This post will not be concise, it may not even make any sense because I’m tired but I said I would start writing again…and today there are alot of things on my mind.  This post is a combo of thoughts on my mind, and maybe sometimes yours too. this is a dear diary, without the dear diary part. Observations and thoughts of the day.

I get busy with life.  In my brain there are lists of things I need to do.  The million things I need to get done and in what time frame. I get twisted in my little web of things I need to do for work, in my personal life and relationships, my health just to name a few of the priorities I try to juggle on a daily basis.

Sometimes I get days that reset everything. Days that are so busy that everything is a blur that I barely have think let alone time to eat or pee because I run from meeting to meeting. Days like that wipe the slate clean that make you forget everything you were focusing on with a macro lens before. Today was one of those days. Sometimes I’m thankful for days like this.

Sometimes I get mad. Sometimes it’s relevant and sometimes it’s not. But every now and then I get my ass handed to me by life. I get untangled from my web of priorities and and drop kicked to wake the F up and stop fussing about things that don’t really matter and stop being stupid and allowing the non-important stuff to bother me. I really need to sleep more so I’m less cranky.

And then, There’s nothing like Death, to make you examine your life.

I spent the evening at a viewing for R6 Alex’s mom. I’ve known Alex since 2004 through bikes. Alex is loud but truthful in hilarious way; saying all the things you’re thinking but won’t admit and sometimes he pisses people off. Alex is a plumber and helped me out a few weeks ago when I had a leak with my water tank which resulted my water being turned off because water was leaking into the condos below me. First world problems, y’all. Alex wouldn’t allow me to buy him dinner as a thanks for coming over at 9:30pm to run around and MacGyver things to give me running water again so I could wash my hands, shower and drink. He says, you do what you can, if you can help. Prior to the water emergency, I haven’t seen Alex since 2012, we just play phone tag, and tag in real life missing each other whenever he’s in the neighbourhood after visiting his mom in the hospital since she had cancer.

I got a text his mom passed away monday night on Wednesday morning. I don’t appreciate or look forward to this phase of life, going to funerals for friends’ parents.  It sucks.  So I went to the viewing to pay my respects. Alex is an only child and he has his moments today. He says “I’m all cried out. I was a hot mess around 5pm.” I always appreciate how honest and genuine he is especially about his emotions. I wonder how some men barely know what they feel enough to identify what it is they feel let alone talk about it, and then the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves like I do. I feel like comfort and familiarity in that. Like long lost members of my tribe in a world that dictates we act like robots and micromanage our feelings in order to not make others uncomfortable for making us feel uncomfortable and not allowing us to be ourselves or give us the right to react.

I get to the Funeral home, I see Alex smoking outside talking to a bunch of people. I say hello. I don’t know anyone else there. I don’t know if there’s anyone I know. There isn’t. I stand around as he talks to people I don’t know. I get lost in my thoughts, thinking about life and the last few days in this week. Some people say goodbye to Alex, he starts to cry, then pieces himself together again with a cigarette, laughs and chain smokes another.

Eventually a bunch of us go inside. A girl named Kim who was sitting and crying by herself comes and sits next to me after half an hour of being there. We ask each other how we know Alex. She says she met him in college. I say bikes. She asks me if my parents are both still alive. I say Yes, she says she lost her father a while ago, I know this is why she’s been bawling her eyes out. Every viewing or funeral of someone else we go to always reopens the wounds of loss we feel for our own loved ones. I say I’m sorry as I start to get vaclempt and tear up. I make a mental note to go see my parents this weekend and hug them long and hard. After an hour or so we leave. The funeral home is closing.

I brought my gym clothes with me; my gym bag sitting in the passenger seat of my car. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m soo going to the gym. I just renewed my gym membership today, for a year. I am determined to actually use it this year rather than NOT like the embarassing amount of times I went in the past 6 months. I’m not allowed to go riding in evening in the summer unless I’ve dragged my lazy ass to the gym, I’m making this covenant with myself today for the year because my corporate gym plan requires me to pay upfront for the year whether i go or not.

