5x5 Challenge : Day 3 BIRTHDAY PARTY

The light outside right now is peach colored. It's a peachy sunset. Oh dear.

Since I started this project I hear myself pre-writing these posts in my head all day long. I tell myself to remember this moment or that thought or the other witty remark with the wholehearted intention of making these entries a little more interesting. But when I sit here with my computer on my lap, with the goodnights of my kids to their grandparents singing through the monitor, it's all gone. I have absolutely no idea what I was going to write about. 

The birthday party happened, and by all accounts (including my own) it was a success. I woke up this morning and made a conscious decision not to give a fuck. It worked like a charm. I knew that I'd done the prep work and just enough planning so that it wouldn't suck for anyone, and after feeling a little stressed about the whole thing last night I made a concerted mental shift upon waking this morning. 

When I worked at The Week there was this incredible muscle-y, tattooed and scarred man who worked in the mail room. His name was Bill. (Not to be confused with the weasel-y sexual-harrassing pig of an Editor in Chief, also named Bill.) The good Bill had been shot and stabbed and spent more than one night locked up on Riker's Island. He was as hard as they come on the outside. But man-oh-man was he the most caring, thoughtful dude on the inside. We talked often and neither of us had time for superficial shit. He knew I struggled with panic and fear and anxiety. Though he claimed to lack the psycho-babble vocab to talk about these things on an intellectual level, he gave me one my most favorite mantras for fearful times : it's not that serious. 

I wish I could say it out loud the way I hear him saying it in my mind. His deep voice would resonate through his chest cavity before making it to my ears so the words were always laced with extra gravitas and wisdom. It's not that serious.