2nd Chances..and crazy people

Greetings to all. Most of you are family. Sometimes when you are a lowly political figure you are asked to attend functions. Most of the people there were family, and the person who invited me was my mother.... ABATE's Palmetto Chapter, of which I am a member, held a "Fall Ball" rally to celebrate brotherhood. ABATE is the American Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Endeavors, a Motorcycle Rights Wright's Organization. At any rate. There was a band at this fete and they were playing a slow song and I couldn't help but notice all the couples dancing. Many of them their 2nd or 3rd marriage it made me think about 2nd chances and marriage. As an unmarried woman of 28 who has no intention of getting married (that's the crazy people part) anytime soon, I sometimes wonder about people who do, and what happens when it's over. I know many of my divorced girlfriends and even single friends who have gone through breakups. They are horrible and personal, and sometimes can take away your ability to love and trust another human being? As a student of new wave psychoselfish thinking, people can only do to you what you let them do to you? If someone hurts you it's your own fault for letting them in? Now that I don't believe, if you love someone then you love them. But when is enough enough? And when it's over how do you know when to pick up and start over again? Makes me think of couples I know who have been married for 40+ years most only knew each other for a few months before getting married. Now we have 5 million couples living together unwed, and most couples POSSLQ don't even get married after living together? Interested in divorce facts I looked some up.

Percentage of population that is married:
59% (down from 62% in 1990, 72% in 1970)
Percentage of population that has never married:
24%
Percentage of population that is divorced:
10% (up from 8% in 1990, 6% in 1980)
Percentage of population that is widowed:
7%
Median age at first marriage:
Males: 26.9Females: 25.3
Median age at first divorce:
Males: 30.5Females: 29
Median age at second marriage:
Males: 34Females: 32
Median age at second divorce:
Males: 39.3Females: 37
Median duration of first marriages that end in divorce:
Males: 7.8 yearsFemales: 7.9 years
Median duration of second marriages that end in divorce:
Males: 7.3 yearsFemales: 6.8 years
Median number of years people wait to remarry after their first divorce:
Males: 3.3 yearsFemales: 3.1 years
Percentage of married people who reach their 5th, 10th, and 15th anniversaries:
5th: 82%10th: 65%15th: 52%
Percentage of married people who reach their 25th, 35th, and 50th anniversaries:
25th: 33%35th: 20%50th: 5%
Percentage of people who have ever been married by the age of 25:
Males: 32%Females: 50%
Percentage of people who have ever been married by the age of 35:
Males: 77%Females: 84%
Percentage of people who have ever been married by the age of 45:
Males: 87%Females: 90%
Percentage of people who have ever been married by the age of 55:
Both males and females: 95%
Number of unmarried couples living together:
5.5 million
Percentage of unmarried couples living together that are male-female unions:
89%

50% of females have been married by the age of 25, well I missed that mark but the age of 45 is 90%, whew.. Looks like I will get there, unless I am part of that 10%. The remarriage divorce rate seems to be more, but at least they took the leap, and it seems that men wait longer to get married and remarried. Enough stats lets look at the emotional side of things. I watched these couples dance, I knew everyone of them and their stories. Some of them absolutely touching, others stories of convenience. Is convenience companionship? In first marriages I often wonder how much of it is actual love, or is it, "hey we've been together for a year, it's time? My friends are looking?" My brother and his wife were together for 3 years before they got engaged, I remember Elizabeth being restless, but not because of societal expectations, because she loved him and was getting nervous. As anyone would. These couples were holding each other, looking into the eyes of their partner, I could not help feel lucky to witness so much love and feeling in a small room, it made me blush. They twirled about the room, cheek to cheek, swaying, turning and enjoying the music. I wasn't envious of what they had though, I preferred to watch it. To watch peoples wishes coming true. People who wished for a 2nd chance, to end a first marriage, have children, but most importantly for a second dance.

Suprises.. Circe's?

Well everyday brings something new as my mother always tells me. Yet everyday I am surprised by the events of my day. Take Wednesday for example. Usually I am at the ABATE safety meeting greeting my friends and supporters, but last night I decided to take a little me time and read some of the twilight series. OK. I know that it may sound bad to have get your reading selection from the "teen age" section of Books-a-Million, but I have really grown to enjoy the series. I love it actually. Mostly because it is a very good love story. Complete fiction of course. Love is many things and I think the author tries to cover those facets, but at the end of the day I still had to walk to the "teen" section to purchase it. I suppose I am too bitter or cynical to believe in real love stories these days. Ah but that's another blog. This particular blog is about surprises.