We walk out of the funeral home, I see Pizza Nova in the next plaza over. I’m going to get pizza. I can’t remember the last time I had pizza, but I LOVE PIZZA. It’s my friend. it makes everything better. I’m going to go home and cuddle with my dog (the only person/thing I want to be around at the moment) and seek comfort in carbs and be a little happy because I just spent my evening at a Funeral home crying here and there.

I pull into Pizza Nova with a vengeance for all the Pizzas I haven’t been eating. I get inside, look down at my phone to see Ahmed text me and shame me about the gym because I said I’d go every day this week. This exchange occurs.

I sigh and drag my sorry ass to the gym. I have a 75% decent work out. Ok, maybe 60, it was halfhearted because of sadness, tiredness and my re-injured knee as of last week. But I still went, so I guess I have that going for me.

While I’m there I think about how fitness causes eating disorders or unhealthy relationships with food. I mean myself personally, I feel so guilty for eating things when I’m putting in more time at the gym then when I’m not-which should allow me to cheat on my diet more in reality.  The guilt I feel when I cheat on my diet or don’t eat something clean is like Catholic guilt x 10,000.  Oh lawd, the conversations that go on in my head when there’s cake in the office or someone has some carbulous wonder for lunch at work.  I remember talking to this pro MMA fighter about diet and how he binged occasionally and how he berated himself. I guess it’s good to know we all kind of do it, even pro athletes.

I think about being on Coronado Beach in San Diego and watching a cornucopia of hotness made up of Navy SEALS running shirtless with their muscles twitching on the beach with their golden sun-kissed skin because they do THAT on a regular basis and trying not to get pregnant from staring at their beautiful bodies.

Eric, years ago once said there’s this military culture that everyone gets called fat or thinks they are fat and working out becomes an obsession and a weird form of body dysmorphia. I wonder if this is an onset from lower percentages of body fat and if there’s a correlation and something is triggered in the brain to cause this mental affliction.

I think about my sister in law and how i have a new found respect for her because of a new perspective. Our relationship has always been interesting if you know the history. When I was 20, my brother called to be picked up from some party during march break. I picked him up, and thought he was drinking and he kept babbling about some girl he met and how he really liked her. I just assumed it was some new flavour of the week he was in love with, how wrong I was. A short while later he lamented how she wouldn’t date him because she had to get a job and maybe drop out of school at 16 because her mom was dying of cancer. I just assumed my brother was being melodramatic like usual when it came to his love life. A week later, her mom did die and it was so sad. I remember her and her little sister were over hanging out in my brother’s room. I remember giving them a gift basket with bubble bath products (as if that would make everything better) and saying this no way makes up for what you are going through but I just wanted them to know that someone cared, then I ran back to my room. I never realized until today how brave she was bearing the weight of all of that at 16, because in my 30’s I don’t quite know how to deal with it by just being an observer to someone else’s loss of a loved one as I watch Alex in his 30’s and an only child flit around talking to people there to pay their respects.

I go home, I shower, I wait for my call from Chels, and think about stuff. I don’t want to be mad about the stuff I was fustrated about the past two days. I’m to emotionally exhausted to care after going to the funeral home. I’m taxed out and have tapped out. I remember my friend from highschool Alicia’s funeral and how they said every night before going to bed, she would name 3 things she was grateful for. I remember that that was my New Year’s resolution, to practice gratitude.

So I realize I am grateful for having a reset day to be reminded of what IS important in life and to let go of the stuff that doesn’t matter.

this entire post was brought to you by something that will forever be engrained in my heart and mind. So haunting.

This evening when there was only 4 of us left as we walked out,  I watched a man, Alex’s father, bend down and kiss his wife who lay in a casket on the forehead and not want to leave her even though it was time to go home and was beautiful as it heartbreaking.

Life is________(you fill in the blank)____.