Running vs Running Away

You know that scene in Moulin Rouge where Satine is on top of the elephant?  The one where she’s singing “One day I’ll fly away, leave all this to yesterday.  Why live life from dream to dream and dread the day when dreaming ends…”?  Yeah, I get like that sometimes.  I got it real bad yesterday.

Now, I love my life.  I have a wonderful, fantastic Zliten, and a gal could not ask for a better partner in crime.  He supports me on my silly endeavours of half-marathoning, randomly picking numbers for shirts for me, and has even done a damn large share of the wedding planning when it got too much for me.   This one, he is a keeper, and he is coming with when I fly away anywhere, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I am thankful daily that I have a great group of friends, a big, comfortable house to play in, a nice new gas efficient car with all the bells and whistles, and I can still afford the payments on all this with my stable job in an industry I love.  Of course, I want it all and I want it now, but I’m feeling very good lately with what I have in comparison to what I don’t have.

However, sometimes I get the nomadic feeling and want to just get up and go.  Go somewhere, anywhere, anywhere but here.  I feel trapped in my life and want to run away.  The pressure of having to keep the job so I can afford the house and the car becomes stifling.  Having to deal with the day to day minutiae becomes tedious because I want to be off backpacking in Europe or roadtripping around the US.  I want to pack up a small amount of my shit and get in my car and go somewhere away.  I hate that I don’t have the possibility right now to just take off and go.

It’s not as if it would do me much good anyway.  Generally, I have about a 4-7 day span that I actually enjoy being away from home.  The last Vegas trip was about a day too short, but the last 8 day cruise was just a little too long.  By the time a week passes, I miss my bed, my couch, my patio, my life, and am ready to go home.  I am not a nomad at heart.  I like having a home base where all my crap is.  Sometimes I just forget that though and want to just do something… spontaneous.  Sometimes I forget that I like to micromanage everything in my life and have the urge to be the kind of person that could hop the first plane out of the airport, no matter where it was going.

I tend to psychoanalyze myself when I do or think something I don’t understand and realized that many factors weighed into this –

1.  I got some news at work that sort of shifted my job back from the cool, fun thing I was doing to more of a normal role.  I pouted for a while because I felt like my toys were getting taken away but I realized this is an opportunity.  I am being asked, for the first time in 4 years of holding the title of Associate Producer, to actually be an Associate Producer.  I’ve always lacked a little bit of confidence because I never felt I knew how to do a typical AP’s job.  Now, I get a chance to learn and conquer.

2.  My Zliten was really down yesterday, and the feeling kinda seeped over to me, instead of me being able to cheer him up.  It usually works the other way but not yesterday.

3.  It’s too hot to go outside, which is pissing me off royally.  Now that I’m not training/working/eating/sleeping/resting every moment of the weekdays, I have time to do fun stuff!  I think, “OMG after work let’s go ride our bikes downtown and hit the mini golf place and have dinner and…oh crap it’s 105 fucking degrees outside (literally), let’s not”.  We just couldn’t figure out an adventure to have in town that didn’t cost a lot of money, involve drinking, or involved being outside.  No disc golf, roller skating wasn’t open, ice skating wasn’t open, movie sounded meh, didn’t want to hit up a bar, and we just couldn’t think of anything else.  If it was just 10 degrees cooler we could have been out on a bike adventure and it would have been awesome, and I could have looked forward to it all day.

4.  The biggie – I had just taken a week off running.  I was so focused on the half training that I didn’t have the desire to run away.  Running just made me feel so free and so accomplished at the same time.  Nothing else fazed me because I was working on something huge.  I got to go out 4 times a week and get the wind in my hair and it was just me and my thoughts.  I guess it was also an awesome feeling knowing that I could pretty much by the end of my training run one way anywhere I wanted to go.  I mean, maybe not all the way to the suburbs or south Austin, but the radius of where my feet could carry me was huge.  Most importantly – the running was so tiring physically it shut my brain off too.

Instead of hitting the road or the airport, we made big huge gigantic salads which were so pretty they needed pictures (expect a recipe post soon) and declared night to be different night.  We banned internet dorking and TV watching, because that’s what we do every night at home.  Instead, we downloaded some game demos, and ended up purchasing Sam and Max on the Xbox360, which is hilarious and fun, and we played together until my eyes got heavy.  Mood was definitely improved by the end of the day, and since I got my run on this morning and got my attitude in check about work, I’ve been doing just fine.

I’m still trying to figure out at least a mini-vacay to take in between now and October, but I don’t think I’ll be hopping the first plane out.  Or if I do, I’ll packed for every occasion and I’ll have submitted my time off at least 2 weeks ahead of time, because that’s just how I roll.