There's a mouse in the house!

On Sunday night, if you woke up around 11:00 P.M. eastern time, I apologize.

Why might I have woken you up? Well, I screamed. I have the kind of scream that can curdle blood. I don't often scream, but when I do, I give it all I've got. And then a little bit more for good measure.

So here I am on a Sunday night, just entering my room after a delightful shower where I shaved my legs for the first time in a week, when I notice a little brown speck on my pillow.

"What in the world?" I thought. Hoping that maybe it was just a piece of dirt or a fuzz from my brown blanket.

So I did what any sensible person would do. I picked up the brown speck.

"I think that might be poop."

Again, "What in the world?"

So I go wash my hands as if my life depended on it, and return to my room to see if I can figure out what is going on. I lift up my pillow and it happens.

A mouse.

A MOUSE goes scurrying across my bed, leaps off onto the floor, and runs into my closet.

By this point, I am wondering how long it will take before somebody knocks on my door and am trying to determine what the best way to get my heart to stop beating 200 bpm is.

The mouse is still alive and well, tricky thing. Robbing the grave. Or something. I have had four traps set since Monday, and my apartment complex put two more out on Wednesday (not exactly sure why I bothered contacting them Sunday night if they were going to take three days to do anything, but that is another story). It freaking ate the peanut butter off of one of the traps last night and didn't get trapped.

On the bright side, my apartment is cleaner than it has been in months.

Edit: When I came home this evening from a patio/high school t-shirt party, there was a mouse in the trap. Dead mouse, trap, and the two grocery bags I used to pick it up are now in the dumpster outside.

I will sleep more soundly tonight.

Look for the good

"I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition." -Martha Washington

Love this. Love her.

Several years ago, something happened that made me realize that I needed to put my life into perspective anytime anything bad happened. I don't always do it. In fact, I probably do it way less frequently than I realize I do, but when I do put things into perspective, I always feel better. Always.

I would say that one event, as inconsequential as it was (the sprinkler system in my apartment at the time burst), it has totally and completely changed my life and the way I choose to look at things.

Life is beautiful, but it's only beautiful if you make it that way. I know that sometimes there are things in life that are beyond our control, but I also know that, even when things do suck, there is good in everything if you look for it.

Perspective (As if I haven't written about that before)

Today, I was in the car with my site supervisor for my internship. Not an every day occurrence. Actually not an occurrence at all until today when it happened twice. That is beside the point, though. She is older than I am, which I feel like should be a duh since I am 24 and she has the same degree I am working on, but again. Beside the point. Older enough that she is definitely a mentor and it isn't weird that she is my supervisor, but close enough to my age that I can relate to her without much difficulty.

Back to the car.

So we are leaving the site to go to a presentation when she gets a text message from her child's daycare about her child. Everything was fine, but the content of the text message made her ask me if I was sure I wanted children.

Jokingly I said, "Welllllllll."

The truth of the matter is, though, there isn't anything I want more in life than to have children, but I just told her that yes, I was sure, but that I also knew it would be a while.

At that point, she asked how old I was and she told me that I should wait until I was 30 to get married.

It was so interesting to hear her perspective on it since, as I mention pretty much every time I write a blog post, almost everybody I am friends with is engaged/married or at least in a relationship.

Perspective. It's a funny, funny thing.

I'm so grateful and thankful to get to live my life right now the way many 24-year-olds may not.

I, quite literally, have no responsibility other than myself. Want to eat a banana and some crackers for dinner? Sure. Go grocery shopping at 10:30 at night? Hey, why not. (Side note, I freaking love night time grocery shopping and am grateful I live in a part of town where it is safe to do so). Mostly, though, I am continually realizing how many amazing people I get to have in my life right now.

When else in my life am I going to get to see my friends at least once a week every week?

When else am I going to have multiple people in authority positions that are not my boss that are able, in their own ways, to speak truth into my life and provide encouragement with where I am at, even if where I am now is not where I want to be eventually?

Perhaps because I don't know what my life will look like down the road, I am not able to see the ways that it, too, will be beautiful. I also realize that I only get 365 days to be 24, and I realize that while there are beautiful things about every single chunk of 365 days, that if I fail to appreciate the 365 days of being 24, regardless of if 24 looks like what my 16 year old self thought 24 would look like, I am going to live a life of ungratefulness and comparison. And maybe, too, if my 16 year old self thought that 24 would be different than what it is, my 32 year old self is probably not what I think it will be.

That's okay, though, because I know that no matter what happens between now and 32, it will be beautiful if I let it.

Life is beautiful, amazing, perfect, incredible, and I think I so often get stuck on the things I don't have or play the comparison game with the highlights of other peoples' lives that I forget that, right now, I am where I want to be, with people I couldn't have even begun to imagine getting to live life with, doing exactly what I want to be doing.

And that, my dear (nonexistent) readers is why perspective is a beautiful, crazy, weird, funny, perfect, glorious thing.