All right, I've been introductory, I've tried motivational, now I want to get a little personal to give anyone who may keep up me an idea of what it's like to be Shelbs. It always makes me laugh when people put "it's complicated" as their relationship status on Facebook. As if they expected any meaningful endeavor to be easy... It occured to me today that naming my blog "Simply Shelbs" is incredibly ironic. Because, to be honest (ha, more facebook cliches!!), my whole life is "complicated". I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way. Life in general, the ENTIRE natural world, tends toward chaos and chaos does have a habit of complicating things. And when I say "complicated", I'm not talking your typical mindless teenage drama. I don't mean to be sanctimonious, but I have absolutely no time for that. For one, senior year in itself is going to be tricky. To give you an idea, I'm writing this post as an excuse to get away from college essays I've already put off for a week - which is a little uncharacteristic, because procrastination is not in my vocabulary.
I'd like to illustrate this with a little STORY TIME!! I just returned from spending the past couple of days at the beach with my mom, little sister, and her best friend. As we're driving home, although three of us have iPhones, fully equipped with GPS and Google Maps, mom realizes she has noooo idea where we're going. Through Rockport? Up to Sinton? Who knows? Why we didn't address this sooner, the world may never know. So we pull out the map - the prehistoric kind that's flat and printed on paper - and after a few minutes of staring at the spiderweb of colored lines and numbers, we locate the correct route and hit the road again. Some miles later, the car starts to STINK like nobody's business. There were some suggestions thrown out there as to what exactly could be causing the stench - excrement, compost... Whatever it was, it was awful. Amid the panic about the smell, we missed a turn and ended up passing a prison where we could see the inmates playing basketball outside, which launched a whole discussion about THAT. When we finally stopped to eat at a Dairy Queen, we discovered it was a piece of driftwood my older sister had insisted on bringing home. She wasn't even in the car!! She came down to the beach for a few days - just long enough to find the stupid stick - and then instructed us to bring it home so she could stain it and use it as a wall hanging. ...I have nothing good to say about that. It was a dumb idea. Not sure why we listened to her. I was all for leaving the stick behind. But for some reason, somebody put the stick in the car. And not in the back of the car...it was basically in the backseat. Where we could all smell it. The. Entire. Way. Home. So we're parked at this Dairy Queen, trying to ignore the stench as we eat, discussing whether or not we should get rid of the stick, and a dog comes up to the car. He's an adorable, golden-eyed chocolate lab, pitifully skinny, wagging his tail and licking his chops as the scent of our french fries wafts out the open car window. Fact: I have a habit of rescuing anything furry with four legs. What do I do? I start tossing him french fries out the window. Eventually, I broke off pieces of my chicken and shared those with him, too. At this point, we're all throwing food to this stray dog, and I finally got out of the car and started petting and talking to this dog, telling him how cute he was and that if I was driving, he'd already be in the car. But my mom is not buying it. "What are you going to do with that dog? Where are you going to put him? He can't just ride in your lap." Touche. He was crawling with fleas. Still... It was this time that my little sister and her friend went into Dairy Queen to go to the bathroom and when they came back, I was still no closer to convincing my mother to let me rescue this stray. In fact, the story of the Dairy Queen Dog ends there because when they returned from the bathroom, they looked at us with those deer-in-the-headlights looks on their faces and said, "That guy in there said there's a gang coming to Dairy Queen tonight, he said they're headed this way, get in the car, let's go. Let's go NOW." Now, whether or not there were gangsters en route, it was getting pretty late and my mom finally pulled the plug on my efforts to smuggle the dog home with us. On the way home, we had another mishap with the directions, the car still smelled disgusting, and every radio station was staticky or playing nothing but commercials.
What was supposed to be a point A to point B journey home, with a short stop on the way to get something to eat, turned into an ordeal. It was laughable, and most of the time we made light of the situation, but that is a Grade A example of how my family seems to have a knack for making life harder than it needs to be. What could we have done? We could've - and definitely should have - left the stick on the beach. We could've - and arguably should have - routed the trip home on the GPS, right off the bat, and eliminated any confusion. We could've eaten inside the Dairy Queen and completely avoided any contact with the dog. And that is entirely true. Any of the complications we encountered on that trip could have been avoided. But I think the important thing is not that we failed to responsibly get directions, or that we may or may not have narrowly avoided being on an episode of Cops at Dairy Queen, but that through it all, no one laid the blame on anyone else. Instead of being pessimistic and annoyed that everything seemed to be going awry, we chose to laugh.
Even the most meticulous, perfect plans can unravel. It's all in how you deal with it.
-Shelbs
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