Blue Suede Shoes

Despite year-old late fees hanging over my head (whoops, I accidentally stole some dvds before moving to France!), the library has become my escape from self-inflicted house arrest these past weeks. I officially began working on my project for google on Monday, and while I find it fabulous, it involves quite a bit of sitting, clicking, and staring at the computer.

During my past trip to the good ol' Dexter Library I stumbled upon a book titled "My Reality Check Bounced" by Jason Ryan Dorsey, and I had to give it a once over. By doing so I learned that this self-improvement book is aimed towards lost twentysomethings in search of hope (which we are far too young to lose!).

The book caught my immediate attention. While this is without a doubt a thrilling life stage, I can't help but to feel a bit without direction during my first year of unstructured American adulthood. It's completely overwhelming.

So, I checked out the book, learned about my year-old late fees, and tripped over myself while walking out of the building because I couldn't even put the book down while making my exit. I knew I had scored both because I had found a great read and because I probably looked awesome stumbling around in the doorway.

The book discusses defining your "future picture", the image that you see of yourself when you imagine your life at your absolute happiest. Now, being the future-obsessed girl I have always been, I figured that I would breeze past this challenge. Instead, the questions really made me zero in on the details of that image. One of the questions was something like "What shoes do you see yourself wearing to work in your future picture?"

Surprisingly I knew exactly what I saw: blue suede pumps. Apparently I imagine myself living in some psychadelic decade. Silly as it may seem, by imagining this detail of my future life, I have realized that at this point, my real checks would bounce if I purchased these dream shoes, and I have a lot of work to do in order to reach that point.

This book has really made an impact on me, and I feel more inspired than ever to throw myself into creating my ideal future, but there just isn't enough time in a day... even when you spend the day watching talk shows and "The Biggest Loser" marathons (though my new television obsession happens to be "Bethanny Getting Married").

If I take baby steps to achieving my goals rather than attempting to make it all happen at once they will become more realistic. My baby steps are the following:

1. Write something for my blog every day, even if it's only a brainstorm or a draft.
2. Complete a creative writing prompt every day from the book The Write Brain, by Bonnie Neubauer (a fantastic book for anyone in a creative writing rut or just looking for inspiration).
3. Spend time every day working on my current article-in-progress.

But out of intense curiosity I am going to throw the question back at all of you: What shoes do you see YOURSELF wearing to work in your future picture? Please leave me a comment with your response!