Don't be boring.

There is so much to do and so much more to see on this big green planet, so why be content? I aspire to one day have the power of spontaneity, and I don't mean that by definition. There is a reason that relationship/marriages are crashing and burning at an record breaking rate. We as people are attracted to the fire inside another person and what they truly have to offer. A "person" is 1% looks and 99% "person"laity, 

The Honeymoon Stage--

Isn't it ironic that "The Honeymoon Stage" has nothing to do with marriage or a honeymoon at all. By the time someone actually gets married, 9 times out of 10 the honeymoon stage has already come and gone. This part of a relationship is so critical and important but it shouldn't be a stage, it should be a lifetime. The reason we fall in love with someone and fall in love so hard during this stage is because we can truly see who a person wants to be and what they have to offer.  We play all of our cards to show this other person that this is all we can be but what happens when we don't have anymore cards to play? 

They/we should rename this the "Don't fall in love with me just yet stage", we take all of our past experiences and use our knowledge of what worked and what didn't and we express all of that in this stage. The relationships that advance are the ones where we can continue to make things grow and become brighter. Living content is NO WAY to ever live, thats what we don't eat at the same place everyday (unless its Chipotle because "Chipotles my life") we always try new foods and see new places. We need to use the same method when it comes to love. 

Take your eyes off your DAMN phone---

Now anyone who knows me knows that I am on my phone more than a 16 year old who just discovered Snapchat, but its still something to be addressed. If there is one thing that I wish was never invented it would be the modern "smart" phone. Isn't it funny that we call them "Smart Phones" when everyday we get more addicted and "DUMB" just by picking them up. We have so much at our fingertips that we lose the ability to look around where we live. What is the first thing we do when we see something beautiful? We pull out or phones and take a picture of it and share it to everyone else in the world. My goal is to have 5 breathtaking moments this summer and keep it in my heart not in my camera roll. Maybe you should do the same :)

I think that this is the biggest downfall of being a millennial, and also the biggest fear I have for whats to come. When we go to a mall and see all the kids walking around  and they are all on their phones or taking pictures in the full length body mirror inside Forever 21. Keep in mind that just a short while ago, we were those kids and we didn't have the ability to do this. Our cell phones had to be flipped open and their primary use was to call mom or dad to pick us up. It's crazy to see how much has changed in just 10 years. In 10 years whats going to be different? We take for grantred that we live in such a beautiful world. We live 20 miles away from Red Rocks, one of the most beautiful concert venues in the entire world, and just because of my phone I know exactly whats happening there EVERY single day. If you consider Snapchat and Instagram, I have been to every concert at Red Rocks for three years straight. 

Travel----

Now I have said this time and time again, I think one of the most amazing things we have the ability and freedom to do is travel. I don't mean that we should save up money for 6 months and backpack through Asia (well I would love to do that) , but go somewhere... ANYWHERE that you have never been before. Traveling isn't just about sights, it's smells, sounds, tastes and falling in love with what god created for us. There is SO (<- not even close to the best word to describe) much for us to see out there. I promise you that it won't cost you a leg and an arm (i flipped that around) to put on a pair of shorts and some shoes and drive 30 miles in a direction your afraid of and eat a restaurant that you can't pronounce. 

The Long Story Short-------

Don't fall into a pattern, discover inside your body mind and soul that there is ALWAYS something more to be had. Take a different route to work/school, eat something that smells bad, listen to music that might scare you, basically DON'T BE BORING. 

Single and Ready To... Love Myself Again

Break ups are a fickle bitch, now I could go into a long rant about how being a millennial and trying to create a standardized relationship is so hard...  but we have all read those cliche and silly posts and this is just not that time. At the beginning of this long and painful process that we call "going through a break up". It was quite honestly one of the scariest and hardest things I have encountered in a very long time. At the start I didn't want to leave my home, I didn't eat regularly,  I cried to my friends and family, but then I started to think about what was going on. Like i said above, we call this "GOING THROUGH a break up". Meaning that this is just something I'm GOING THROUGH. We don't call it "dying in a break up" even though there were a lot of times that I felt like I could never be happy again. I had to keep repeating to myself that I would overcome this. 

