This is 29.

I watched This is 40 tonight. I cried, cringed, laughed and wanted to slam my laptop shut throughout the entire movie. These emotions and reactions came from a lot of back story…

So last time I blogged I was trying to decide whether to stay or go at present hostel. I stayed. I spent more money at the hostel, but am surrounded by a group of people I have come to love more and more every day. I don’t love them, the way one loves their best friends, but the way one loves a family, where you understand they’re yours – unconditionally.

My job – the restaurant opened and for the past 2 weeks I have been working what feels like non stop. I spend the majority of my time in the restaurant having two days off last week and tonight ending my only day off in an 11 day stretch where the next 5 work days consist of 3 doubles and 2 dinner shifts.

Today was payday, and somehow I was able to scrape through with $13 in my pocket for the past week. Thanks to help from people looking out for me and making sure I always had something to eat. I’ve been salivating over today and the idea of a big fat paycheck and what I would luxuriously spend my money on. The latest day dream was to day drink my loneliness away at a lovely bar on the River Yarra.

As luck would have it, I woke up to pouring rain. I didn’t want to day drink in grey, let alone leave the house in the rain. I spent the first few hours of my day concerned as to what I would do with the following hours. Dedicated to getting drunk and finding some sort of trouble to get into to just completely relinquish all sense of personal responsibility. Then, the funniest thing happened – I was lying on the couch moping and a hostel mate said he was going to the gym, so without much hesitation I was up and changing into gym appropriate attire and went with.

I spent 30 minutes on the machines and swam in a 50m pool, until I could literally no longer breathe. I thought my chest was going to collapse. When we left the gym I told him I still was in a shit mood and didn’t work out much of my aggression and frustration. The plan was to go to the cinema after but first, we had to eat. Stopping by the grocery store en route home, I opted for chicken, spinach, broccoli and health food. (don’t worry I ate a lot of chocolate later too) However, the point is that I did a complete 180 from when I woke up and wanted to not care of myself to making some pretty good decisions.

The night ended with me retiring to my dorm room (which I have to myself) and watching This is 40 on my laptop. The movie is basically about two 40 year olds realizing they haven’t got everything together as neatly as they’d like to believe they have. There’s a lot in the movie to identify with, and for me a big part was sensing that I actually do want to have a family at one point, one day.

I still struggle with having left the boy in Chicago. Knowing that I love him after everything we went through I know that he was not the one I wanted to end up with. It’s hard to face that because in the mean time I feel lonely and miss having someone who cares about all my useless stories, someone who’ll cuddle with me when I have a bad day and will challenge my passionate outbursts to make sure that’s really what I mean and not just something I mean in the heat of the moment.

Today was hard because I couldn’t call up a friend and say “hey let’s do something…” I felt stuck and trapped and then realized I was fine. I’m all the way in Australia not having the late night, early mornings that one has in their early 20s or when on a holiday. I’m mimicking the life I just left to help transition deeper into the unknown. My time will come when I can stay out late, with plenty of money in my pocket and not worry about being to work on time and what I have to do. This is why I chose the year visa – to have the full experience.

My hostel mates are mostly moving on. In the past few weeks I’ve seen a few long term-ers go. Now that I’ve been here for almost 5 weeks and a couple are taking off in the next coming weeks I am sad. The changes that keep happening and how we are all at different phases of our journeys. And we are – as people and as travelers.

I don’t feel happy the way I have been happy in the past. I am a different kind of happy, and lately a lot of times frustrated. I need a release, like the kind you see in motivational posters. Where the person gets to the top of the cliff and screams and lets it all go. I need to let it all go. It is seriously all gone. I have nothing. Everything I have is sprawled on the bunk bed above me and layered deep within me. That’s it and this is it.

This is life. The one shot we get as the people we are to do what we want. We worry and we bitch, we hope and we pray that things will work out and change for the better. We spend so much time trying to build our houses out of cards when any gust of wind can knock it down completely. The wind is not here to blow houses down, that’s not its assignment. It’s a byproduct, a part of the bigger picture, a part of a whole which we do not see.

I’m stuck in the small, personal picture of things I know and things I can fathom. The way a person is against gay marriage because it threatens their beliefs and their upbringing. It doesn’t necessarily threaten them, but it feels like it does. People start wars and fight for ideas of things that aren’t tangible or owed to a human.

Sometimes it feels like a big game that nobody bothered to read the rules to, so we just made up our own and now the box is lost and the rules will never be found so we have to agree on our own rules. Problem with that is everyone wants to win, so everyone needs an advantage. We’re fighting for the advantage to roll first when really it’s the dice that decides where we go…