But, ever since I turned 36, I can't help but feel the days beginning to whir past me in a frenzy. I can't get my mind off of the fact that I might as well learn to accept that I may never have a child.

So many more distracting thoughts spiral around in my mind, but, honestly, that's the real issue that's plaguing me lately. Oh my god. How embarrassing is that to admit... but my biological clock is ticking.

What if the person you are with is more concerned about the amount of money he'll be making in the next three or four years... and your heart calls out to create a new life, before the opportunity is gone forever.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to make a really good income and a satisfying life. But if everyone waited for all of the puzzle pieces of life to be perfect, no one would ever have kids.

Life is such a dilemma. You wait, and you wait, and you try to meet that right person. And then, when you do, Mother Nature and Father Time have a great big ole party at your expense.

I wonder why it had to take all of this time for me to meet someone who treats me kindly and with respect. Why did I put up with people who caused me nothing but pain and self doubt. I wasted years in these relationship patterns. I felt like I had all of the time in the world.

We've only been dating for 1-1/2 years. We're not married. I have no right to demand he change his priorities. You don't say you love someone, and then try to change him. That's not love, and I know that.

But a few years from now, I don't want to still find myself living in a sardine-can-sized apartment, running ragged from the commute and sleep-deprived from a schedule that only makes me wearier. I don't want to regret how I spent my years and wonder what it would have been like to have a family.

Is that so wrong?

Our society makes fun of women for being attuned to our biological clocks, tells men to steer clear of women our age because of this, and makes us feel like we should be ashamed for wanting to bring the beauty of life into this world -- for wanting to invoke the power we hold dormant in our bodies for years.

14 years ago, I had my chance; but I was too young to understand it. I let a married couple masquerading as my friends take my beautiful baby boy Nick away from me, right out of my life. I didn't know my rights. I didn't know how to fight to get him back. I was a spoiled young kid who'd never had to work a day in her life before joining the military. It all slipped away.

As the years passed, I was comforted by the fact that when I did have children, I would never let anything like that happen ever again. I believed I would have at least one other child. I would finally gain back the chance they took from me, the chance to be a mother, and a damned good one.

That never happened, and here I sit upon the shifting sands of change, wondering if it's going to soon be too late to ever realize that part of my life. 

When you've known the feeling of your own child's tiny fingers grasping your own...when you've held his tiny warm body hours after he entered the world, you can never be content to let that go.

When I began this blog, I had oodles of time on my hands, during which I could muse about the day's issues or my personal gleanings, and share some of my insights.

Now I get up at 3 a.m. daily to be at work by 5. I get off at 1 p.m., but, by then, it seems I'm caught up in  a slew of household and financial errands. Before I know it, I barely have time to read a chapter from a book before I have to recharge what's left of me for the next day's early wake-up.

This is taking a toll on me, and I see no end in sight in the near-term. My creativity has taken a huge dive into oblivion, and honestly, all I care about is getting home, and knocking tasks out as soon as possible so I can crawl right back into that bed that I dreamt about all day. It has meant hardly any time to see my friends anymore, and mainly, no time to blog.

Does anyone have any ideas for blog writing prompts? I don't have a major interest in or aptitude for writing about politics or sports. I'm just looking to climb right back onto that blogging horse, to remember what it feels like to let my fingers fly as my opinions scurry forth, taking shape in the letters, words and structures I arrange onto the screen.

How can you care about anything when your body is lacking even the most basic reserves of energy?

However, that snippet of conversation between us, during a quick snack break in the office cafeteria, really made me do a double take. I guess, like everyone, I have my own ideas of how things are and aren't, and often think people can be neatly categorized into neatly labeled packages. I have to remind myself now and then that just because a person waitresses at a restaurant or shines shoes for a living -- that doesn't mean that what we see is the total sum of who they are.

I don't believe I'm the only one who makes snap judgments in this way. I'm kind of ashamed that I do. I just assume that a person working in the auto parts store never went to college or even dreamed of it. I really can't talk, at 35 years old, with no degree to speak of. It just never happened for me. The timing was never right when I was young and wanted it so badly I could taste it. By the time the opportunities were more available to me I was making a good living and needed the full-time salary to survive; so I couldn't just quit to attend school. I tried more than once to attend evening classes, and it interfered with so many other things I wanted to do in life -- which was, well...to have a life. I wasn't able to make that commitment that many other working adults do for years in order to have the honor of a degree bestowed upon them. I don't know if I ever will. I have no energy, willpower, much less mental acuity left at the end of the working day. I jumped in with the best intentions at a few different schools, many times. I've had to put that dream on the backburner. You can't live in this society without working full-time, and going to classes late into the night and trying to rise early is not an option for me.

Anyway...maybe these hardworking people I see in restaurants, or working on construction projects by the side of a busy highway, are more dedicated than I am. Maybe they do what they do just to bide their time as they struggle through long hours of college courses that will, in the long run, send them into careers more to their liking. We can't know everything by the skin on the outside of one another. So I know that I need to work on not assuming I know everything about other people from what I see on the outside.

My friend's mention of this competition really brought this home for me. Maybe some people have menial jobs or quiet, simple lives. But deep inside of some of them, as in everyone, something surprising lives and breathes that might astonish us if we better took the time to know them.

Let's make this improved perception of those around us something that we take to heart, and not be so quick to throw away the chance to meet amazing people.

Because I love scrawling lists and random thoughts on receipts and the backs of index cards, etc. (linear thinking is for the birds), I decided to apply that obsession to a blog entry and slap down the beginnings of my own list. I plan to try to hit 100 items, but so far I've only made it to #29.

1 - I love a challenge, puzzles, crosswords, etc.

