I’ve nearly caught my breath, but only momentarily, of course.

My mom has been in the hospital since Sunday morning, when she went to the ER with severe stomach pain. Turns out it was gallstones.

So there was a thing yesterday and then the surgery to remove the gallbladder today, and now she is resting comfortably and we can breathe again. I sat in the room with Grandma Mary today, away from work on my lunch break, jumping everytime I heard something that sounded like a bed rolling down the hall. It wasn’t, and just as I was getting so anxious I thought I’d burst, she came back in, looking a million times better than she did on Sunday.

And I was so happy to have her back.

I’m so selfish, I know, but I’m not ready to lose her yet. (Not that I’ll ever be, but, you know…) I wore her rings yesterday and today; it’s odd that small comforts like that really do help.

When I first realized what it might feel like to not have her there anymore, I was younger, maybe still an emo-ish teenager, and I was reading some article in some magazine I would only buy once. It was about picking up the phone to call your mother and realizing that she’d never answer. Or deleting her number because it was stupid to have it in your phone becuase you’ll never be able to call it again anyway. Upon reading that, a surge pulled through me and then away, leaving an empty sucking feeling at the pit of my stomach. And from then on I realized how precious our time is.

And so I gave her the “you’re-running-out-of-spare-parts” lecture and I hope the heavens understood my true meaning.

But thank god, more than ever, for good health insurance, and for family.

Am I heartbroken or am I just weak?

Rough week, exhaustion, uutter despair. Calamity, apathy, angst-ridden.

Worst part about it all?

Nothing’s wrong.

Except that overnight, plane tickets to Chicago went up $120 round trip. So that sucks.

But other than that, I guess I’m fine.

I am in the midst of a trepidatious Monday. I’m unnverved, unsettled, and somehow craving something firmly rooted.

It must be time for the next great adventure. We’re thinking of road-tripping to that music festival and then flying to Boston/Provincetown to see Jacob in the summer. I want Chicago, too. I want to see the people I love, the city I crave.

All of that will quell those feelings momentarily, until I can’t breathe anymore and I need to be moving. I always want to be moving. I love the thrill of nowhere, living from that suitcase, throwing things willy nilly into the backseat and speeding away, off to anywhere.

Maybe I need to learn to sandboard, to ski, to do those things that will give me motion without taking me too far. I’ll get my damn iPod fixed and I’ll run in the park every day, until the long forgotten muscles become taut and sinewy. I’ll run and run toward freedom, only to find myself back at my door, fumbling for the right key, reminding myself that tomorrow I’ll take off the key that doesn’t work.

My spirit isn’t dead, it’s still very much alive, it’s still here.
I want to go to Tibet.
I want to learn how to meditate. I want to sit with people wiser than me and let them show me how to find calm.
I want to dive in deep ocean. I want the waves to crash against me in the night. I want to stare up at the sun and stare out into the sea and realize I’m so small.

At least if I still want these things, my soul must be still stirring inside me. That’s a positive sign, I believe.

This is the 500th post.

The first sentence written here (back in January of 2007 – my freshman year of college) was, “Ah, solitude at last.” or something like it.
And since then there have been many sentences and many posts, and in the coming days I’ll repost a few of them – or something like it.

And because I know which post is my mom’s favorite, I’m going to put it here, instead of writing something momentous.

http://angelfallenhere.blogspot.com/2007/12/dear-mom.html

Happy Friday, world.

This week has been especially professionally fulfilling for me.
I realize that it’s weird to say, but there have been small accomplishments that really boost my confidence as far as potential goes.
You’ve been reading my blog long enough (maybe) to realize that I’m terrified of being stuck in that mediocrity that I feel I live in, but I’m also terrified to realize how capable I actually am. (I know what you’re thinking. She’s so melodramatic; not this again. But deal with it.)

That being said, today I updated the company website for the very first time. By myself (mostly, there was a bit of input from my colleague Heather). I added links to images on our Partners page. And then I put them up live on the website unaided.
That was the scariest part, I think; messing around with our actual, real website. Not just saving and testing HTML code internally.
But I did it. And now I’m comfortable enough that I could do it again.

And for me, that’s a small step toward something.

One of my dear friends is finding herself mired in the same existential crisis facing most of younger twenty-somethings. I guess if I had to title it, I’d call it “The Future Questions: A Beautiful Crisis by Katie Barry.” We’re here, but we’re still not sure if we want to be. Visions of airplanes and different cities float through our minds, Chicago calls me daily, wishing I’d pick up my phone and beg it to take me back.
We’re here, and we’re happy, but we keep waiting for something else.

I find myself stumbling back to South Africa in my mind, at nights, or when I’m driving, or when I see anything that might remind me of the place I temporarily called home. It’s a smell, a conversation, an NPR report. It’s the jerk from behind my belly button pulling me back.

And yet I know there’s nothing left there. We all spoke, in the last days, about going back, but the conclusion was that it could never be recreated, it could never be the same. And it won’t be.

But I miss the cultural conversations, not just South African, but everything. I miss snippets of German flying between my ears (and most certainly out of them again, sans comprehension), I miss black tea (regular tea, don’t call it black, they’ll think you’re being racist), I miss samoosas on Saturday nights and badly fried chips, I miss take aways and the miserable walk to the laundry and Long St by night. I miss stumbling home and fumbling with the gates (oh the gates!) and I miss the sun and the mountains and the city….but what is it that I’m really doing?

