I have discovered the answer to ALL post grad problems. The post grad problems I’m talking about consist of: stress, finding jobs that make you happy, dating mature human beings, partying, being adventurous, finding yourself…you get the point. So, how are we supposed to conquer all of these grown up issues at such a young age? Be obsessed with yourself.

With every fiber in my body I know this works. When you focus on nothing but yourself, things start miraculously working out in your favor. Put a little playful selfishness into action! Of course you should care about others and do things for the community, but lets be honest — doing good things for others makes you feel good, too! And that only aids in being obsessed with your own well-being.

You will never again have an issue with dating if you focus on what makes you happy. True story: I recently cancelled a date with a guy merely because I was painting my nails Turks and Caicos by Essie and munching on banana bread. I wasn’t really feeling a date night and didn’t want to ruin it with my selfish attitude. I’d much rather go when I actually wanted to. In the end, the guy was totally fascinated by my non-apologetic drive to live my own life and things have been working out flawlessly since! Read More »

If I were to ever win a gold medal in the Olympics, it would be for over-thinking EVERYTHING. I guess I fit the typical girl stereotype. It’s totally like me to stand in the cosmetics aisle in Target for 80 hours trying to figure out which type of mascara I want. I’ll over-think a text I’m about to send to someone I’m dating. I’ll over-analyze a conversation I had with a friend and turn it into something it probably wasn’t in the first place. I’ll over-analyze a bedroom color if I’m painting. I’ll over-analyze…OK, you get it.

I also realize I probably made myself sound like a total freak in that last paragraph but, then again, I’m over-analyzing that too.

That being said, my new goal is to STOP. Stop over-analyzing every single little thing to a point of making up fake stories, wasting time and driving myself crazy. My philosophy has always been to have fun and leave the rest (the rest being all of those unfiltered thought process jumbled messes) so how hard can it really be? Life can’t be about wasting time freaking yourself out at the expense of everything that probably doesn’t matter anyway. Read More »

I need a focus adjustment. Let’s just say I’ve been a little on the negative side lately. At first, I tried blaming it on the crappy weather (like I usually do) and then I realized I could be dealing with a personal problem.

For example, whenever I’m about to do virtually anything, I immediately envision the worst possible outcome. From sending a text to a guy for the first time (i.e. he is going to think I’m clingy or too weird) to expressing my opinion at work (i.e. everyone is going to think I’m crazy, my boss is going to fire me and where will I live after that?)…it’s becoming a problem. (Okay, not a lot of my thoughts are this dramatic, I’m just trying to make a point. I need a focus adjustment.)

The good news is, I think the fix is pretty simple.

I need to focus on what I DO want to happen instead of focusing on what I DON’T want to happen. When I send a guy a text, I need to confidently believe that he is excited to hear from me. I need to have a crisp understanding that he probably thinks what I have to say is cute and endearing. When I want to express my opinions/ideas at work, I need to focus on the positive new opportunities I’m bringing to the table. I need to zero in on all of the great things that could come out of saying what I feel.

Positive thinking is the match that strikes every great success story. If I wake up with the thought something wonderful is going to happen that day (and I pay close enough attention) something magical will happen. Even if it’s something small.

For example, I experimented with my new philosophy just this morning. Instead of waking up and deciding I was going to be crabby because it was that time of the month, I woke up with a fresh face and a glowy attitude for no reason. It was the smallest effort EVER. I literally did not do anything different with my morning. BUT, the beauty of this whole entire (starting to sound lame) story was that I didn’t pinpoint anything negative that happened to me. Minor things (cars pulling out in front of me, people cutting in front of my path in Target, etc.) didn’t ruin my day. And I would go about my own 24 hours pretty happily.

It’s really very magical and focus-altering. Turning the teeniest negative thought into a positive one could change your (or someone else’s, depending how violent you are) day. And when your inside center is sharp, things will be so much clearer.

I’ve said it before 48,573 times and I will say it again. Life after college is a hectic whirlwind. And most of your time is spent trying to decipher if you’re happy with who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re doing it all. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Does this make me happy? He loves me, he loves me not. Blah, blah, blah, blah. But what happens after that hump? How are you suppose to tell that you’ve finally reached that blissful element of contentment with your life?

I’m sorry if this is too deep for a Wednesday but I’m here to help because I have finally found an inner contentment in myself…nearly two years after graduation. Please don’t lose hope if you just graduated. It may not take that long for you to find inner quietness as it did me. Either way, it will come. And here’s how you will know… Read More »

Yesterday, I went out for a late night happy hour with one of my greatest girlfriends. We sat down in a booth, ordered up our California red wine, some pommes frites and got to talking. Happy Hour, might I mention, will be your favorite activity come real world. At happy hour, you discuss life’s difficult moments, relationships and friendships–all to the deepest degree.

