merriam webster can't get everything right i guess.

It may be strange to say that a fortune cookie prompted me to write this little schpeal today, but it's true. I'll tell you that fortune later.

There's a word that sometimes lays heavy on everyone, and it's one that has been plaguing me lately.

Expectations. 

People's expectations for you, your expectations for yourself, and round and round.  They can be a glorious thing that lifts you to the highest heights of your dreams and they can be a dark cloud that weigh down your soul.  Lately, I have been dealing with the later of these definitions.  Not rationally of course.

It's true, I have high expectations for myself.  But it's also true that I feel like other people in my life have even higher expectations for me based on previous "performance". Whether or not that's true or just something I feel, it's a hard thing to deal with and leads to another ugly word. Regret.  I've been feeling a lot of that lately.  Regret for some of the decisions I made 7 years ago. Regret for some of the decisions I've made in even more recent years.  These two go hand in hand like a dirty, filthy virus and I'm starting to feel like patient X.

But you know what's even worse than these two words slowly chipping away at your sanity? Is that they overshadow all the good things.  They block out the sunshine on a breezy warm day.  They obscure the joy of the impending birth of a baby.  They weed into inter-personal relations and plant seeds of dis-rest. They make you forget who you are and why you do everything that you do to keep putting one foot in front of the other each and every day.

So today, I opened an ordinary fortune cookie not knowing how wise of a cookie I held in my hands.  It told me that "nothing  can keep you from reaching your goals..Do it!"

It might seem strange to you that 10 words printed on a tiny piece of paper and stuffed inside a cookie could spark me to think so "deeply", but it's true, they did.  A few hours after reading that little piece of paper, I sat in a room in a doctor's office and heard the tiny heartbeat belonging to my nephew still in my sisters belly. I marveled at that little sound knowing that in just a few weeks time I'll get to meet the owner of that steady heart beat.  I walked in the sun to a friend's house, listening to the sounds of Spring. I hung out with friends and laughed. I realized that despite expectations and regrets, love and persistence still exist right along side them in the dictionary.

I may not be where I want, and things might not be going my way, my loans might be calling soon and I might feel stuck in a place I'm not going to get out of but the truth of the matter is, that if you refuse to give in and push yourself farther than you think you can, mountains can move. I'm not there yet, I'm not even close to the summit of the hill I put my ass on with past decisions, but hell if I'm giving up now.

Now, someone bring me some aspirin and take out stock in diet pepsi, because this is going to be one fucking long journey.