2009 Was A Very Hard Year

    

I successfully dropped out of the blogging universe for 2009. I would love to say that I was so busy doing  incredibly constructive and world-bettering activities that I just didn't have the time to stop and blog. But that would be a big lie, and so would me telling you that I'm totally positive that "world-bettering" is proper English.

     If you haven't been living under a rock or been held captive by Somali pirates, you probably have a Facebook account. One of the things I'm fascinated by is the drama-soaked status updates that I see four or five times a day from a lot of my "friends" on there. Not just the generic "having a rough day" or "not feeling well" stuff either. Let me share several examples of the updates I've received in the last 24 hours:

(I've changed names to protect the integrity of my friend count)

Frannie is "wondering when her cheating boyfriend will decide to come home and what color lipstick will be on his collar tonight"

Adam is "hating the world. Women suck (you know who you are Jennifer)"

Shannon is "going to kill her ex"

.......and my most very favorite:

Terry is "FML"


     These come up day after day, usually peppered with song lyrics about setting people's pants on fire or walking blindly into traffic while holding a rose in your teeth (Hellooooo new name for an emo band! Yesss!). Whether it's cathartic for these people to blurt out to an entire social network that they're hurting or they are in desperate need for validation or just feel that it bears announcing that women......specifically you Jennifer.....suck, I don't know. And don't get me wrong, we're all guilty of these posts, there is just a really wide spectrum measuring the frequency of how often we do it. I just hope that when people notice I've updated my status people aren't instantly thinking "Awesome, how close is Ingrid to driving into a K-Mart store front today?". (For the record, I'm pretty close to doing that everyday since we have the most ghetto, miserable K-Mart on the planet right here in Bangor.)

     My point is, some people don't mind talking about bad things in their lives. Some people are actually rather enthusiastic about it. Some people simply shut down and don't want to talk about anything when things in life are hard. I am one of those people, and 2009 was really hard.

     The worst of 2009 centered around my break-up, separation, pseudo divorce....whatever you want to call it. When you share a house, family and help raise each others children, the term "breaking up" seems like something that should be reserved for middle schoolers and doesn't really do the situation justice. Anyway, I don't really have a lot to say about it other than it was hard, it was my choice, I wish we both could have handled things differently and minimized the negative impact on our children, I miss people in my life that I either pushed away or lost as a casualty of the "taking sides" phenomenon, it was the hardest decision I've ever made, it was the right decision, I miss a little girl more than I've ever missed anything in my life, I'm doing better, the boys are doing better too, I'm looking forward to seeing what life has in store for us.

     So that's that in a nutshell. I missed blogging and even though I rarely comment, I still check in with my Google Reader every day and have kept up with all the "regulars". All my old posts on this blog have been switched to drafts and are no longer visable to the public. I feel like so much has changed and I'm continuously moving forward. Having posts that illustrate a past that I'm so far removed from staring me in the face everyday just doesn't seem comfortable right now.

     It will keep getting better and it will be okay. "Every little thing is gonna be alright" in the words of Bob Marley. Or was that Garth Brooks.......or Lady GaGa?


I'm going with GaGa

Who wouldn't, really?