Partial Credit

There I was, drinking beer in a strip mall with my husband...

Now it was an ice-cold glass of my favorite beer in a cute bistro in the design-award-winning strip mall just five minutes from our house. And I do love my multi-faceted, loyal and adoring husband...

But there I was, drinking beer in a strip mall with my husband...

And I thought momentarily about how very far my life has diverged from where I had thought I would be at this time. I'm thinking about my dreams and visions for myself when I was a 16- or even as a 20-year-old girl imagining a 34-year-old self.

(Side note: Facebook is stupid. For past 20 minutes I've been looking at RB's photos of her fabulous trip to Mykonos this August, when I know she didn't post those photos for the likes of me. I only have access to the photos because Facebook has decided that if I'm a friend of DK, who is a friend of RB, that's good enough. Don't be stupid, Facebook. RB doesn't know me. -- And the fact is, she knows me better than she knows some of the other yahoos who now have the privilege of viewing her photos, because at least we have met. But Facebook doesn't know that. Stupid.)

And, yeah, the face-to-face confrontation with the expectations of a 16-year-old me was way more than I could handle, and of course I drank one beer too many, sure, and came home and looked at Facebook.

(Got a screamin' deal on the pitcher of beer, though, so while I may have felt unduly pressured by its pitcherliness to have the third beer, I can't say it wasn't a bargain.)

But to give myself a break, my expectations as a 16-year-old maybe weren't terribly realistic. As I recall, if you boil it down, I really only had two thoughts about my future:

1) I'll be a writer or jazz singer somewhere.

2) My future self will figure out the rest.

If you boil it down, that's what I thought about my future. Inherent in number two was my expectation that I'd have success and confidence and love and children, etc., but I trusted that Future Crystal could be relied upon, in turn, to make the right choices to get us there.

How has "Future Crystal" done in those endeavors? Because that's me, right? How have I done?

Future Crystal is hitting it out of the park, in a lot of ways. I hadn't counted on it being such a complicated matter, figuring out the rest of it. But I've done okay.

If you look at it a certain way, I've made my living by writing, for years now.

And maybe I haven't done too bad at being a jazz singer, either. I mean, for not actually having become a jazz singer. I am, for example, very cool. I have a great voice. I know a lot of jazz numbers. I'm extremely available for rehearsal and performance times. Partial credit?

Ha.