It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like... New Year's

Is it just me or has almost everyone of the last 20 blogs I've read talked about how hard 2013 was? Whether it was difficult, unfortunate, dry, unhappy, uneventful, unfruitful, or just not one-for-the-books, it seems to me like many people share in my sentiment that 2013 was not the best year ever.

It's encouraging to hear everyone's goals and resolutions along with all of their positive thoughts and encouragements to others. I really do feel like 2014 has the potential to be a great year.  Currently, I am trying to stay optimistic, utilize the positive energy that a fresh start brings, and not lose momentum!

I tried to jump on the band wagon and think up one word for 2014, but I can't put my finger on one alone, so I made a small list.  I want to clean up my life, not just the space I live in but my thoughts and attitude and many relationships.  I want to mature, which means going through hard things and coming out better despite the pain.  I want to find peace in my relationship with God, and also with where my life is heading.  I want to simplify my desires.  I want to love those around me with a more selfless love.  I want to prioritize better than I have in the past and make sure my decisions benefit others, and my future self.  Assuming I can do these things, I hope the outcome would be happiness. :)

Here's to a great new year!

15 Before '15

15 things I'd like to do by the end of 2015:

1.      Find a career "big-girl" job that I enjoy

2.      Travel somewhere I’ve never been

3.      Cook a fancy meal for our parents

4.      Get a pet

5.      Have a best [girl] friend

6.      Have a real Christmas Tree

7.      Visit another country

8.      Get rid of all the clutter in our house/life

9.       Be healthy again: start eating clean[er] and also exercising on a regular basis

10.    Run a marathon

11.    Pursue my creative dreams

12.    Evangelize to someone I’ve never met

13.    Figure out how I take my coffee (“Miss, how do you take your coffee?”)

14.    Finally watch the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies

15.    Find peace.

Doppelgängers

(n.) Derived from the German language, literally meaning "Ghostly Double". 

One who nearly or completely resembles another- but with no biological relation. 
A while ago James and I started watching How I Met Your Mother after our friends Jesse and Kelly recommended it to us and we really like it.  It's a well thought out storyline, it's pertinent to married life, and it's just 21 minutes of 5 funny people to wind down with at the end of a long day. But I'm not trying to write about the show so much as one episode in particular that we recently watched, in which the gang finds their final "doppelganger" (each person on the show had the goal of finding their doppelganger at some point in the last 8 years), and Ted (the narrator) makes a very poignant point.  He notes that apart from finding a stranger in a restaurant that looks "exactly like _(insert friends name here)_" we all become our own doppelgangers over the course of our life, or even the course of a decade (or less).  We look exactly like us, and we look remarkably similar to how we looked five years ago, but almost nothing about us has remained the same.  I guess it's not something everyone experiences, but a lot of people do.  I think especially for people that go through big life-changing situations there is just so much that happens it's hard to stay the same.  I know for us, the "little Doskocils," we feel so different than we did even two or three years ago.  I was recently going through my phone, purging camera photos in order to make more memory space, and the couple that I saw in all the photos looked so foreign to me.  We looked so little, and so happy, and so carefree. That's not to say that we aren't happy anymore, but real life hit us like a ton of bricks since then and now things are just a little harder sometimes.  But there are also things we've lived and accomplished now that I could have never imagined for us back then, and I'm grateful for that wisdom.  I wish I could say we've found our stride, but in reality everything still keeps changing.  We love the flexibility and space we have to grow, and we love a lot of our recent developments, but there are still so many moments of uncertainty and times that I just want to quit being a grown-up altogether.  I think back to my goals I had in high school, or all the conversations with friends about where we wanted to be in five or ten years, and I can honestly say I'm only fulfilling maybe half the things I had planned for myself, but I guess that's God's grace that things don't always go according to our plans.  So I think it's safe to say I found my doppelganger, and maybe I'll find her again in another five or ten years, but I know I can't wait to hear her story and see what her life is like.

Dog Days of Summer

As you may or may not know, James was laid off almost 2 months ago and I am now more than ready to leave my current serving job in order to work full time.  We have both been applying to hundreds of jobs, going on countless interviews, and getting our hopes up and down faster than the Tower of Terror ride.... but all of it really has me wondering, if it keeps not working out, maybe there's a reason why.  I guess what I keep asking myself is where to draw the line of desperately needing something, anything, to tide us over for the rest of the year, versus holding out for the job that will make me happiest in the long run.  As much as I want a 9-5 with a 401k and health bennys, I want to make sure I pick the right one.  And something else I can't escape is the feeling that I'm leaving any and every hope of being a graphic designer in the dust.  I am an artist, I'm creative, I can't go more than a few days without making some new little thing in Illustrator, but is it really anything someone would pay me to do for a living?  A girl can dream.  Even in my current job situation I feel stifled by the lack of encouragement and the overwhelming sense of competition.  People take the fun out of serving others and turn it into a game which inevitably screws over the people who are there to work hard.  I like to think I am one of the hard workers, but it's just so difficult to keep working hard when you feel you are being taken advantage of.  It seems like an easy choice, just pursue my dreams, but when you are barely scraping by on monthly payments and can't even go to the doctor's due to lack of insurance, it makes the decision a bit more complicated.  I mean, I guess it's something I just have to keep praying about and thinking about, and hopefully soon something will pan out.  Until then, I found this cool comic that more than expresses my current frustration (Click on link below):

Bigger here