Lately, I’ve been noticing something about these happy hours. I jump on them with all of my friends. New friends, old friends, friends from college, friends from high school, friends from work…and I realized something. My friend groups are slowly growing apart. Like a cell, they are pulling themselves away from each other and bouncing into two different worlds where they are altogether different.

In one group, are my college girlfriends. They were the lovely ladies I chose to spend the heftiest chunk of my four years in college with. They share drunken escapades with me, long stories of nights in the library, silly adventures sprouted from hunger, ambition and craved adventure.

In another group, are my newest friends. They are the lovely ladies I have chosen to spend my post-college life with. They share more recent drunken escapes with me, long afternoons in our favorite coffee shop full of recapping old college stories and new ones alike, silly adventures sprouted from a sense of eager ambition, craved adventure and a blank and exciting future.

They are pretty much the same relationships right? So you mean nothing really EVER changes? You guessed it, that’s totally not true. These new post grad friendships and the ones I held so dearly in college have evolved. My college girlfriends have all found men they plan on marrying. They talk about the cuts of wedding rings and their jobs in the office. They are busy and crazy successful, I’m proud of every single one of them. But since my life has changed, my college friendships have carefully drifted up up and away. I’m envisioning the scene in Titanic after the last bit of the ship went under water and Jack and Rose drifted apart in the ocean. They came back together of course, but lost each other for a fiercely cold moment in time.

I’m a flight attendant now. My week by week schedule changes as quickly as a young boy in puberty. I never know what I’m going to be doing day to day or where I’ll be. I’m single and comfortable with it. I have no idea what color my bridesmaid dresses are going to be, I’m not building a home with my boyfriend and, even though I totally know what cut my wedding ring is going to be, I don’t have anyone to share it with (quite yet). These differences have pulled me away from my college girlfriends but have brought me increasingly closer to a new group of girls I’ve found to love.

My post-grad girlfriends are all single, I met them through my new job and we have so much in common it almost freaks me out. We laugh in the name of marriage, love to go out and have fun. Finding this new group of ladies has fulfilled me with personal hope–that there are people out there (my age) that are still like me rooting for a single life out in the town, a hopeful future and lots of crazy stories and juicy laughs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my college girlfriends. I will always love them with all my heart. But sometimes, I have to accept that my future may be going a different direction than theirs (even if it’s at a slower rate). And that’s OK. Because there are girls out there who share the same beliefs and stories as I do at this very moment. There are woman out there who want to live life and view the world the way I do.

College made life so easy. Seriously. I was effortlessly plopped onto a large mass of land with tons of people my age who had the same goals (AKA make it to class and survive finals week sober). Then, college provided all of us with a giant room to eat (cafeteria), a giant room to nurse a hangover and take naps on tables (library) and a giant neighborhood to spend our weekends guzzling weird combinations of booze and Juicy Juice (off campus housing).

College was a large Biodome for easy mistakes, debauchery, learning and living. And now that I’ve been out of college for a while, a few things have become irresistibly harder to accomplish without this grand ol’ biodome of easy living. I’ve dealt with the following combo platter of difficulties in the real world, and in every situation I contemplated ripping my hair out. They get harder to cope with, people! And I’m going to make up this silly excuse that it’s because I’m growing up. Read More »

The other day, my friend and I were driving to Hudson (Wisco) on a Sunday afternoon to buy some wine.  Yes, that calculation all together means we physically left the state we were in (Minnesota) and cruised controlled our way to Wisconsin so we could legally buy booze. On a Sunday.

Girls gotta do what a girls’ gotta do, okat? Even if that means taking a flashback ride to the high school days – when you would beg someone older to drive the healthy hour into a state where no one else had anything better to do than drink on God’s day o’ rest. Cheers.

Basically, while she sped east and I sat and ate my Uncrustable for breakfast in the passenger seat, we had a chance to get down to talking. And of course, that conversation was about boyz. I immediately assumed it was kosher that we were being desperate about booze and discussing the one thing we couldn’t ever seem to figure out. My roommate and I can relate, we’ve both been single for a while, we both like to go out and have fun and we both like to dish about it. Naturally, our conversation led to something a little sacred in the dating world. Sexay time. Read More »

I have sad news. If you get a great job after you graduate college, you’re still going to be poor. Ok, cue the sad trombone noise. I can’t believe I’m being this depressing on hump day!

