Taking Stock

It's amazing how a group of complete strangers can give you a jump start on life.

In November, I went to the Young Women's Leadership Conference put on by the YWCA. It was excellent and worth the hundred bucks. Between the break out sessions on owning your own business and volunteering abroad, there was small talks about peer mentoring. Rather than having a mentor/mentee relationship, peer mentoring is about a group of people who are in somewhat similar stages of life and get together to talk about goals and how to achieve them in a supporting way. Seeing as I'm somewhat in a period of transition myself, I figured why not.

Went to the meeting the next week, met some women and now I have a mentoring group. We met 6 weeks ago to discuss what we wanted out of the group and set this week as the week we would set our goals.

It was with a little uneasiness that I walked up to Melinda's apartment on Wednesday. I'm shy and take a long time to warm up to people. I mean, the vast majority of my closest friends are from high school and that was 10 years ago. How on earth could I be frank with people I had only seen a couple times before? Well, the truth is, you can be more frank. I don't really care what these people think of me. I don't really want to be the greatest of friends with them. I want to give my goals, have constructive feedback and monitoring and I want to do the same thing for them. I don't tell all my goals to my friends because you get judgement about the goal or they will let you off if you slack. Friends can be selfish too. I asked a friend recently if I should go back to school or move to Ethiopia. She decided that I should go back to school because then I'd be around. And seeing as I'm always around myself, I figured she meant around her. Helpful.

So, I have set my goals. I just have to follow through with them. And I have a feeling I will, because these women will definitely call me to task if I don't. Which is good because I don't call myself to task, so I need someone who will do it.

The next night my mom, mom's friend, sister, sister's boyfriend and I went to see Michael Buble. Hello, crooner. I sat with Diana because Nadine and Arne had floor seats and my mom got to sit in the player's box (it was at a hockey rink) because she had recently fallen and tore the cartilage in her knee. So, my mom's friend and I sat, enjoyed, laughed (Buble is freakin' funny) and made fun of the lady behind us. You know the people who have conversations with the people on stage? Yeah, Michael would say something and she would reply like there wasn't a thousand people between her and the stage. Other than her, it was one of the best concerts I've ever been too. Got to love a hometown boy who sings about the Canucks during his scat session.

Today I went out for brunch with Jason and now am writing this, while the boys play WoW. Keeping busy is nice.

S.