Ok, so I know… it’s pretty much been an unfortunate amount of time since I last blogged. But I’ve really had a lot going on! So, I thought I would give you all a “life update” blog in case you were interested.

My last update was in May, so here’s what’s happened since then. Well, for starters… I bought a new car! Not a NEW new car, but a new to me car. And it’s actually ALMOST new, seeing as how it’s only a year old. I was driving a 2005 Mini Cooper convertible. Then, one day the convertible top broke on it. I took it in to get that and some other things fixed, and it looked like my extended warranty was going to pay for getting the convertible top fixed. But after almost a month of back and forth between the warranty company and the Mini dealership, the warranty company finally came back and refused to pay. It would have cost me $3,000+ to get the top fixed, along with about another $800 of repairs. Yikes! Now, I know that I could have either 1) gotten nothing fixed or 2) gotten only the other repairs done or 3) ponied up and paid to get the top fixed too, but really, I didn’t have the money to fix all of it at once. And I know how I am, and how it would start to bother me that the car was getting older and started to have other problems along with having a convertible with an unusable top. So… I ended up finding a (non-convertible) 2013 CPO (certified pre-owned) Mini at the dealership that I liked, so I traded in the old one. Here’s my new baby:

So there’s that. Life change #2… we also bought a house! Yep, after living in apartments together for 4+ years, Ricky and I decided we wanted to own something of our own instead of continuing to live in an apartment forever. After much searching and not finding what we wanted for the price we wanted, we were almost ready to give up, then with the help of a new realtor, we stumbled upon a place that we really love so far. It has 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a two-car garage, two floors, and a FABULOUS view from our front balcony (we also have a back patio and back balcony as well). We are loving almost everything about it. (I especially love that view from the balcony and having a much bigger kitchen to cook in!) So moving and unpacking are some other things that have kept us pretty busy.

Check out our fabulous view!

Among those and other changes and things we’ve had going on, I’ve been traveling for work and dealing with a few changes going on there as well. I flew to Charlotte for a week in May, flew back to Phoenix for Memorial Day week/weekend, then headed back to Charlotte for another week to finish up the planning and training we’d been doing there. But, I’m back home now and trying to get settled into the new house. I’ve finally gotten most things unpacked and in place except for all the things we need to hang up on the walls. We’re getting there.

I have a few events coming up that I hope to blog about, so hopefully you’ll be hearing more from me in the coming weeks. July is just around the corner, and I have two trips planned for then. July 11-13 I will be in Portland for World Domination Summit, which I’m looking forward to experiencing and writing about. And then two weeks later, I’ll be hearing to San Diego for San Diego Comic-Con, which should be quite the experience too. I look forward to sharing all of this with you, my dear readers, so stay tuned!

I’ve been doing some thinking lately. I tend to spend too much time thinking sometimes. But lately, I’ve been thinking about people and relationships and communication. People are pretty interesting, especially in how they communicate and how they relate to other people. In my own experience, it can be pretty hard to find other people that you truly connect with. And then, even if you do, sometimes those people may not feel the same way.

Moving across the country has been an interesting experience for me. (And for Rickytoo, I’m sure.) We basically left behind almost all our friends and family and really only knew a handful of people here when we moved. Which has made for some interesting dynamics. Obviously, it changed the relationships we had with people back in Indiana. Ricky has no intention to purposefully go back to Indiana for a visit. I, on the other hand, usually go visit about every six months or so. I’ve been back three times since we moved here almost two years ago. But even with our lack of face time (not the iOS app), we still manage to maintain some pretty decent friendships with people back there. A few have even been out here to visit us (or happened to be passing through for other reasons and made the effort to connect, which we always appreciate). I still consider some people in Indiana to be my very best friends, and I make a concentrated effort to see those people when I am back for a visit. These are people that I have a pretty meaningful history with and have grown to basically see as family. I love these kind of people. They are the ones I can truly be myself with and don’t feel like I ever have to worry about losing them as friends, even if I am a few thousands miles away most of the time now.

There are other people in Indiana too, or in other states for that matter, that I may not see very often, but thanks to the popularity of social media nowadays, I have the ability to keep up with their lives and even see them every now and then, usually. I’m grateful for this, and it’s one of the best things I see about social media. These people may not be family or “family” but I’m grateful for their presence in my life and I like that I can count them as friends.

There are also new people that I am meeting. Ricky and I didn’t meet a lot of people right up front when we moved here, but it has happened gradually through various channels. This is what’s interesting to me. Some of the people back in Indiana I have known for years and it was through common interests or activities – school, church, work, etc. Well, most of those channels no longer exist for me. I don’t go to church or school anymore, and all of the people on my team at work are in other states. So the people I meet tend to be through more non-mainstream avenues. It also means they tend to be people that I have to make an effort to spend time with. What I mean by that is that I don’t see them on a regular basis like one would in the more mainstream channels I mentioned above. This makes for an interesting dynamic and is where that whole communication thing really comes in. Ricky and I have had different experiences with people that we’ve met out here. He’s pretty good about perpetuating contact with people and making an effort to spend time with them. Especially people that reciprocate. But you get different responses, which always make me wonder what people are thinking. Some people reciprocate and also seem to want to make the effort. Some people seem to want it at first, then for whatever reason their effort at contact seems to die down. (These people always tend to make me really curious, especially if they are people I felt like I connected with. I wonder why they seem to lose interest. I have to restrain myself from overanalyzing it and just accept that the connection might not have been what I thought.) Other people may not always be the best at making the effort to connect, but let you know in other ways that even though they may not be good at it, they do want to connect. (These people tend to be nice in that even though you may not see them all the time, you do know that they care and are almost always there when you reach out to them.)

