My Next 30 Years

This past weekend I turned the big 3-0 so I spent a lot of time reflecting. Where my life is going, where it's been, changes I want to make, etc. Oh and I ate. A lot. I ate the entire world. And I annoyed the absolute crap out of all of my Facebook and Instagram and Twitter followers by posting pictures of my meals in all of their heart-attack-inducing glory. We partied with our friends all weekend and I drank like a fish. Like a 30 year old fish. But back to the reflecting...

I'm certainly not mourning the loss of my youth but I have to say, I honestly thought I would have life figured out by this age. Yet here I am. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I still don't always make mature decisions. I still speak before thinking and talk out of turn and I'm not nearly as responsible as I thought I would be by now.

I do have a few goals in mind for the next few years and I'd like to list them here. I'm a firm believer that whenever you share your goals with others, it just makes you that much more motivated to achieve them. Because if no one ever knows that you intend to run a marathon, let's say, it's a lot easier to fail in privacy of your own mind.

I'm sort of tired of failing.

1. My biggest goal, pun totally intended, is to lose half my body weight. This goal is rather involved because in order to achieve it, I will need to quit drinking so damned much. And if I quit drinking so much, I will quit smoking so much because I only smoke when I drink. This would be an all over makeover, mind, body and soul. It will probably be the most difficult of all my goals because I have such an addictive personality and I have trouble understanding that I don't need something more than me to feel happy. I have trouble with the idea that I don't need to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or eat unhealthy foods to be happier, but I know it's true. This is obviously really 3 goals but I'm trying keep it neat here for all you type-As and keep the list to 10.

2. I want to travel. I want to visit my dad in El Salvador, to finally visit Parral, to leave this continent, God willing. I'd like to see New York City and Los Angeles for shits and giggles. I want to get my husband on an airplane and to show him the ocean for the first time.

3. I want to have a baby in the next few years. This isn't a goal per say but really just where I see our lives going. People ask me all the time if I would have a baby in Juárez because I think they assume my son isn't here for safety reasons of some sort. I think I've cleared that up in the past but I still get asked. I would hope that God will bless us with one more little one when the time is right.

4. I want to write a book. I have started writing the book but never really taken the process too seriously. It's time to buckle down and bust it out.

5. I want to pay off my credit card debt. I know I have spent the last few years whining about our debt and how much it weighs us down. We aren't fancy people and aren't really into fancy things, but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the massive debt that we've accumulated since moving to Mexico. When we didn't have money for gas or groceries, we put it on a credit card. When the car broke down, we put it on a credit card. When we wanted to visit our kids, we put it on a credit card. And the creditors in the US totally let you suck yourself deeper and deeper into debt. It's disgusting. When your debt to credit ratio is high, they send you constant applications for more and more cards offering another thousand here, another thousand there. And then when you're finally drowning in the debt, you start getting pay day or title loan offers. We're done with that. We cut up all of our cards last month and a person who can only be described as an angel has helped us devise a plan to pay everything off. We should be debt free by the end of 2016 at the latest.

6. I want to learn a 3rd language. Maybe French or Mandarin. I'm not sure which would be more useful in life but I'm going to start looking into it. I can already count to 50 in Japanese (thanks Mr. Inouye) so maybe I should start there?

7. I want to learn how to care less about what people think. Something that annoys me so much about my personality is that I am constantly worried about how my actions affect my friends. If I've hurt someone's feelings, if I left someone out, if I said the wrong thing. It's ridiculous because I find myself obsessing over situations unnecessarily because it's likely that the person I'm so concerned about doesn't give two shits about my feelings. I'm hoping that this is something that will get easier with age.

8. I want to buy a house. This is actually a much more attainable goal than it may seem thanks to Infonavit. Infonavit it a federal mortgage program in Mexico and many employees earn credit with Infonavit after working somewhere for a certain period of time. Raymundo has enough credit now to purchase a modest (i.e. small as fuck) home now and we're tired of paying someone else's mortgage. We won't be able to buy new in the area that we want to live in so it's really just a matter of waiting until something tiny and falling apart goes on the market in the right location.

9. I want to get a green card for my husband. Despite everything that's happened and despite my love for Mexico, I still want that for him more than anything. For us. So that we can feel financially secure, so that we can travel freely from country to country to see our families, so that one of us doesn't have to do back-breaking labor for 50 bucks a week.

10. And lastly, I really want to learn every word to Juvenile's Back That Ass Up until I can karaoke it like a boss. No explanation needed.