2 - My favorite way to drive is across open country, the windows down, hair blowing in the wind and some road trip tunes on the radio.

3 - My favorite date is not a fancy restaurant, but a picnic on a nice day on some soft grass, with nowhere to rush off to.

4 - My favorite item of clothing is a broken-in pair of blue jeans. If I could, I'd stay in worn jeans, sandals and floral blouses all of the time.

5 - When people say, "Shed-U-Ele," I want to shake them in the way you should never, never, shake a baby.

6 - Humor, to me -- that unabashed ability to laugh that shakes a person and those around him or her to the bone -- is one of the most important qualities in a friend or love interest.

7 - I love the electric feeling in the air moments before a late-afternoon or evening thunderstorm, and then the resulting heavy rain that pelts the windows.

8 - I love the smell of freshly cut grass.

9 - I love books so enjoyable that I lose myself in them.

10 - I most want to travel to Ljubljana, Slovenia; and Australia and Prague, and maybe return to Alaska and Switzerland one day.

11 - I want to return for a few days to my humble Alabama hometown of a few hundred residents, just to look around and see what I remember, to come full-circle.

12 - Nothing's as good as a slice of pound cake or warm homemade chocolate chip cookies with a tall, cold glass of milk.

13 - When I first joined the Army, I was the fastest runner out of 60-something people in my platoon and once ran a 6:15 mile.

14 - I collect shot glasses from the places I go.

15 - I'm a Virgo, born on September 15.

16 - On the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, I'm an ENFP.

17 - I occasionally lucid-dream.

18 - My favorite books to read are nonfictional: Travelogues, sociological topics, books about small-town life, like those by Garrison Keillor - but fictional books do grab me now and then, when I need an escape.

19 - I have no qualms about going to any restaurant and sitting at a table for one.

20 - My two passions in life are photography and writing. I think it's because I have always felt that even mundane everyday things are worth recording. There lies the depth of our lives in those small, short moments.

21- I'm not a neat freak, although I play one in my current residence. I don't need to make the bed each morning to be happy.

22 - I placed in spelling bees and French contests in middle and high school.

23 - I used to be painfully shy. It was almost incapacitating until I joined the Army.

24 - I pride myself on seeking to know more and explore more in life.

25 - I wish I got out more and did some walking and sightseeing in the District on weekends or evenings.

26 - I love doing things spontaneously. I'm not very consistent, but I am spontaneous.

27 - I make a mean guacamole. That's about as close as I come to cooking, besides bacon and eggs.

28 - I'd much rather walk a little farther than be the lazy American and go to my car just to drive down a few thousand feet to park somewhere else and get out.

Find Your Spot is a fun website I found years ago. It suggests U.S. locales where you might feel at home. Just for shits and grins, I took the quiz again to see where I might want to end up, that is according to the answers I provided to the various questions in the quiz.

So, my results are posted here.

For those of you who don't know her, think of the scene in the movie The Fifth Element. It was her voice coming out of that weird blue alien female being on the stage. Most people who do not know of her get that reference.

She's Andrew Lloyd Webber's ex-wife as well.

I'm kind of a weird bird, I think, as women go (but maybe not). I'd much rather spend money to do something -- travel or see a concert, have an experience -- than buy $100 shoes. True, I did just spend a wad on a dress at Lord & Taylor to attend a wedding; but that is a rare expenditure for me.

Anyway. It's finally happened. This is so cool I would have put it on my Bucket List, if I weren't already set to do it. I'll be happily seated in the club seating section to see the show, November 19, at Verizon Center, barring any sudden military deployments or cataclysmic happenings.

To refresh your memory, here is a YouTube clip of "The Diva Dance," from The Fifth Element, featuring Sarah Brightman's voice. For some reason, you have to go 43 seconds into this video to get to the beginning of it. The Fifth Element is also one of my favorite movies, me being a SciFi fan and all.

Enjoy!

It's called Southerner at Large.

I started keeping it when I realized I had forgotten so many details about where I grew up.

I always believe that life is a patchwork of personal stories. Each of us has one, no matter how trivial we may think it is. I think mine's pretty plain, but getting down things I remember along the way means a lot to me.

For a long time, I just wanted to leave it all behind, change my accent and just move onward. Maybe it's the point I've reached in this 35th year of my life that makes me turn and look back to accept every moment in my life. Whatever is spurring this need to delve into my background...it means a lot to me. I believe that no matter how far we will all go in life, we always need to return home, at some point -- whether literally or figuratively.

No matter how rural and boring it may be to me now, I still yearn to travel back to the small town of Lexington, Ala., where I grew up, just to let my mind remember, and to see how things have changed.

There is no greater passion for me than recording my impressions of life through writing. So what better way than to use it to thread the beads of my experience together into something whole?

God, I'm starting to sound hokey. I think it's time to go now.

Well, not immediately. Sure, heart disease probability and such. But at least I might not become a victim of E. Coli or Salmonella.

It's bad enough we live in a world that seems to be steadily growing worse in rising costs just about everywhere we look; a world of eternal war, strife and spreading population. Now we have to wonder every time we eat a hamburger, which could be possibly deadly on two counts, if we top it with a fat, juicy slice of tomato.

As of today, these are the top headlines. This makes me want to pack everything up and move to the middle of nowhere to lay down a garden and breed my own cattle for beef and cows for dairy products. I guess that's why making a Bucket List is now more important than ever. Life is too short to worry about scares like this. There will always be a new one to replace one as it fades into the past. All you can do is live it up and live well; and don't forget to indulge a bit when the opportunity calls.  

E. Coli Illnesses Prompt Beef Recall

U.S. Officials Stymied in Salmonella Search