We are all funny, fickle people. We change and adapt and grow. We also help each other and hurt each other. I, for one, have a tendency to let myself be affected a bit too much by other people’s actions, when really, those actions have way more to do with that person than me. What I hate is feeling like I don’t know why someone seems to have no interest in connecting with me, especially when I feel like I can easily connect with them. I don’t know why I try so hard to understand it or feel offended or hurt by it. It’s happened often enough that I know it’s really not about me, nor is it usually worth worrying about.

Things like this also affect how I react to other people. I meet people that I do connect with or people that I even admire or respect almost from the get-go, and I worry that I will somehow turn them off – that I will say or do something to make them quickly lose interest in me. If they do, I should know that it’s just not meant to be. But these types of people generally are the ones that I want to like me the most, because they are the people I respect and admire. But of course the only thing I can do is be myself. My messy self. And if they like me, they like me. If they don’t, they don’t.

I really have no conclusions about any of this. It’s all just observation as a result of way too much thinking. But sometimes it makes me kind of sad how precious little we ultimately all really think of each other. We are so wrapped up in our own lives or our own thoughts about ourselves that we give little thought to how we make those around us feel most of the time, or how we might be able to help them. It’s also a bit sad how little we open up to each other, how little we bare our souls. Ironically, doing that would likely be the way we would best connect… having someone understand us even more or love us in spite of those things that we didn’t even want to talk about. It’s oddly enough the things we hide that would likely bring us closer. Yet our fears tend to keep us from sharing our true selves.

Oh well. There’s always the internet to hide behind.

[Disclaimer: if you think this is about you, then yes. It is.]

I started this blog because… well, I’ve pretty much always had a blog. Since I’ve known what one was, I’ve had one. I started out years ago with Xanga, basically writing whatever I wanted, however short or long of a post I wanted. In some ways, I still kind of do that. I’ve been through different names and designs for my blog, finally coming up with the idea of “girl vs planet”. I’m not even sure how I came up with it, but I like it. I think it will be around for a long while. I think it adequately describes what my blog is. The planet thing kind of has multiple meanings. First of all, it’s an indication of my love of travel. Also, I think the whole “girl vs planet” idea kind of sums up what it’s about… the experiences I have. Whether it is a book I read, or a trip I took, or just what’s going on in life in general, it’s a good description of what my blog is about.

Now, on the other hand… where do I want to go with it? Initially, and for a long time, I have never cared much about who reads or doesn’t read my blog or how much of a following or how much traffic I have. But now I’m kind of starting to. Not because I really feel the need for more attention, but because the more “attention” I get, the more I can do with it. For example, it gave me the opportunity to be a part of the Phoenix Film Festival this week. I love that. The best thing I can provide them in exchange for the festival allowing me to be there on a press pass is passion. Passion about this event they are having. Enough passion that I do everything I can to make sure people know about it. Enough passion that I want to share it with however many or few people are reading this. I like telling people about the things I’m passionate about. That’s what passion is, I guess.

I’m kind of unsure of what to do or where to go from here, though. In a way, I felt sort of like a fraud with a press pass at the festival. My blog doesn’t have a huge following. I review films sometimes, but I know I’m probably not the best film critic. I don’t follow any film critic rules, I just write what I think about the film. And I know that I don’t want to just write about film. I like writing about all kinds of things, and I’m wondering if maybe that is a downfall. I write about books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, places I’m traveling to, what I think about the series finale of TV shows. The blog is about all kinds of experiences I have. Hence the tag line – “One girl. One planet. One experience at a time.” But how does that gain a following? People generally aren’t going to care about finding one person’s blog about all different kinds of things, are they? Instead they are looking for a movie review site, or a book site, or a TV site, or a travel site.

Eventually, it would be my dream to somehow monetize this blog. An even bigger dream would be to earn my living from writing, hopefully in some form like this. I love writing, but I can’t see myself writing a novel or a screenplay. But I also have a hard time believing I could ever gain enough of a following to make a living from a blog like this, so I’m not sure where to go with it.

So that’s where you guys come in. I know I don’t have a ton of readers, necessarily, but I do know people read this. (And every once in a while, someone even comments!) What do you think? I’m kind of begging for feedback on this one. If you’re reading this now, what brought you here? I know most of you are just my friends that see the posts I put on Facebook or Twitter or you follow me on an RSS reader. But what makes you come and read? Is it just the fact that you know me? Or do you genuinely think my writing is interesting? What makes you visit a website that you go to regularly (besides something like Google or Facebook)? Do you think my blog/website would do better if it was just one focus, or do you like that I write about all of my experiences? Personally, I like finding other people’s blogs. I like reading about other people’s experiences. I can’t really imagine just writing about one aspect of my life, because I have so many interests and different things I’m passionate about. But I’m not sure how far that’s going to get me.

So please, tell me what you think. Comments here (or if not here, Facebook or Twitter or wherever) are very much appreciated. What should I do? Where should I go from here?