I've just had a lot going on.
Well...not really, but kind of.
I'm still trying to get into touch with my future (I hope) trainer. We've been playing phone-tag because for some reason I accidentally left her a message giving her my mothers cell phone number instead of mine. I was nervous and after I hung up I though, "Oh crap. I'm an idiot."
I'm nervous to talk to her in depth too, really. I hate admitting to people how much of an idiot I am and I've been doing it a lot lately. I'm kind of all...idioted out. Hopefully she will call tomorrow, or I will call her. Either way I'm going to try to talk to her tomorrow.
In other news, I finally heard back from the therapeutic riding center and I start volunteering Monday! As soon as I get a schedule for my training, get out of the woods with all this random day babysitting and find a steady job, I am going to sign up to work there on a regular basis. For now though, I'm mostly going to get training. I coupled this with the riding lessons because I thought I would probably be able to learn from both of them as I go.
Also, I have boots! I have to admit...they're ugly. I knew when I was getting into horses that everything wasn't going to be haute couture, but I still can't help but be slightly disappointed. I mean, don't get me wrong, they serve their purpose, and they're nice and reasonably expensive. But would I have bought them if I wasn't riding? Nope. I really wanted the extreme adorableness that is knee-highs but...$232.89?!? (and that was the cheap pair!) I'm still too new to this to unload that kind of cash.
Hm...what else...Oh, it took me forever to find a place that even sells riding boots, or pants for that matter. EVERYTHING that is reasonably close caters to the Western rider, not the English rider, which is annoying, I don't want to buy everything over the internet! And heaven help me, I am not into the Western thing at all. As hard as it was for me to buy those boots I would have bought a thousand more if it meant never having to buy some sequined, frayed out, button up, cowboy shirt-thing. Or tight ass, acid-wash jeans.
But I have been practicing what general good conformation looks like. I found about two dozen horses that just appeared in the field next to the club house and spent the afternoon sizing them up. The fact that they had a barbed wire fence around them was enough to tell me that they were probably somewhat shitty horses. I'm an idiot and I know you don't keep horses in a barbed wire fence (They spook, go running into a fence they can't see very well and are shredded to bits), so the person who owns these horses must be a REAL moron and thus, probably doesn't know what decent conformation looks like either. I was tempted to pet them but kept away mostly. I didn't like them straining their noses and getting them scratched up through the fence.
Anyway, I feel like I'm more rambling now than being informative.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Away we go
Yesterday only cemented what I want to do with my life.
My college visit went really well, even if it kind of didn't. It still did. Let me explain.
I've been trying to find direction in my life for quite some time, oh ten years or so. This year marks the year that most of my high school classmates are graduating from college. Where am I? Most certainly not among the sea of caps and gowns. I'm in my parents basement. Literally.
So this year, instead of feeling more motivated than ever, I was just feeling much more discouraged. Where did I go wrong? Well, that's a story for another day.
Fast forward to today, and what I hope becomes the start of something very different. I've been working at this, struggling to find direction and through all the work I've put in to it, I think I've finally found a dream to follow. A dream I never knew it would be possible to follow.
My whole life I prayed that I would want to focus my ambition (yes, it's in there somewhere!) on something that would make me wealthy enough to one day work with horses, or provide me the ability to own horses. It even became a secret obsession as I measured potential mates by the same standard. ("Would we be able to afford a horse on his income?") Sure, I would have just worked with horses directly, but my family knew nothing about the culture, and didn't have the funds to immerse me in it either when I was younger. So I held on to the hope that someday, I would be wealthy enough (financially stable enough) to immerse myself, but I had to find some sort of career that could get me there.
So still spending years of being unsure, and uncomfortable with every potential option I had before me, I had yet to make a decision. I didn't think I could be good enough at anything because I simply didn't have passion for anything else. And now, at twenty-two years old, I would surely look like a fool and never have the experience behind me of someone the same age who was put on a horse when they were six.
But it was one day during the summer that I was driving around Kansas City and it struck me. I had paused in front of the Kansas City Life Insurance building, it's a nice building, columns, stone lions out front, wide steps. A very grand looking building. Now, it's no Sears Tower or other outlandish architectural marvel, just a nice building. But someone designed that building. And the someone who designed the building probably wasn't doing it when he was six years old either, yet he made a functional and beautiful building. How did he go about doing that? Well, probably college.
And there was my answer. I needed to find a college that would teach me to be good with horses, then I could skip this passion-less business of finding a career to fund my wanted lifestyle. And so, after scanning a huge list of colleges that offered degrees (usually just associates, sometimes only certificates) I finally found one that offered a four year program, and it was only 2 1/2 hours away from my home.
THAT'S what I would do. I would go there and they would teach me everything I needed to know, so naturally I scheduled a campus tour, which was yesterday and I became ambitious and discouraged and ambitious all over again.
My college visit went really well, even if it kind of didn't. It still did. Let me explain.
I've been trying to find direction in my life for quite some time, oh ten years or so. This year marks the year that most of my high school classmates are graduating from college. Where am I? Most certainly not among the sea of caps and gowns. I'm in my parents basement. Literally.
So this year, instead of feeling more motivated than ever, I was just feeling much more discouraged. Where did I go wrong? Well, that's a story for another day.
Fast forward to today, and what I hope becomes the start of something very different. I've been working at this, struggling to find direction and through all the work I've put in to it, I think I've finally found a dream to follow. A dream I never knew it would be possible to follow.
My whole life I prayed that I would want to focus my ambition (yes, it's in there somewhere!) on something that would make me wealthy enough to one day work with horses, or provide me the ability to own horses. It even became a secret obsession as I measured potential mates by the same standard. ("Would we be able to afford a horse on his income?") Sure, I would have just worked with horses directly, but my family knew nothing about the culture, and didn't have the funds to immerse me in it either when I was younger. So I held on to the hope that someday, I would be wealthy enough (financially stable enough) to immerse myself, but I had to find some sort of career that could get me there.
So still spending years of being unsure, and uncomfortable with every potential option I had before me, I had yet to make a decision. I didn't think I could be good enough at anything because I simply didn't have passion for anything else. And now, at twenty-two years old, I would surely look like a fool and never have the experience behind me of someone the same age who was put on a horse when they were six.
But it was one day during the summer that I was driving around Kansas City and it struck me. I had paused in front of the Kansas City Life Insurance building, it's a nice building, columns, stone lions out front, wide steps. A very grand looking building. Now, it's no Sears Tower or other outlandish architectural marvel, just a nice building. But someone designed that building. And the someone who designed the building probably wasn't doing it when he was six years old either, yet he made a functional and beautiful building. How did he go about doing that? Well, probably college.
And there was my answer. I needed to find a college that would teach me to be good with horses, then I could skip this passion-less business of finding a career to fund my wanted lifestyle. And so, after scanning a huge list of colleges that offered degrees (usually just associates, sometimes only certificates) I finally found one that offered a four year program, and it was only 2 1/2 hours away from my home.
THAT'S what I would do. I would go there and they would teach me everything I needed to know, so naturally I scheduled a campus tour, which was yesterday and I became ambitious and discouraged and ambitious all over again.
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