What is "not a race"?

Since it seems like I'm making an effort to make this blog a regularly-updated thing, how about we try for a little introduction?
"Not A Race" - this title - comes from a tale of my childhood. Apparently, when we (myself and my sister, or my dad and I, or something) would be running about from one place to another, and I would begin to fall behind, I would yell "it's not a wace!" in my adorable southern lisp. This is a thing that my family still does. Adorable.
But, like many good book introductions have taught us, this seemingly both simple and uninteresting anecdote has a more complicated and even less interesting translation into the rest of my life.
"Not A Race."
I'm a very competitive person: not in the way where I will try super hard to beat someone else out, but more in the way where I am constantly comparing myself to others (usually women around my age, but also everyone else) to measure my success. When I find myself lacking, I get sad.
This has led me to split myself in a lot of different directions: some people are good at music - I should try music - but then I'm not very good at that, so I should make sure I'm still good at math or something - but I'm not very good at that - so I'll be mediocre at languages as well... and so on.
Not a race.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that I'm happy and satisfied and doing things that make me happy - but what is an easier thing to do is to try to find people of my age or my alma mater and try to figure out how I'm more successful than they are. I think this comparison, or "competitiveness," as I generously like to call it, is probably the thing that makes me the least happy.
This post has taken a somewhat negative turn.

I promise this is a good thing, though. The more I learn about myself, my default ways of examining things and what makes me happy and sad, the better I get.
This "competitiveness" idea was a pretty big breakthrough when it happened. Similar to when I discovered that my parents were fallible, when I figured out my least moral peers were the ones in my sunday school class, and when I learned that the more someone tries to convince you to make the decision they made, the more they're really trying to convince themselves they've made the right choice.

So yes, this blog. Maybe if I slow down and think and track my own life and progress I can be happier in myself, instead of poking around looking at other people's blogs and Facebooks to see how I track. Because it's not a race, you see.

*thunderous applause*

2012: The move

HELLO AGAIN, INTERNET
I just finished leafing through my old Prague blog and in it found a few posts that reminded me how glad I am that I kept a journal during that time. I had forgotten, for instance, how supportive my friends were through comments on that site - some of these people are friends I rarely talk to anymore. I had also forgotten some of the specific stories - especially the terrifying day I had to travel from Germany to Prague, my myself, on a train - with no currency or sure way to get from the train station to my hostel. What a crazy day.
So I thought I might ought to come back to the world of personal blogging. It's a world I left when I thought no one wants to read about the mundane details of my everyday life, and people will judge you for sharing so much online. But I didn't care about that when I was in Prague, or when I was on LiveJournal as a high schooler, or when I was (ugh) sharing my poetry online for anyone to see. And when I didn't care, and I didn't think to care, I was writing. I was analyzing my thoughts and putting them into words, and I was sharing those words. And it didn't matter if anyone read them - but sometimes people did. And those people were good friends.
And thus I have returned. And I'm returning right back to the last place I had a personal blog, because it's here, so I'm not creating a new thing just to abandon it - also because this blog's older posts have a nice combination of "my creative writing" - which I don't do anymore, and "my trying to learn how to be an interesting blogger" - which was cute.

BLATHER TIME: MOVING
Right now I'm sitting in my "office," which is actually a bedroom I've stolen from my roommate who doesn't live here anymore. It's going to be my "office" only for a few more weeks - my housemates and I are planning a move across the river to the East side of Portland. It's going to be a great location and a wonderful house. Our current house is HUGE - but most of that is wasted space - extra bedrooms, a big finished basement that we haven't really furnished, etc. The new house is smaller, but has a bigger kitchen, a bigger bedroom for me (yay) and a bigger living/common area. About this we are very excited.
Before we can move, we need to pack. Before we can pack, I need to get rid of like... all of my stuff. I have a lot of stuff. I have everything I brought to college, and everything I've acquired since then. Because this house has so much darn storage space, I haven't gotten rid of anything since I moved out of the dorms two years ago. I've barely even thrown anything away, really. So this should be fun.
I'm in a good place for throwing things away, because I just watched this video. In that video, Alex Day, who you don't need to know who he is, whatever, explains that he owns fewer than 100 things. Of course, that's extreme. Plus he's a boy, and he's British, so he's weird. But the message that I got out of it was that you really don't need to own things, because things take up space, and you don't really use them. I was particularly struck by one moment where he showed off all of the clothes he owns - about 5 t-shirts and two pairs of pants. Because, you know you have only a few articles of clothing that you really like wearing, he explains -  "I thought, I'll just always wear my favorite [clothes] and not own any of the others."
Not a new sentiment necessarily, but when it's said in such a nice british accent it's hard to not hear it in a new way.

This post doesn't have much of a dramatic arc or anything - but I'm going to stop writing now and go sort my clothes. Bye!