Rose Colored Glasses and Other Such Nonsense

I often live as though life is just one big sinkhole. You know, one day you can be hanging out with the 2.5 kids and the family dog in your picket fence encased front yard, marveling at the beautiful weather and maybe even enjoying a cocktail or two on your front porch. You're probably inhaling the smell of sweet jasmine, thinking, "Self, I've sure made it. This is the American dream. Nothin' can bring me down!" The next day, boom! You walk out your front door onto your wrap around porch meticulously decorated with Adirondack chairs and maybe even a porch swing, then promptly fall right into a giant sinkhole that manifested itself overnight. You didn't even have time to drink your morning coffee and read the paper before you're neck deep in a sticky situation.

I treat life as though the glass is perpetually half empty. If there is a silver lining, all I see is the storm cloud. If there is a rainbow, I focus on the rain that preceded it. And if the Dodgers are winning a game, I sit back, cross my arms, and wait for them to give the game away.

So of course, given my depths of despair attitude and penchant for all things negative, I tend to ignore the signs that life is giving me lemonade rather than lemons. I am Chicken Little, running around screaming that the sky is falling. I'm the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe - a story that, incidentally, has made me terrified of little children. I am the Boy Who Cried Wolf. You get the picture. Everything is over exaggerated, hyperbolized until I have become convinced that I am going to fall headfirst into the rabbit hole and spend the rest of my life trying to figure out why, exactly, a raven is like a writing desk.

Because I was obviously not issued my rose colored glasses, I ignore all large, hand painted arrow signs that I am in fact heading in the right direction. I married a country boy raised by Giants fans, who willingly decided to forsake the pride of San Francisco and fully commit himself to the boys in blue just to have a harmonious marriage - because, you know, marriages break up over baseball disagreements all the time. And when he agreed to move to Southern California to follow my dreams, did I thank my lucky stars and think about what a fortunate gal I am? Why no! I instead grumbled to myself that it would never work out, we would never hop on the 5 and head south in a uHaul without looking back.

When we opened our first joint savings account, the online banking system randomly gave us an icon so that we would know it was our account. Can you believe it was a picture of seagulls? But did I think, hey, what a lucky sign! Nope. Instead I thought man, seagulls sure are ugly birds. And when we opened our joint checking account and were given a picture of San Diego as the icon, I figured we would never live there in a million years.

One day, my job miraculously asked me to move to San Diego permanently. Not too long after, my husband got a fantastic job in San Diego as well. Instead of marveling at this serendipitous situation, I focused on how much I hated that he would be traveling a lot and never home. And when our landlord decided to sell the house we were living in right out from under us, I definitely did not view it as a fantastic opportunity to find our dream home.

But find our dream home we did, complete with a fancy below ground pool, honey! We were handed the keys to a home of our very own just this afternoon. Not without signing our souls away to the bank, of course, and over extending ourselves to the point where we might become the weird recluses on the block who never leave their front yard...

But never mind that. Today I am going to revel in the positive because come on, we all know that there is no way a raven is like a writing desk. The sky never fell on Chicken Little, and I can only trust that the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe pulled herself up by her worn out boot strap, told those little whipper snappers to stop whining, and went on to move into a beautiful Louboutin and live happily ever after.