But, I’m being serious and honest. Even if you get a entry level job out of college, money is low, low, low, low (and you won’t be buying boots wit dah fur, if you catch my drift). A few months after graduation, I got a fabulous job — the one I had dreamed about all throughout college. And it was the real thing! I had a salary, benefits, Monday-Friday gig and a huge smile plastered on my face. My paychecks were strong and lovely and I could officially afford my own apartment.

Get ready for another sad trombone noise.

Unfortunately, making enough money to make a small living after college was an incognito reality check for me. After spending my life living on an hourly wage or no wage at all, making that much money made me greedy and unrealistic. I started spending my paychecks freely. I shopped a lot (and not in the clearance rack) and when I started having to pay loans, I hardly had any money at all. I’d cringe whenever I filled up my gas tank, curse when I signed my rent check and had a bad mood if I ever had to pay extra for utilities on my apartment.

Basically, if you get that big girl job after college and start making real money, you don’t have any money at all. In fact, I should have had the mindset that I was more poor than before. Because I finally had the means to pay off the four years I spent sleeping and taking pop quizzes.

With all of the spending I was doing, while paying loans, while paying rent, while paying for my cell phone/groceries — saving money wasn’t even an option. At least it didn’t seem like it was. I could never catch up. I could never have more money in my bank account than I had the month before. Nothing was working. I couldn’t even swear off the mall and save some dough. Having money seemed impossible! What is this real world business? I can’t even go to Pottery Barn and buy fun stainless steel utensils for my kitchen!

Stop the sad trombone noises and see the glimmer of hope. I have some advice. As a warning though, you may need to swallow some pride. Because not having any money is a huge ego check and a sign you need to make some sacrifices to save the ching ching.

My first bit of advice? Move home for a year. YES, it seems embarrassing and awful. It seems like you would never have a social life again. But you will. And I’ve heard from many different people that not moving home at a young age was the worst decision of their life. Their life! Think about it. After college, all you need to do is catch up with your bills and how is one suppose to do that when they are writing a $700 rent check every month? Besides, it’s better to move home now than in your 30′s when you’re hundreds of dollars deep in credit card bills? Just sayin’.

My second bit of advice? Put aside envelopes for saving money. Label the envelopes: Coach purse, Spring Break, Car Insurance. Every paycheck, take out some cash and put $10 into each envelope. Then, instead of spending freely, you will know the means of money that are available to you for each perk. Credit card payments, no more!

Finally, live within your means and be realistic. The first three years of our careers are the hardest ever for money. Just because we have real jobs, doesn’t mean we can live like we’ve had real jobs for ten years. It’s all part of growing up.

I actually caught myself doing this yesterday:

I was posted up in my cozy bed, leisurely reading a politically focused novel, my pillows stacked high behind my neck, while drinking chamomile tea with extra honey and a mini-spoon. And, as you can imagine, it was effing amazing. The next morning, I woke up naturally before my alarm (my favorite and most annoying thing ever). Then, I sipped coffee and read the headlines in the first page of the newspaper.

Amidst all of this old lady talk, I got to thinking…and not just about how simple my life has become. Actually, I’ve been so busy talking about how stressful and crazy my life has become since graduating from college all of this time, I haven’t even stopped to think about the serene course my life has taken as well.

I will compare my life from then until now with one word: extreme. EVERYTHING was extreme while I was in college. Read More »

I’m honest. That being said, I’m insecure.

To me, saying I’m insecure sounds a little harsh. It sounds a little wobbly and flaky. It sounds dishonest and awkward. Sometimes, it seems like I’m a little too big for it, kind of like Alice in Wonderland after she ate that piece of crack bread and grew her arms out of a cottage. But I’m willing to believe actually admitting an insecurity of any sort is the first step to fixing it. And I’m very willing to believe that I’m not the only one out there feeling a little bit…emotional and unsure.

Of course there are a lot of things I’m positive and confident about. In relationships, the future, my friends, where my life is going…I am confident and positive that I love to write. I am confident and positive that I am treating my body like a temple (aside from the occasional Sunday morning after a night out at the bars). I am confident and positive that the Lady Gaga’s song called ‘Hair’ makes me feel THIS close to climbing a mountain wearing an 80′s outfit.  I am confident and positive that I deeply love my family, friends, horses, Jesus and Minnesota. I am confident.

But sh*t, I’m insecure too. I never know what I want with relationships. Do I want to make out with this guy at the bar, sleep over at his house and wake up like Sex in the City Samantha and walk out feeling like a million dollars? Do I follow a strict pattern of going on countless dates, letting the guy buy the first meal, wait for a second date, begin intensely dating and wake up for an early special and do it every morning to Maroon 5? Do I have a type? Am I not good enough for him/anyone just because one guy didn’t call me back? Read More »