Which brings me to the meaning of this entire post. I truly believe that God gave me this break up as an opportunity to focus on one specific thing, myself. When we fall in love, like madly and deeply in love. Then we only know how to find that love when we are with that person. As humans  (Baby Boomers, Millennials, Generation X... Yes we are all humans) we are not designed to be alone, but we still need to maintain the love we have for ourselves. If we give all of our love away then when something like "going through a break up" happens it will only prolong the entire process. 

Social Media : 

One piece of information that I obtained from being in a 4 year relationship and then abruptly going through a break up is that there are two completely different faces to a relationship. There is your physical and mental face that only your close friends and family see on a day to day basis. Then there is your social media face, IG Facebook or any other social media that I used to show the people following me how "perfect" our relationship is/was. Now don't get me wrong our life was lavish and amazing and I am the type of person to do crazy, spontaneous and sweet things. And in turn I felt the need to show the entire world that I was doing these things for her. Now that I have time to sit and think about every post I had made, maybe thats something I could have toned down. NO ONE cares about if you buy your girlfriend flowers and Starbucks and surprise her at work, the only two people who should care about an action like that would be the only two people involved. When we make these posts to "show off" to everyone following us, it defeats the entire purpose of doing that cute and sweet thing. Relationships are no longer sacred and private, we all try to compete with what we see. She would always come home and be like "did you see that cute thing that (so & so) did" which caused me to result in an action to subconsciously show (so&so) that we could do the same thing. We would put on this perfect social media face for everyone to see, but the immediate people around us could see through that. Our relationship was by far no where near to "perfect". But we tried to prove that to anyone and everyone else.

Every morning i have to wake up to Facebook telling me "You have memories with (ex)" ...its literally a relationship graveyard. I really do aspire to be one of those people that can give up their social media, but for some odd reason I can't find it in me to do that (yet). I strongly believe that some of the most true and honest relationships are the ones where we don't see constant posts about dates and surprises. That is something that I need to keep telling my self, and when and if I decide  to wander into something new then I am going to make a promise to myself that I need to tone down exposing my relationship to the world.

Everyday is a new day filled with new opportunities, I live by one core value above anything else, and that is "POSITIVITY". Anyone who knows me understands that I try to make everyday as uplifting and positive as possible. Although some days have been extremely harder than others, I will never let anything negative creep into my life and change my outlook on life. Some days are going to be miserable, but there is ALWAYS something that is telling you it's going to get better. 

I look at this entire break up as a new chapter in my life. It is overall one of the biggest learning experiences I have ever encountered. I truly believed that I was going to marry this girl, and this sadly was the year I was going to do it. Now I think about what if, what if I would have proposed how much harder this would have been. Or what if I would have been married and I was going through a divorce, and that is the silver lining. I use the positivity that surrounds me to see the brighter side of things. There is not a day, hour or minute that goes by where I don't think about her. I have learned that it's okay.  

Comminication: 

I believe that communication is one of the strongest and fulfilling attributes a person can obtain. Which is also what makes things so much harder. I used to wake up everyday and send a good morning text, it was something that I have always done. It shows that other person that your thinking of them. I sent those good morning texts for years, EVERYDAY! So when I had to stop doing that it's what really started to make me crumble. Through this break up we continued to communicate with each other, which may or may not have been the right desision. Yes I love to still talk to that person everyday, but in the long run is that going to benefit me? I'm not sure. We have recently started to not communicate at all, I still find myself drafting up book long texts in the middle of the night and then deleting them. I think that we can use more than our words to tell someone that we are thinking of them. I don't doubt that there is a single day that she's not thinking about me and vice versa. And for right now I think that's all we need.  

The Long Story Short: 

Some days will be hard, and even on the hardest days find that one thing that is in your heart that will make that bad day just a little bit better. I believe that through the power of family and friends and a positive outlook on everyday we can prevail past the deepest darkest days. 

Judy

So this is just a quick little story about something that happened to me today. 

It's a beautiful day out, I got quite a bit done, washed my truck did some laundry and picked up my house. While I was out and about I got hungry and decided to get some pizza, so there is a pizza joint down the street from my house and it was closed last week due to some sort of renovations or something and I was really craving it. This pizza place isn't a 'sit down' restaurant its a fast casual place, kind of like Chipotle. You order your pizza and follow the person who is making your pizza down the line and they add ingredients. Well, I walk in and get up to the counter and place my order, keep in mind that I ordered the 'Red Vine' Pizza and when the guy asks for my name I say "Brandon" and he repeats to me "Brad?" and I say clearly to him ... "No sir, Brandon" and he crosses off the "Brad" he had originally wrote and writes "B-R-A-Y-D-E-N". Whatever, no big deal right? Well this was only the beginning to the most awkward lunch I have ever had. 

