somebody, please, buy me a globe and throw in some crayons for good measure…

so i’m having a major case of insomnia, but i thought i’d “out” myself first, since my darling friend kris has already threatened to do so…

it seems, when it comes to geography, i know NOTHING.

i actually made the mistake of asking a friend if new zealand was “north of here”… his response to me, and i quote was, “are you shitting me?”, and sadly enough, at the time, i wasn’t.

now, outside of giving everyone a good laugh, i think my point is this…how in the hell did i graduate highschool or college for that matter without retaining that knowledge? i always knew algebra was never going to be missed in my lifetime for any reason, but making yourself sound like a totally brainless twit who knows nothing outside of my own borders was NOT on my to-do list for the day…

which got me thinking about borders in general… i jump from subject to subject like a gymnast as i’m sure you all know by now, so just play along…

what are my borders? how do i define them? should i define them? when i was a child i liked to think of myself as a creative little genius, but i distinctly remember getting quite unnerved if i colored outside the lines….it wasn’t perfect. it didn’t look “pretty”. it broke the “rules”. i wanted to not only fit in, i wanted to be the BEST. so doesn’t being the best mean you follow the rules, and do it better than anybody else??? i lived my entire life, for the most part, with this thought in the back of my head….

and then, somewhere along the way, the lines started blurring. i had let it build up for too long, all this rule following and attempting perfection that could never be reached, and even if i had, would it have ever been enough? no, i don’t think it would have.

because no amount of staying inside the box will ever undo the mistakes you’ve already made, and those were almost always caused by this endless quest to please people and be a good girl and do the right thing, the socially acceptable thing, the thank you notes and the crossing your ankles instead of your legs, no elbows on the table, no foul language, new dresses every sunday for easter, don’t air the dirty laundry… the list goes on and on….

and we’re just children when we learn this… please don’t misunderstand, i do not mean to undermine the importance of good manners….but why don’t we let children paint on their walls?? the walls are already there, they’re not going anywhere, we might as well let them have some say in how they look if they’re going to be confined there. and obviously, i’m speaking metaphorically much more than literally, i just wish… i don’t know… that maybe i’d been okay as a child with the idea of coloring outside the lines??? because now i’m an adult, and i pay for the walls, i’ll color them however i damn well please, thank you very much, but it just seems like it would have been a lot more fun at the age of six.

but whatever. age is a number and i intend to buy a box of crayons, tear the label off every one of them, break them all into pieces, and just start scribbling willy nilly all over the walls in my life and see what happens next…

it might just look like crap. or it could be the beginning of my greatest masterpiece….and i’m not six anymore, but now that i really think about it, it sure does sound like fun. =)