Yellow Mustard Blog

Monday mornings are generally depressing and melancholy and that usually leads to a lot of critical introspection. Introspection which inevitably produces a short list of your personal faults, defects and weird odors. At least, that's how I spend my Mondays. This particular Monday, I came up with a few things that I wish I was able to do. Because it's the first day of the week, I chose to focus on things that I will never possibly be able to achieve due to my shortcomings. As each weekday passes I get progressively more optimistic until by Friday afternoon I am convinced I can fly and cure diseases simply by sneezing on the afflicted. Don't even ask me about my weekends. So without further ado ...

Thing #1 I wish I could do:
Wear my hair really short. Like Natalie Portman growing out her hair after V for Vendetta short. I attempted something approaching short waaay back in my sophmore year of high school. This was when Ellen (the sitcom) was very popular. So I had the hair butcher give me "the Ellen" but it came out more like "the mini-shemullet" that no amount of mousse could tame. (On a humorous side note, I attended Lilith Fair around the same time I got the short haircut. On the first day of band camp I wore my Lilith Fair tank top and my Ellen hair and was given several nicknames not appropriate for blog-reading children. You know what is the most shameful part of this story? The fact that I was in band camp.)

Anyway, I have a mishapen head (which houses my mishapen brain) and roughly 14 cowlicks in various places on my skull, so short hair would probably make me look like this. Not even someone in the marching band would find that attractive.

Exhibit 2:
Play the drums. If you know me slightly well, you probably know of my burning desire to play the drums. You also probably know that my drum-playing is roughly equivalent to taking a man with no arms, putting a drumstick in his mouth and lobbing him at a drum kit. Actually, I sound worse. It is kind of embarrassing that after playing an instrument for 10 years, I still don't have rhythm. Then again, the instrument I played was the dreaded French horn and I just faked it for the last five years. Honestly, by the end I was lucky if I blew air in the general direction of my horn. So to sum up my digressive tangent, I hate the French Horn.
And really, I have rhythm. I can identify beats and times and what not. It's more the hand-eye coordination or even just basic human motor skills that I lack. Forget getting my right hand to do something simultaneous yet different than my left hand. It takes all my concentration just to get a single hand to move on my command. Lifting a pencil can take every last ounce of my brainpower. So for now, I'll have to stick to playing the spoons. (and by "playing spoons" I mean bashing a spoon against a shoebox repeatedly)

Thing # C:
Quit work, give up school and open my own cupcake bakery. Honestly, I would love to do this. I don't know WHY but I am really enamored of the idea of putting every last cent I own into a business that will require me to wake up at 3AM to bake cupcakes for 12 straight hours and most likely fail in a year. I have been the recipient of several nasty concussions though, so perhaps that explains my weird affection towards cupcakes and inevitable financial ruin.
I guess what I want even more than a bakery is the ability to just go off the conventional path, risk everything and follow my craziest ambitions no matter what the naysayers nay say. But I can't. Dear reader, I have been fooling you. I am not the free spirit I appear to be. I don't skip through flowered fields spreading happiness and yellow mustard to all I meet. I am a neurotic goody-two shoes with an obsessive-compulsive habit of making lists for EVERYTHING. I make lists of what I need to make a list for. I don't have the cajones to deviate from my "plan". It's hard to believe now, but just a few months ago, the idea of quitting my job (the job that was slowly eroding my faith in human spirit one agonizing teleconference at a time) and pursuing a career I -gasp- would enjoy seemed blasphemous. Good heavens, not that! Go back to school? But I have my degree already and it's in computers. I have sealed my fate. There is nothing I can do! The italics represent my internal thought process. Duh.
The sad thing is it was HUGE for me to do this. To a seasoned rebel, quitting my job and pursuing a graduate degree in pediatric physical therapy is like taking your geeky half-cousin to the senior prom. It's lame, and it isn't the real thing. It's not like I dyed my hair orange and started my own avant-garde interprative dance/vegan crusader group.
So perhaps what I truly, truly wish I could do is be cool enough to have legitimately bad-ass rebellions. I think the best way to achieve this is to make a list....