’re doing the things we should be doing - and in uncertainty there is fear.

Looking through old videos that I used to enjoy today, I saw something on Vimeo. One of the first videos posted on the site reads that it was posted “a decade ago.”

...a decade ago. Nostalgia, for me, is like chasing something I’ll never catch. I want to re-live so many good memories just one more time, to be excited and inspired in the way that I was back then.

It’s the moments where you are able to step back from your life and see where you are, where you've been, and the road ahead in a way that is enlightening. I am, at these times, overtaken with a sense of peace. Peace in the face of what was uncertainty then. Knowing that the unknown isn’t that scary. Understanding that in another 10 years, I’ll feel the same way about all of my current fears and worries.

There wasn’t much of a point to this one, just getting some feelings out of my body, and some thoughts out of my head.

Goodnight.

#personal #life #time #fears #aspirations #future #past #nostalgia

The break of day is before us

I think often on the power that perspective holds in daily life. I have plans for a piece of artwork that will go on my body that holds symbolism with regard to being able to look past the immediate nature of a situation pragmatically - to circumvent knee-jerk emotions so as to make the right decisions when things are dire.

There's a subtle beauty within the automaticity of a morning commute. I often deeply reflect on the capability of metaphors to add perspective to a situation (a little meta, I know, but please bear with me). There's this quote about the sky, the clouds and the sun that I've heard many times before:

“The sun always shines above the clouds.” - Paul F. Davis

I feel that there's a lot worth exploring here. At its base, it's one of those quotes that I can see being superimposed on a photo of the sky and endlessly shared on Facebook. If we dig deeper, it can speak to this idea of perspective, and it intersects with another quote you don't have to look far on Facebook to find:

“The only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude.” - Zig Ziglar

I may not be on board with everything Zig has said over the years (he certainly was from a different time), but this is one thing that truly stuck. I value the capacity for pragmatism, and this notion that it's the same world, but it's me who is holding on to negativity, often serves to help me embody pragmatism to a much higher degree. I've struggled with some pretty severe anxiety and certainly my fair share of depression in the past, but eventually realizing that I was the main cause of my own bad day gave me the foothold I needed to turn things around.

All of this comes together to help strengthen the idea that we have the power to rise above the things that are right in front of us and see things for what they are on a higher level. The clouds may be dark, the rain may be falling and you locked yourself out of your car without an umbrella, hell it might even be Monday (let's hope this isn't the case), but there is a you that exists in the future that isn't upset about any of it. Why can't you be that person now? Your ability to hold that perspective is already there. Everything is going to be okay.

Exploring another layer of this idea, I'd like to say a few things that I believe about life on a personal level, and I'd like to speak in simile in a way that I don't believe is difficult to decipher.

While the absolute destruction of a natural disaster like a tornado or a hurricane is terrible and sometimes impossible to survive, it's a universal truth that destruction breeds creation. Adversely, a sky with no clouds is not worth much more than its weight in small talk. You certainly don't see many plain blue canvases hanging in museums. The most beautiful, breathtaking skies are the views of the sun penetrating the clouds after a storm, or during a sunset or sunrise.

Analogies have helped me understand so many things over the years, and they continue to. This power of added perspective, the eye-opening "aha!" moments that close the gap between hindsight and foresight - I live for these. I can only hope that I can help other people use them the same way.

#personal #life #inspiration #quotes #rise #above #the #bullshit

Window

This is not the end

It feels like, over time, my sharp edge is dulling. My keen sense of every grain of sand that falls through the hourglass is fading. However, it doesn’t feel as though this sense of acuity is lost despite my best effort; I find that as I become a more balanced individual and as my anxiety fades, so too do the nuances of myself that were a byproduct of those things.

These aspects that I once believed defined me (they did) now are obvious limitations to my current self (a much more complete self). I used to worry that, if I lost the 20/20 on every minute detail of my life, if I missed any tiny part of any given moment, I’d be doing myself a disservice--I’d be losing what makes me special.

I have always known that the mind changes over time, and as we mature we find our latent thoughts different than we are used to. I saw this coming, and I used to fear it. I don’t feel that I’ve lost much. In reality I’ve gained balance... and that’s okay.

#personal #personal thoughts #life