I don't know what happens in July. Or June, or May, or any of the other really nice summery months. They just like, go somewhere, and I get kind of anxious that I'm not enjoying my deck, or the hipster lights that I hung out there, or my flip-flops enough. The inner monologue in my head gets all snappy and is like, "girl you better get grateful and light those sparklers you bought last week because tick-friggin-tock. Summer's 'bout over."

My inner monologue doesn't have an accent or anything, even though it would be kind of cool if it did. But it does have the over confidence of someone who hides behind a computer screen to throw some real talk around.

I'm getting really carried away here. The point is summer is slipping by and damn it, doesn't it always?

***

So lately -

If you don't follow my instagram ramblings - lucky you. Just kidding, kind of. Anyway, Ry and I watched this documentary a few weeks ago and it made me A.) physically ill and B.) different. We gave up the meat industry cold turkey (get it?!) and we drink cashew milk now.

Cashew milk is kind of gross, so I'm on the hunt for a good substitute, but I've eagerly picked up cooking plant based dinners, and it's kind of okay.

I feel like I have this opportunity with Duke, you know? He's perfect right now. His little body is perfect. There's no addiction to sugar, no cholesterol in his tiny arteries, no carb habit -- we can really set the stage here. So I'm thinking that if God didn't make it, we're not eating it. The one thing I really learned and maybe disturbed me more than all the antibiotic power pumped, ammonia scrubbed chicken carcasses I saw, is that we live in this culture that the food industry that feeds us literal garbage is financially supporting the organizations that we trust to tell us what's healthy, which feels like a conflict of interest to me.

I was walking around the grocery store earlier this week and I get it now, what it feels like to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist. I had my eyes all narrowed up and just imagined being tricked by everything I buy. Like it's all semantics, you know? I read this juice box that said verbatim "20% less sugar than leading sports drinks" which is true, technically, but an 8-ounce serving still has 8 grams of sugar. I mean, I guess we all have a perfect right to massage the language, but the opposite of that is an obligation to be a conscious consumer.

***

So, I'm turning 29 in a few days. Get ready for me to get emotional.

Seriously though, this feels like an important birthday. I have one more year before I turn 30, which doesn't really scare me that much, maybe because it's not here yet, but I do have things I'd like to accomplish in my twenties. Only 367 days left and my goal list is growing, but the first one is to not get overwhelmed because truly, the line you cross on a birthday is an invisible one.

***

Happy Sunday, folks.