Every vine I see

Since moving to the South, I believe every vine I see is kudzu. Green leaves climbing, overtaking, must be the same plant everyone is trying to kill.

I live on a corner in a wooded neighborhood, part of a park, and most of my backyard is kudzu, now a brown tangle of hibernation. It faded quickly, and I remember last spring that it lagged in revival, that it surprisingly wasn't the first to rise in green from the dead of winter.

What is my fascination with kudzu? Allow me to be cheesy for a moment. Kudzu is persistent. It believes in itself. It overcomes obstacles. And it can kill what it claims, blocking out the sun. If we take this all in a positive bent, I want to be kudzu. I want to keep reaching for goals and meeting them; that's a problem I've had in all areas that only pertain to me. If someone came in and told me I had to reach the top of a tree, by god I'd do it and I'd do it well. But if I tell myself, Hey, I'm going to reach the top of that tree, and I wrote it down, and I put it on my mirror so I could see it every day, and if I repeated it to myself, I'm going to stand on the top of that tree, damn it, it wouldn't matter. I never keep promises to myself. I don't know how to motivate myself.

So, perhaps, mission number 1: Respect myself and my authority. Respect my thoughts, my goals, my desires for my life.

Sugar is an easy option. It's cheap, delicious, everywhere. And so that's what I've been living on for the last 3 months. I cringe to begin to calculate the pounds of sugar I've eaten, and I cringe to think what it's doing to my mind and my body. But I also haven't been eating very much at all, skipping meals. I also haven't been drinking much at all, ignoring my intense thirst. I don't drink when I'm thirsty. I don't eat when I'm hungry.

I no longer believe in New Years Resolutions. I believe in life choices. I want to be a runner, an athlete. I've wanted that all my life, actually, but I've never believed that I could be. But, hey, I could be. And I'm going to be.

Life choices: Live on plants. Run. Satiate. Be a writer and write.