A couple months ago, I came up with a little mantra of sorts.

When presented with the choices of action or inaction, always choose action.

This phrase came into play during one of my stints of temporary unemployment.  As anyone who’s ever been without work for a time can tell you, it’s easy to find yourself without a forward trajectory; it starts with sleeping in entirely too late, and ends when you realize that you’re able to list Bravo’s Tuesday lineup starting at 9am.  I found myself spending all day doing a million little things, none with any great purpose or meaning, and when Kyle came home at night and asked me what I did today, I found that it didn’t really seem like much.  “Oh, you know, stuff,” became my standard answer.

So in order to try and break myself out of this rut, I started taking walks everyday.  Little jaunts through town (as seen here) that got me out of the house, into the sunshine, exercising a little, and thinking about something besides Real Housewives of New Jersey.  Of course, as the days got hotter and the walks lost some of their sense of adventure, the Lazy crept back in with its good friend Excuses, and it became harder to make myself put on shoes and walk downtown.

Enter the mantra.

And it worked.  As part of my new mindset, I was choosing action, which meant going on that walk even though it was a billion degrees outside.  And oddly enough, I found my new mantra coming into play in a lot of other expected and unexpected ways.  Decisions like:

*Whether to take the long way home from my walk of whether to take the shortcut home.

*Whether to clean up the kitchen right after dinner or continue sitting on my ass and watching the Daily Show.

*Whether I should try making apple butter because we have a million apples leftover from apple picking, even though there’s only the two of us and I don’t know how to can.

*Whether I can pull off flats with my leggings and mini dress because my gray boots finally fell apart completely.

*Whether I should wait to make the work phone call that I’m totally dreading because I’m pretty sure this guy is going to yell at me, but really needs to happen sooner rather than later.

*Whether I should get out of bed and make banana pancakes or stay in my awesomely warm bed and snooze for another hour.

And surprisingly, this simple mantra has been enough for even my willpower.  I find myself more and more do that thing that I always say that I “should” do but don’t.  Of course, it doesn’t work all the time, and even if it does, I’ve found that there are decisions to be made in which my mantra should not be applied.  Decisions like:

*Whether the cuteness of the hamster would be enough to outweigh how amazingly pissed Kyle would be for bringing it home.

*Whether I can eat a whole block of cheese in an afternoon.

*Whether I need another totally adorable jersey sundress.

*Whether it would be funny to anyone but me if I dropped a cat on Kyle while he’s asleep.

*Whether I should go to the bar wearing one of Kyle’s old hockey jerseys and leggings.

*Whether I should explain to the jackass who just spilled beer on my purse my theories about his heritage, and what his future might hold if he comes within 5 feet of me again.

So it’s not exactly airtight.  A little common sense should be exercised.  But so far life in action is pretty fun.

(But oddly devoid of capes.)

So, last weekend was Travers.  If you are the majority of the population, this means nothing to you.  If you are the part of the population that was in Saratoga Springs last weekend, this means that you are still hungover.

Travers Stakes is Saratoga’s Kentucky Derby.  It’s a Class One race with a $1,000,000 purse, and to this area, it’s a big motherfucking deal.  45,000 people were at the race this year, and at night the streets exploded.  The Saturday of Travers is literally the biggest party night of the entire year for Saratoga Springs, and Kyle and I weren’t about to miss it.

Holy.  Shit.

Crazy fun.  Crazy, crazy fun.

There was beer.  There was loud music, and dancing, and singing at the top of my lungs.  There were some very late nights and some very early mornings.  There were walks home that were both much longer and much shorter than they should have been.  There was a lot of beer.

It was fucking amazing.

I noticed a peculiar phenomenon, however, in all our bar hopping.  It was weird.  I first noticed it at our favorite bar, Putnum Den.  There was a group of three people, two girls and a guy on the dance floor, and they were doing an odd group dance.  One of them would bounce an imaginary ball around, pretending to hit it with their knee, their head, roll it across their arms, until finally they would make an exaggerated throw of the ball to the next person.  That person would hackey the imaginary ball around for a while before passing it to the next person, and so on and so on.  It looked sort of like a exercise we would have done in an acting class.  Except in the middle of a bar.

And the bizarre part?  I spotted this Imaginary Ball Dance being performed on three different occasions by three individual groups of people.  In two different bars on two different nights.  It’s like all of a sudden all the cool kids are doing the Imaginary Ball Dance.  (Yes, I know that “Imaginary Ball Dance” is a stupid name for a dance.  A pan of fudge to a better name.)

A large part of me wanted to laugh hysterically at their ridiculous dance.  It was childish and awkward and a little epileptic.  But a smaller part of me wanted to join their circle.  They were so joyful in their movement, and each toss of this imaginary ball created an instant and intense connection between the tosser and the recipient.  Even in the two mid-twenties guys with leather jackets and gold jewelry, the movement was beautiful as they lobbed an invisible football back and forth across a packed dance floor.

But I didn’t join their circle, because that would introduce a level of awkwardness beyond even my level of comfort.

Rest in peace, little dude.

Who’s Lil’ Ralphy?

Lil’ Ralphy is the mouse that somehow made its way into the hallway of our apartment building.  At first I wanted to give him to the cats to see what they would do.  But something about the way he sat there with his paws folded, staring up at me, reminded me of the mouse on the cover of The Mouse and the Motorcycle.

And suddenly I wanted to keep him.  Kyle insisted that we let him outside and started herding him towards the door, but I had other plans.  I would catch him and make him a little nest in a shoe box lined with bits of fabric.  We would become friends, and eventually he’d become friends with the cats, too, and he would let me pet him.  And I’d feed him peanut butter sandwiches and make him a helmet from half a ping pong ball and a rubber band.  And get him a motorcycle…

Unfortunately I was so busy thinking about all the awesome things Lil’ Ralphy (as he was called in my head) and I would do together that I failed to notice that Lil’ Ralphy had stopped on the stairs.  And I kept going.

And I stepped on Lil’ Ralphy.

I knew what I’d done as soon as I’d done it.  I shrieked, and Kyle said, “Oh god, Stephanie, you didn’t.”  And I looked down, and there was Lil’ Ralphy on his back, with one leg kicking wildly.  Luckily, I’d picked up my foot before I’d put my whole weight on him, but at the very least he had a broken leg.  And I didn’t know what to do.  Kyle scooped up the poor little mouse and deposited him into a bush, where hopefully he’d be safe from predators.  And we went and got ice cream.

Hopefully Lil’ Ralphy’s mouse family was able to find him, and nurse him back to health.  Maybe outfit him with a little black cast that all his friends could sign with a silver sharpie.  And he’d tell all the mouse chics at the bar that he totally kicked our asses before one of us fell on him.

So here’s to Lil’ Ralphy, a badass motherfuckin’ mouse.  At least in my head.