We bronze our memories, immortalizing them to gleam in the light, and we forget that they’ll never be like that – that they never were like that to begin with.

I’ve been struggling with that lately. The gleam. I’ve bronzed a lot of memories, made them comfortable and safe, glossed over rough edges. But to return to those nights, to those infinite moments, would be miserable, I think. I watch everyone around me strive for their pasts, stretched equally in their search for their futures, and they’re forgetting that none of those things are so imporant as these quiet moments in which we listen to the hum of the central air, in which we roll down the windows in January for a glimpse of promised spring, in which we fully absorb what we are, who we are…currently.

We can gloss these moments over later. But for now, I want them to saturate my skin and make me whole; I want them to chase me and engulf me and I want to come up gasping for air as though I’ve jumped off that bridge again and forgotten how to breathe.

We’re poor and we’re happy and we just don’t know it yet, because we’re so worried about the rest of it all. It’s coming, we can’t stop it, might as well dance around while we can. Your miserable future self will someday look back at your miserable present self and wish for this again. Fight the gleam, you’re in it.

We’re 5 posts away from 500 – which is pretty exciting. “A Mile High and Then Some…” is celebrating it’s fourth year on this planet and I’m celebrating the fact that I still have topics of conversation.

But today, it’s chicken salad. And fear. But the fear part comes in a little bit later.

I love chicken salad. The only problem is that when it’s bad, it’s horrible. While there have been instances of mediocre chicken salad in the history of the product, it usually tends to fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. I’m currently fork-deep in some from King Soopers, and it’s mediocre. It needs more lemon juice, more pepper, more salt, less red onion. Good balance of celery and grape, perhaps a pinch more tarragon.
I’m currently salivating at the thought of Costco’s chicken salad. They have the best rotisserie chicken, hands down, and their chicken noodle soup (made from that chicken) is divine. And super cheap. One of these days, I’m going to have to get some.
I worry that people are forgetting how to cook home cooked things. Not fine dining, that will exist forever in some form or another. But things like baked goods, meatloaf, casseroles – all the hallmarks of suburbia, of the housewife, the busy mother who manages to get dinner on the table every night by 6. I want to learn how to cook. I want to be able to bring flavor into dishes without having to get the ingredients from a box.
But I guess lots of people my age can cook.
And I guess it won’t be that hard.

But on to fear. Suddenly, I don’t have much to say about it.

I’ve moved my desk back into the conference room so I can shut the door when I’m on the phone. Which is supposed to be pretty consistently. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I do enjoy the cave-like atmosphere.

Another wild weekend leads to another busy week.

However, I have purchased bookshelves.
Two of them.

And hopefully tonight I will have them in my room and I will feel like I live there.

Also, I have some bones to pick with both Google (Blogger) and Tumblr.
Google won’t accept the fact that I want to make my Gmail address my primary on this account. They refuse to let the two merge together although I no longer actively use my Loyola e-mail address. Actually, it might not even be mine forever.
And then what?
What happens when the next kbarry3@luc.edu wants to get her own blog?
What happens when I’ve completely forgotten that I was kbarry3@luc.edu?

And Tumblr. I adore my new layout but it’s impossible for people to comment. Ironically, that’s the blog where I’d like to have comments. My family reads this blog but doesn’t comment (even though it’s super easy to do) but my friends are unable to do so on my Tumblr.

Ugh, technology does have its limits.
How about making it all a little bit more intuitive?
(I’m talking to you too Constant Contact!)

I’m not good with food.
It’s not that I don’t like it – I like most everything except fish and spicy things, and even that is starting to change. I now crave shrimp sometimes, and I’ll happily eat mussels in pasta. I ate half a scallop on a date once. South Africa really got me into spicy. I can eat medium salsa without complaint and now put jalepenos on things.

Everyone makes fun of me. I don’t eat meals (often). I much prefer to just eat throughout the day. If I had my way, I’d be constantly eating but not that much. And not that much variety.

Today, I was nearly late for work because at 8:25 this morning I decided to make a pan of spinach. Why? I don’t know. Why not?
But it has made for a delicious lunch. I put some olives on it at first and then decided to make a wrap. Lacking some sort of sauce, I put cream cheese in the wrap (it’s one of those health ones that tastes like sawdust and hell but you’re still going to eat it anyway) and then put in warm spinach, olives, cheddar cheese and turkey. Cover that in pepper and you’ve got a meal.

But that’s weird. The other night, I realized that salt and vinegar chips can be dipped into mustard potato salad with great success. (I’m serious, try it.)

That and my one entree, mustard chicken. Oh man, delicious. Spicy mustard (the deli kind) and then honey on the chiekn and you do some baking and some stabbing and some dipping- it tastes like the best memory of chicken nuggets from childhood minus all the fried bits.

I can also make a mean chicken salad.
Or spinach bacon salad.
Or BLTs.
Or bacon oatmeal.
Or bacon mac-and-cheese.

Starting to see the theme?

I’m a much better baker than I am a cook, although I don’t know that that’s saying too much about my baking skills. Or my cooking skills.

Ryan made me dinner last night: lamb things, proscuitto wrapped vegetables, and asparagus, yum! He kept saying he was worried he’d have too many leftovers becuase I wouldn’t eat it anyway, but I think he was surprised when I asked for seconds.
But all of that was to his severe detriment becuase now he’s going to have provide meals on that level at least twice a month.