Party down, I'm 26!

26! Today I'm celebrating an unremarkable birthday to close out a highly remarkable year. I had so many plans, goals and dreams for 25...and watched them all change, crumble or become irrelevant as I changed careers, ended relationships, and completely re-evaluated my priorities. For 26, I'm not setting deadlines or worrying about the future or benchmarking myself against some invisible, self-established timeline.

Instead, I'm going to embrace the fact that I'm a twenty-something Millennial, and live it up accordingly. After I quit my public accounting job, I joked about how I left behind busy season and started enjoying "Lizzie Season." After a year of bizarre personal growth, I'm excited to enjoy a Lizzie year. 26 is going to be a good one...I can just feel it. 

In the year of 26, I am going to: 

-wear lipstick as often as I feel like it and smile enormously with or without it on. 

-go to the gym as much as I can, but stop hating myself on the days when I just plain can't. 

-happy hour spontaneously and laugh with my friends without worrying about how loud we're being. 

-grow yellow flowers, and if I kill them, buy and grow more. 

-travel with open eyes and comfortable, pretty shoes and my camera always at hand and people with me who enhance the experience. 

-tear up at wedding ceremonies...and tear it up at wedding receptions. 

-send cards and thank-you notes and texts and Snapchats and emails to everyone I love to tell them that I love them. 

-devour books and write volumes and see movies and watch tv and visit museums and see plays and experience music and study art and seek beauty everywhere.

-enjoy all the pretty, funny, delightful things that make me happy, no matter how big or how small. 

-embrace my hyperbolic, superlative excitement about life in general and stop giving a damn if that's to everyone's liking or not. 

So there you have it. Frivolity, happiness, little things...all of which I am determined will add up to a great year. With that, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEEEE...I'm off to pretend to work and really just spend the day celebrating :) 

ghosts

It's a funny thing, having lived so much life in Minneapolis. I've built myself a city that's haunted by my past self. Selves, even. I drive around or walk here and there, and most of the time, I stay in the present...focused on getting to the store, making it to happy hour, or not being late to the gathering. Sometimes, though, I get taken off-guard, and that's when the ghosts creep in. 

It happens to me at work, sometimes. I spent a weekend in St. Paul with the Band of the Fighting Irish for the Frozen Four once. I now park at the hotel the band stayed at, and we have work happy hours at the bar where the official pep rally was held. Sometimes, I sip my beer and look up and can see myself, 30 pounds thinner from mono and a flirtation with an eating disorder, clutching a piccolo and wearing a hockey jersey so big it could drown me. I had my first pair of skinny jeans on, and I never considered that the glittering, glassy building just across the street would one day be the source of my professional fulfillment. 

Restaurants haunt me. The tiny taco bar where my parents took me for my 25th birthday while he was at a class he hated, where he took me mere days before we broke up and sat at the table on the front porch. I've come dangerously close to car accidents when the ghost of that embattled couple catches me off-guard there. The window tables at Chino Latino will never cease to draw my eye, an old Lizzie trying to cheer up her depressed boyfriend with s'mores and the cheesiest jokes. And Culver's...Culver's will forever be the road trip food that conjures the old two of us, leaving our ButterBurgers and chicken tender memories along I-94 en route to weddings, football games, training.

Crave still echoes for me with the devil-may-care laughter of my mother, godmother, sister and cousins on a girls' day that included one too many lemon drop shots. Pizzeria Lola will always trigger memories of cat plates and photo booths and my dad's "lack of a sweet tooth." 

The corner booth in the bar at the Smack Shack is redolent with memories of Kaitlin, a bartender with a sense of humor, and a coloring-book kids' menu placemat. 

It's the apartments, though, that are the true graveyards for me. Every time I drive past Laurel Village, I count down the corner windows from the roof, 25 down to 19, and look to see if the lights are on. Sometimes I swear I can see my past self out of the corner of my eye. Biting back tears of frustration with EY and letting that view...god, that view...be the balm that soothed the angst of a brand-new stab at adulthood. Lit up for a party that brought the weirdest, most electric mixes of people together. 

Or that shithole on the corner of Nicollet and First...the white-washed brick, the vagrants drifting across the street. The rows of tall, narrow windows, behind which I know the radiator squeaks and the floorboards squeak and the faucets all squeak. The streaky windows I peered through, trying to spot my apartment in their vista because I was so besotted with the boy who came up behind me and hugged me close and made me think this was forever. 

222 is still the only place I know I'll always see myself. Leaning up against the corner of the railing on that rooftop deck. Hot pink gym shorts on, taking a day of actual PTO to "finish up the move." Waiting anxiously for him to get home so we could swim and decide where to order takeout from--we hadn't unpacked all the way, the place was too new to cook there. I remember the feeling of the concrete burning my bare feet, and watching the passers-by look up at me. In my mind, I was having a Princess Jasmine moment...being on the inside, with them looking up and wanting in too. Now I'm back on the outside and I know how much misery was on its way for that girl on the deck, and I'd never want to be anywhere but on the outside looking in. 