So after you add all your ingredients they put your pizza in the oven and call out your name when its ready. Sounds fairly simple right? So I pay, get my drink and a fork for my Caesar Salad (no, I didn't get a napkin, because I don't use them). So I'm casually sitting down by myself eating my salad scrolling through IG and FB. I then hear "(mumbled name) Red Vine, (mumbled name) Red Vine!!" and I obviously think its mine because the name had been crossed off and re-writen with a different, incorrect name so maybe the oven guy was confused which is why the name was mumbled. So I walk up and he asks me if I needed any olive oil, which I responded "Of course what am I , a little girl?" LOL, just kidding I didn't say that. But, I did get olive oil. I take the pizza back to my table and take two or three bites and then I hear "Brandon Red Vine, Brandon!"... "Brandon, Red Vine" I wish I would have seen the own look on my face. So I look down and sure enough written on the parchment paper, in clear cursive english, it says "Judy"

Well I think to myself, well Judy is just gonna have to eat my pizza because they are the same thing, but then I remember that I added pepperoni. So i'm just sitting there eating the pizza acting like I don't remember my name and of course the person literally sitting right next to me is getting upset because her name hasn't been called yet. Well, I clearly knew that this disgruntled customer sitting next to me was Judy and she walks up to the name calling guy, and says "I have been waiting for quite sometime"  and then a back-up name caller says "Brandon, I have a Red Vine here for you, Brandon". While all this is happening around me I'm just sitting there in silence with this silly grin on my face eating the pizza. I don't know why I didn't get up to apologize to the name caller and say that I accidentally took the wrong pizza. Maybe I had this subconscious fear that all the employees and everyone else in the restaurant would start making fun of me, or maybe the name caller guy and the back-up name caller guy were gonna forcibly throw me into the dumpster out back. So instead of saying anything I sat there, in silence while two grown men repeated out loud "Brandon, Brandon!" and with each "Brandon" they annunciated each letter a little more. I hear the manager get called to the register, and he had comp'd Judy her meal but she had to come back to her seat and wait for her next pizza and as she walks by my seat, I could feel her eyes stare at my (her) pizza and I quickly moved the Caesar salad over the very neatly written "Judy" that was still there. Although I don't think she saw the name on my paper, you could clearly tell I was Brandon. I scrolled through the feed of my social media and I could feel her staring at me. Each time I started to look away from my phone I could feel her eyes balls pierce my skin! She was not a happy camper. 

I brushed the crumbs onto the floor, grabbed a box and placed the remaining two slices of Judy's pizza into the box and left.

I guess you could call me some sort of a "gangster" after my actions today, or you can just call me Judy. 

--TheLongStoryShort.

Don't ever get caught if you accidentally take someone else's meal at a restaurant, and eat that meal as if it was your own. 

New York

What a crazy city.

Noisy, pricey and dirty; Those three words are what I would use for a 'long story short'.  New York has always been one of those places that I want to cross off of my list of places I NEED to see. Now that I look at that long list of places, NY is not only crossed off but it has a piece of electrical tape over it. Unless it's for a very short period of time I hope I to never set foot on that concrete fortress again.

The-Peeps

In a city filled with tourists 24/7 I can understand that working there is probably not a walk in the park (unless you are a walking tour guide in Central Park) but it was hard to find an ounce of kindness among people that you are constantly surrounded by. I am a positive filled person and even on my darkest saddest days I can always find a reason to smile, so It was hard for me to see why the people were so rude. We ate at some very nice restaurants where we were kind of expecting exceptional customer service based on the prices we saw on the menu. To our amazement, the customer services was not only not exceptional but mediocre at best. I am by no means a snobby or stuck up person but I know how I want to be treated when I sit down for dinner. 