Last semester my infinitely wise professor (who changed my life whether she knows it or not) had us write journal assignments to help expand our own feelings on topics. Thank goodness it wasn't a paper, the journals had no wrong answers. I have always been told that papers are supposed to help you think and go beyond the topic. Never in my life have I benefited more than from those journal assignments. At any rate, we talked about developing and in one such entry about what people would say about me when I passed, it got my attention. There are tons of people that I have become estranged with. People that 2 years ago I would have bet the farm that we would still be friends here and now. I began to examine those lost relationships for an answer, and it seemed in almost everyone that I felt responsible for the break. Immediately I started trying to bridge the gap. Calling people who I knew were going to be mad at me, because I had been mad at them. In the 3 months since my experiment, very few have called back, but yesterday 2 in one day. I was very pleased to be speaking with both of them. Very pleased indeed and I made it a point to apologize for whatever childish thing that I did. Both acted unaware of any offense that I might have laid to them. Curious though, if there really wasn't anyone to blame, for a technical fouling in friendship what happened then? People either grow together or apart, sometimes they do both I suppose. Talking to them was like fresh air. I laughed til my face hurt yesterday. Made me want to do more to reach out to other friends. I am tyring. Sometimes people are just lousy and lazy when it comes to communicating. Neither of my friends were mad at the lack of communication. Me, I was just grateful to hear about things in their lives. Everybody is looking for a happy ending. Well I am off to play quizzo with some friends, and tomorrow call some more friends. Life is good. Cedar is well she is with my neighbor. Cedar is continuing to grow at an alarming rate. I love it. She is my big guard dog. As punishment for the teen stuff, I am forcing myself to read bronte. Ack. Hmm the saga continues will be here tomorrow.. I hope..

Summertime in the LBC...

I know that it has been since June I wrote a blog. I know this because there is a calendar on this pesky blog thing that tells me so. To defend myself I was busy with school, work, and campaigning. I enjoyed all three so much that I shall continue them into the fall. As if I had choice! LOL! To many peoples blogs have what we in the blogging "biz" call "points". A reason if you will (and you will) for writing a blog. Well I have two today and I am going to split the up into a series of blogs called "Hmmm". I haven't decided if there will be "Hmmm 2" or just "the Hmmm saga continues". Either way it will delight you with great insight into my mind. LOL! OR just make you stop reading this blog all together. I know that all four of you would be devastated. Guess I should skip off to the point of my blog now. Oh by the way I have completely given up on punctuation, I am taking another English this semester, hope it improves.

Hmmm the intro:
Let's start with insight. Before running for office I used to blog quite frequently on my Myspace page, I even had 12 registered readers, that's right. And yes most of them were family. When I threw my hat into the ring for office one of my campaign friends told me to destroy those blogs immediately, so I did. I started deleting them not thinking to save a few, and then I realized I could not throw them away. I had to keep them, these were my ideas, my thoughts, this was where my head was 3 years ago until 6 month ago. I saved them. Now to be honest I have been running a little ragged lately. Thank goodness for the break in school but I have been downtrodden lately by the campaign, almost to the point that I don't really know what day it is just the things I have to accomplish. Yesterday I was at home outlining a book that I am going to compose (Oh Mrs. Bowers I have been meaning to email you about this) about strong southern women. "Confessions of a Steel Magnolia, and all her friends", hope the title isn't already take. I just googled it, looks like it's still available, which is why I have to get on the ball. It will be mostly a compilation of essays from other southern women from ages 12-91, I have selected 26 authors including myself and my mother. I am digressing from the point as usual.. the point here is I was reading through some of the blogs I had saved for some ideas into the things that I wanted to address in my awesome book (on shelves 12-22). I was scanning and reading looking at the humor of the things I said, my randomness is astounding when I came across something I wrote and it made me cry just a little bit. There in the blue background and black font was this " Life is amazing and beautiful. Things will never be as great as they are right now. Whatever you are going through it will pass, I promise. Be strong." I teared up just now retyping it. A reminder to myself, even though I wrote that blog for a friend years ago, that life is beautiful and amazing. We will never be here again. The frailness of these moments is that they are fleeting. I know that I discuss a lot about time, but this was to be about healing. I know that when I am down I often seek sources outside myself, like books, magazines, knitting anything it seems to escape my own thoughts when dealing with a problem. Those words motivated me in a new way. Motivated me to trust myself, and to continue my belief that God is watching over us all. They may have been typed by me, but I know that God put them in my heart to prepare for down times. As I look around my life right now I know again that God has put all this before me, for me. Placed these wonderful people around me because he knew that I would need them and that they would help me. Faith and insight. Amazing terms when you think about it. To think that my eyes have seen things through my own words. Faith.