Sometimes I think about the ghosts I'm creating right now. I dream ahead to a day five, ten, fifty years down the road when I drive up to my building from work. I look at it through those far-away eyes and wonder who I'll see when I look at those windows on the top floor someday.

I like to think that I'll remember this place as the one where I put down my roots and took some time to grow back my wings. 

Sometimes, it's the little things.

These days, I get up around 5:45 to get to work by 7:30. For a girl known for bemoaning anything requiring a wake-up time in "the 5's," this is no mean feat. Lately, insomnia, weird dreams and general p.m. restlessness have made that alarm clock seem less and less tolerable, and cutting potent brewed coffee out of my morning routine (to help with migraines) isn't helping either. 

Today, though, I woke up happy. I took the time to straighten my hair. I applied eyeliner and wore a favorite blouse-skirt-ballet flats combo. My mom packed a lunch that looks pretty damn delicious (no, I am not in elementary school; yes, my mom packs my lunch these days; yes, I am aware of how lucky I am). I had a few spare minutes to chat with my parents before leaving for work, and I think we're going to do something fun in St. Paul after I'm off the clock for the day. When I left the house, it was bright enough for sunglasses, and traffic seemed to be clipping along a little faster than usual. 

And then, joy of all joys, my song came on Cities 97. You totally know what I'm talking about, right? The one song that you can recognize from the first four counts and that instantly fills your entire insides with happiness...an auditory memory trigger, maybe, that throws you back to a place or time or moment of significance. Or maybe a song you've just loved for so long it's worked its way into those moments by accident. Either way, it's YOUR song.

For me, it's The New Radicals, "You Get What You Give." My first boyfriend used it in a high school speech video, and I just instantly adored it. Since then, I've played it on every single major event day...high school graduation, the day I made the marching band, the day I left for London, the day I got my job offers, the morning of college graduation. It's going to be my alarm clock on the morning of my someday-maybe-wedding, guys. That's how deeply I adore that song. 

And so I did what any rational 25-year old girl would do. I cranked up my car stereo to 40, I rolled down all four windows (good hair day be damned!), I opened the sunroof and I had a straight-up seat-dancing, hand-gesturing, singing-at-the-top-of-my-lungs jam sesh. In that three minute span, I just kind of decided I was going to be happy, whether my happiness was construed as hyperbole or not. Because you DO get what you give in life, and I'm never going to give up on giving everyone a little bit of sunshine. Why the hell not? 

101 in 1001 #79: Redesign my blog.

Welcome to the new and improved MinneapoLiz! I'm so excited to officially check the first item off my 101 in 1001 list, and thrilled that it's one I can see the effects of every day. When I started this blog, I was so utterly clueless about web design and user friendliness...not to mention I had no idea how Squarespace, my hosting platform, worked. Needless to say, the result of my cluelessness was a lot of poking around, messing things up and attempting to customize things I definitely didn't have the skill to customize. Ultimately, I ended up with a functional platform to write on, and as I learned more, I was able to expand the site a bit...but the more and more I looked at what I had created, the less I liked its aesthetic. 

I'm a big blog reader. On an average day, I check out probably a dozen different sites for updates, and as I grew less satisfied with my own blog's design, I started paying more attention to others' blogs. The consistent elements I noticed were clean lines, white space, and a consistent layout across pages. With that in mind, I checked out some of Squarespace's templates to see how I could customize. I settled on the "Beatrice" layout for its use of the elements mentioned above (and because the sample site was gorrrgeous, but I digress). 

Once I got started, I had a shockingly easy time customizing the template the way I wanted it! The new header, addition of the sidebar and archives to the blog, and expanded visibility across pages makes me so happy...as do the pops of pink through the links! Now I'm feeling extra-inspired to keep checking things off the list and, more importantly, keep writing. 

Happy Friday, campers--have a great weekend!

Dirty Little Secrets

In the spirit of full disclosure: 

-Watching "The Bachelor/ette" makes me believe in love, even knowing how cheesy and fake and contrived it is. Ditto romantic comedies and occasional engagement ring/baby commercials. 

-I get a lot of very shallow, bitchy satisfaction from the fact that my ACT score is higher than every one of my ex-boyfriends. 

-One day right before I left my old Big 4 job, I was the only one at a client site, so I gave myself a manicure and watched "The Biggest Loser" for like three hours. And still left at 4pm. 

-I accidentally stole a book from my college bookstore once. I was reading it there between classes, ended up running late and, without thinking, popped it in my backpack and left. I did go back and return it...but only after I finished it. 

-When I get stressed, impatient or distracted, I pick and scrape at my cuticles and the skin around my thumbnails, sometimes until my hands bleed. I don't know why, but I've done it my whole life and it never really seems to stop no matter how hard I try. 

-Lately I've been terrified that I'm unlovable and doomed to die alone, not just in a sad post-breakup way, but in a very real, solidly certain fashion. It's gotten to the point where I've browsed the Humane Society's website on more than one occasion for a cat to adopt. 

-I worry about what other people think of me to the point of obsession, and I'm almost always afraid I'm boring.