The Best. Place. Ever.

... is right here right now. While I'm a pretty happy lady most of the time I do have my drearier moments, so let's enjoy this one right here, yes?

Why is this the best place ever? EVER?!?!

Have you ever noticed that you say that in different moments of your life, in different locations, all the time?

Okay, maybe not all the time, but when you do the settings always change? Different aspects of your life conspire to raise your internal temperature to the point of bliss over small events that normally go unnoticed? (Man, if you're NOT having one of those days today or are regrettably having a very bad day, you'll hate me and my flower-child optimism right now.)

Right now I'm sitting in a borrowed backyard (house-sitting) staring at an infinitesimally small field of baled hay between me and another row of sort-of-country homes. It's July, there's golden sunlight coating everything and that makes even dead dill weeds beautiful. There's not a breathe of wind, flying bugs are minimal and singing bugs in the grass are putting on quite the show. I've got a bowl of chocolate chips and a glass of diet-dr.-pepper with mandarin vodka (I made do with what I had, and I did well.) I worked a long day in a job I that makes me excited about life (on the best of days, but today was one of them), I'm 8 chapters into Eat-Pray-Love (good for me, keeping mainstream), A train is whistling, there's a very sassy Chihuahua under my care that just returned from her jaunt down a quasi country road with some dead animal in her mouth and man is it gross, but it's so cute how proud she is...

So okay, there could be more epic days. This is pretty normal. Good work, lots of sunshine, I can smell the earth and hear the birds. It's July. I feel like I'm getting 20x more oxygen than I do in the winter. I've got a rambunctious and snotty little dog to keep me company and a book that doesn't require me to stop and take notes as I go. There have probably been a lot of days like this, and I didn't appreciate them all the way I do July 29th...

... but since I'm feeling grateful, thanks world. The nature rocks. The people rock. The weather, sunlight, O2, miniature Chihuahua's, diet Dr. Pepper and mandarin vodka rock. I'm really digging this quasi-country thing. What on earth was I thinking, hauling myself off to the city core for so long?

(Well, I know exactly what I was thinking and I was totally right, but that was then and this is now and now is the bomb.)

I'll stop rambling. Thanks for listening, crazy internet void! :)

- Paisley

Paisley Senta...

... is so not my real name. Not even a little bit. I pushed "go!" on a Random Name Generator and used the first thing it spit out.

(Okay, that's a bit of stretch since I actually generated about 30 odd names and when they all seemed as ridiculous I just picked the first one and went with it.)

It was actually pretty fun, you might want to try it.

So why the fake name? An entirely fabricated stage name chosen without respect to meaning or connection to my own life? Why start a blog with a lie?

After a sizable chunk of my time has been spent reading the blogs of others, a good 20 or so of them, for the last few months I started to think "me too! me too!"

However, online exhibitionism, even in the form of cute-quirky 20 something blogging communities, is problematic for me.

a.) I have a job that demands a level of personal privacy. (If you interpret this to mean that I am a highly trained spy, I'll enjoy that, but what it really means is that I don't make fancy coffees or flip burgers for money anymore.)

b.) I just actually have trouble with the thought of people I already know reading whatever I might write on here. Strangers are fine. I'm not sure why. I can psycho-analyze that later.

So what can I tell you about me, to get the ball rolling so that I can start indulgently publishing blog posts about all of the things I'm not supposed to talk about ?

- I'm from Narnia! (I'm North American.)

- I'm older than Justin Beiber and younger than Justin Timberlake.
- I'm humanitarian.
- I need anonymity to be able to speak freely about certain things on a blog.
- I haven't quite decided what those things will be yet.... we'll see.
- I once swore that I would never be addicted to coffee because it was too cliche, but it happened anyway.
- I'm pretty sure my QLC (quarter life crisis) is over, and it was a Bitch, so that's good news.
- I pop by at least 10 different fashion blogs a day. I like clothes.
- Contrastingly, accumulating "stuff" makes me feel gross and over-consumer-ey these days.
- This causes me great stress when deliberating at the shopping mall. The inner compulsive shopper wins out about 30% of the time.
- I like lots of creative, trippy indie music, but I also enjoy dancing to pop music in my basement all alone. Really, really embarrassing pop music.
- I'm over educated and under-employed. (Can't be a hipster any other way!)
- I keep trying to read Rushdie but so much happens in a page that I get distracted, feel like I need to re-read everything three times and thus have failed to ever finish a book since I go through it so slowly.



I could go on... but I mean I could go on forever, so let's just wrap it up and keep it tidy. I don't really know what I'm doing here... but I'm pretty sure that's how many blogs start.

- Paisley