In the five days we spent in the city we walked a total of 42 miles, which was just of half the commuting. We also took 15 Lyfts, 15 times we had stand out infront of a large building and, unbelievably, 15 times we had to ride in a car with a borderline sociopath. I have taken Lyfts in six different states and two other countries and this is the first time where I felt utterly uncomfortable. The drivers rarely spoke any English and when they did speak it was just the "hey, Brandon?" when we got into the vehicle and the head nod when we arrived to our destination if you consider that speaking. Most drivers wouldn't drop us off where we actually wanted to go, and not being from this state we had no idea where we were either. It was odd stepping out of the car and realizing we still had to walk around the corner or down the block to actually arrive at our final destination.

The--Views

This is not all negative things that happened, one thing that I enjoyed were the sights, there is so much to see. From the small to the very very large I enjoyed just walking around and seeing new things which is mainly why I love to travel. Something as simple as a unique bench in a park or something as intricate as the Freedom Tower at the WTC I could stop and take a picture and just enjoy being somewhere I have never been before. Prior to this trip I never knew how extremely big the Brooklyn Bridge really is, our plan was to maybe rent some bikes or walk across the bridge to but about 1/4 of the way we thought It would be better to turn around. Standing on such an iconic piece of American history was such a great feeling, the bride was built in the late 1800's and its crazy to think it still stands to this day.

Lady liberty; if you go to NY as a tourist I feel like you just have to see The Statute of Liberty although I knew about the history of the so called giant sculpture, it really isn't so 'giant' like I had thought. I pictures myself standing somewhere in the city and in the distance seeing her in all her glory. You would probably need some binoculars a medium size building to be able to see her from anywhere in the city. We took a short sixty minute cruise around Ellis Island and we got an up-close look at her.

Central Park; I would recommend if you go to NY to spend one or maybe two days within the confines of Central Park. There is so much to do and not being a native of NY it was kind of hard to wrap my mind around how large the park is. We walked around for a good hour and we had barley made a dent of things to do and see within the park. Everything felt so old and so new all at the same time. There are plaques and statues all around the park, and if I were to go back I would spend an entire day walking around looking at all the sculptures and plaques.

Times Square (aka. avoid this area); when doing research about where we wanted to stay we never read anything about avoiding this area, we really wanted to stay somewhere close to Times Square that way if we wanted to walk somewhere we wouldn't have to walk very far. <- MISTAKE. Times Square is literally something you can experience in one hour and I wish I would have know that before. The lights are breathtakingly beautiful and the buildings tower around you making you feel so small... Literally that's all I needed. Imagine a two lane road that's only five blocks long jam packed with 5 million people. Although I know its not true it felt like everyone around us were trying to go to the exact same place and if that doesn't sound busy enough, every 5 feet there was someone trying to sell me something. Being the millennial I am the last thing I would do is buy Broadway show tickets to a show that's been sold out for months from an 18 year old with five teeth and one shoe.

The---Price

Now don't all gang up on me at once, I knew that NY was 'expensive' I wasn't expecting dollar stores and discounted... everything. But I didn't know how expensive certain things were, ie. The Empire State Building cost $54 PP to take the elevator to the viewing area, which isn't even the top. Museums cost anywhere from $35-$50 PP, keep in mind this is for a museum that is maybe 2,000 sq ft with four exhibits. Now all that being said, the overall price for the trip quickly escalated day by day, and towards the end of the trip it wasn't about what we wanted to do or see anymore it was more about if it was worth it or not. $22 for coffee, $8 for the Lyft, $62 for lunch, $11 for the Lyft back, $112 for dinner... do we really want to see a Broadway show for $182 PP?

The---Price (GROUPON)

Groupon, Groupon , Groupon! My phone was constantly on the verge of dying and it wasn't from taking pictures and texting it was from looking for Groupons near me. The 9/11 Muesum was $27 PP which was fine because I really wanted to see it, but I found a Groupon for $22 for two admissions into the museum. I was constantly looking through the app, whether it was for food or sights or things to do.  Groupon is a great tool to find stuff to do and do it affordably!

The----Long Story Short

New York City was a hectic city filled with people, places to see and things to do. Being as this was my vacation with Tiffany I never felt like I was on vacation I felt like I was a tourist which is something that felt new to me. I never just sat down and felt relaxed, It was like I always had somewhere to be. For anyone with NY on their list of places to see, watch a video online.