During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision. Then Daniel praised the God of heaven and said: "Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thank and praise you, O God of my fathers: You have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king."
Daniel 2:19-23

Everyone meet Madelyn my beautiful neice. What a happy baby! Wouldn't you be if you looked like me just a little bit?

Tidbits of the tidbit...

I was watching television the other night saw that in some poverty stricken countries they do not have access to fuel. In the absence of fuel they have started using cooking oil as gas. It works too. The local governments have caught wind of their "cheekiness" and have increased the cost of cooking oil to make profits. It got me thinking about the things that have been unavailable to Americans in the past. Booze? We just bootlegged it until they let us have it back? Then I began to imagine bootlegging gasoline? How awkward would that be? With the recent floods, the droughts and summer heat coming to early this year we will see an increase in everything. And I do mean everything. All of our products that we maintain and grow here are interconnected. The corn that was wiped out will increase the prices of: corn (obviously), gasoline, alcohol, pet foods, pretty much every kind of instant pasta in the world (that's a killer for me), etc... How do we stop this hemorrhaging of American Life? There is certainly no over night solution. There has to be a way to turn this around, or at least get some paddles in this boat.
I was speaking with a friend of mine, and she told me that it was all President Bush's fault. "Whew", I wiped my brow, now that I have someone to blame it on I don't have to work on the problem. She furrowed her brow and informed that she was very familiar to sarcasm Learning that sarcasm was a "oldie but a goodie" with her I tried the truthful approach. I said friend "President Bush doesn't write the laws, he upholds them, our democratic congress of the past two years writes the laws". I think that she thinks I made that up. She then shrugs the debate off with this jewel " oh well I don't care about politics anyways". It was at this point I began to understand just how our country has wedged itself into this corner. We have spent the last ten years avoiding the other big conversation with our kids - voting.
To be honest I took social studies and American government in high school but I still did not have a in depth understanding of how this works? The economy, the government, the two party system. Once I was paying attention to all these things, it was then I realized that I was outraged. Surely I was the only person who was behind on these issues, I started bringing it up to friends, they had even less clue or concern than I once had.
I submersed myself into politics, picking a side and sticking it to it. Jumping on board campaigns and meeting people like myself who wanted to make a difference legally. It was exciting, invigorating and highly rewarding. This is my challenge to convey this message not only to people my age but to all people. We are in this together and if we don't take a stance and demand that there is change we will never receive it.
OK off my soap box. I must study for an exam now. I was just thinking all that and had to get it off my brain.
In Cedar news, she is GREAT!! She is getting so big, I took some new pics to put here for all to see her!! She is awesome!!
I went to the Congaree River this past weekend and went "tubing", I had a great time. It was a nice reprieve.
I am off to study.. wish me luck!

Not so hot..

Today I am feeling a little under the weather. My best may be a 4. I have a headache, backache and am slightly nauseated. I did not attend class this morning because I felt to ill to leave bed. I did have to come into work though. Something about them not paying if I am not here. I hope my professors understand.
Cedar and I have a routine in the mornings. She wakes up at 6'ish, we get out of bed she goes out and comes right back inside. Once inside I prepare her breakfast, she eats, I am usually roaming around the house making sure my books are together. Then we lay back down for a little bit and play or sleep. Depends on the mood of one of us. If she feels playful, yeah I am not going back to sleep.
Today when she woke me up I knew that I needed to get up and get ready for school. I was walking towards the door and my head was banging. I felt dizzy and weak. I let her out and decided that I needed more rest. More rest meant I would not make it to class. I instantly felt horrible. I hate hate hate hate missing class. When you pay for something as expensive as school it is awful to miss it. I lay there in my bed, dog looking at me, thinking I should get up and take myself to class. I don't know what felt worse; missing class or me.
I am sitting at work now, feeling miserable. As soon as I get off I am going home to force myself to do homework and attend a meeting tonight. I am supposed to speak at this meeting. It is election year and these events are very important. I will just have to put on my big girl pants and deal with it. I may leave early though the meeting, not work. The point of this blog is that we have to make lots of decisions in every day life. And the factors in these decisions sometimes are outside influences. It may not be fair, but it is life. Life is what happens while you're busy making plans, or so I have heard. I think it's normal to expect to fall short of things that you want to accomplish. It is extraordinary though to forge past what you expect to accomplish and do more. Not only will I go home and do tons of homework, I will speak at the meeting, do my laundry, be productive at work and vomit. Yes because that's what I feel like doing right now. I will attempt to make up for lost lessons and time. Feeling bad is all in your head, or in my case stomach too.
Decisions. Now it makes the think about what were my big decisions this time last year, two years ago, what about 5 or 10 years ago. What was I doing this time last year, what will I be doing next year? Either way I am losing time on my 10 year plan! lol!

Life lessons, blogs, pups and primary action...

I am currently a student at Central Carolina Technical College. I am taking 3 classes that are all influential. My history class is teaching me things that I kind of already knew but didn't know as well as I thought. My Ethics class is teaching how to think Ethically, I know right from wrong, but it's like our book says. "Studying Ethics is like studying grammar. You knew how to use grammar before you, studying it only helps you use it better". I enjoy the debating in that class and it does make you ask yourself some terrible questions. My psych class is a human development class. My teacher is a lovely woman who is fascinating! She has great quotes and asks questions that are hard to answer as well. The most profound thing she has said to me so far is think in ten years you will be 10 years older. In ten years you will be Ten years older. It sounds so simple but let that marinate for just a moment. Good lord willing I will be 38 years old and who or where or what will I be? I will be 38 in just 10 short years!! It was like a wake up call for me! Cedar will be 70!! I have so much to do and obviously not enough time to accomplish all of these things!! I have to see Greece, become a Senator, finish College, get married (well that's optional), help raise my niece, take care of my mom, it was "BANG". And all I could think it I don't have a lot of time!! Today in class we were discussing how to change your thoughts about issues. I pondered over this the whole way home (all 17 miles) and decided that there ought to be an instruction guide for this. So I am going to write one. I just have to work out the kinks on that one.
She has a blog that is very interesting and her daughter has one too (it's on my blogroll). She told me that it was very neat, I viewed it and she was right. Her daughters blog is beautiful it's full of love and faith. I will continue to read her blog because it gave me hope.

My teacher, also told of us a book that had 4 promises you have to make to yourself. Well I can't remember if they were promises exactly but it was 4 things to hold yourself accountable for.
1: Make your word Impeccable. Not only to others but to yourself. If you say you are going to do something, do it! Follow through is everything, not only in sports! A famous basketball coach once said "you're not a loser until you start making excuses for yourself!"

2. Don't take it personally. If someone says they don't like your shoes, well hey that's their preference. Usually what someone says is more about themselves than you!!

3. Don't Assume! Someone doesn't call you back right away, don't (ladies) think that it's you, or something you did. People have lives and they tend to get in the way of phone calls! I am the worst at it! Speaking of which, must empty voice mail.

4. Do your best. Even if some days your best is a 3 or 5 still do the best for that day.

And now Primary time!! If you live in Horry, Anderson, Berkley or Dorchester Counties all I have to say is LUCKY!! Here in Clarendon County the only primary I get to vote on is US Senate! Voting is such an important part of our Government Process, but that is another Blog.

In Cedar news; our eldest Dog Dreyphus bit her in the face yesterday over a toy. I was very upset, but I am learning that it is part of growing up. Learning what toes you can and can't step on.

Our first Blogging.. aww..

Cedar is a 12 week old Mastador. She is black with a white spot on her chest and purple spots on her tongue. She is hyper and lazy. Currently she is house broken, can sit and lay down on command. I am working on commanding her attention around other dogs. It's difficult, she just gets so excited. I love her very very much. She does whine a lot. She whines to go out, she whines when she's hungry, when she wants to get on the bed. My friend says that I should ignore her whining but I see it as our form of communication. But I may have let her run the show for a little bit. She is so cute though, how could you not? I am new at this. I am running for public office, and have a job that I can bring her to daily. We are together pretty much at all times. I have started letting her outside with the other dogs unattended in a trial manner of trusting her. Yesterday she came back wet with mud caked on her face. I was laughing too hard to fuss about taking so long to return. She is very aggressive with dogs her size. At 12 weeks she weights 25lbs. Doesn't seem to care for the water so much, even though she too has webbed feet. I am going to post some pics of her tomorrow. She is so pretty!! Ok well That's all for now. I will keep this updated and hopefully more fun!!