Mackenzie Carose

Here, There, and Everywhere

By Mackenzie 1 Comment

I have felt my age lately.

Not in a “my back hurts all the time now” or a constant referral to people in their twenties as “kids” kind of aging, but a feeling of my age being more than a number.

My age feels now more like a ticking time clock and I am trying to grapple with that feeling.

I am in my 40’s and being in your 40’s is kind of like standing in the middle of a bridge. There is the part of the bridge that I have already crossed to get to this middle part and now there is also the rest of the bridge that I must cross, a bit at a time, to get to the other side. And that is okay, right?

But part of being on this bridge smack dab in the middle, is this feeling of time slipping away. The first half of your life is in the rear view and the second half is now beginning. With that pronouncement comes the feeling that I am missing out on something. That those regrets from the first half of my life need to be rectified in the second half. All those things I wanted to accomplish “someday”, well I gotta do them now because time is ephemeral and I need to get going and I don’t want to look back on the second half of my life in my later years and be disappointed and bitter and okay, what do I do now?

And so on and so on. Rinse and repeat. My brain repeating all of this, different words sometimes, like a hamster wheel running without a hamster.

While I know our brains tend to ruminate without much pushing from us subconsciously, I still can’t shake this feeling that I am supposed to be doing something. What that is, I don’t know. Do I need to make changes in my life? Do I keep things as they are? Is this wreaking havoc with my anxiety? Yes. Yes it is.

I put these words down here because I want to share how I am feeling and I know I am not the only person to feel this way. The term “mid-life crisis” wasn’t coined out of nowhere. While I am not in mid-life crisis mode nor am I wanting to relive my youth (no thanks!), I am feeling this push to do something, even if I don’t quite know what that is yet. This feeling will not dissipate so I am going to just sit with it. Not ignore it but listen to it.

My subconscious is trying to tell me something and I need to pay attention.

Read books, listen to podcasts, write things down. Something will bubble up and come to the surface and I want to be ready.

As I walk across this bridge onto the second half of my life I want to be intentional and embrace it all.

As The Page Turns: August Edition

By Mackenzie 6 Comments

Back again with another round of book reviews 🙂

The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan

This book revolves around 4 women in England during WWII, who all enter a BBC radio contest to become a radio host on a cooking show showing how to utilize what you have in your pantry in view of the fact that there was rationing and sometimes one had to be creative. I liked the premise but I figured out who was going to win the contest early on and (a small thing, I know) everything was neatly tied up with a proverbial bow at the end which kind of bugged me. But it wasn’t a bad book so if WWII fiction is up your alley, then you will probably enjoy this book.

Debt Free Degree by Anthony O’Neal

College is expensive you guys. I graduated from a university over 20 years ago and I thought it was pricey then, whoa let me tell you, tuition prices now are bananas. I have two daughters that may go to college one day (their choice entirely) and I want to be prepared for what is to come. I wrote a separate book review and what I thought about it all here. Great book with lots of tips if this is something that concerns you as well.

Project 333 by Courtney Carver

If you haven’t heard of Project 333, it is basically a three month experiment to only use the same 33 items for getting dressed. These 33 items can include clothing, shoes, accessories, and jewelry that you don’t wear every day like you would a wedding ring or watch. Carver came up with this experiment when she was running late for work one day and was lamenting that she had nothing to wear even though she had a closet stuffed with clothes. Studies have shown that most people wear the same things over and over again which amounts to only about 30% or so of their actual closet. So she made up this project and it helped her not only take a good hard look at what she wasn’t wearing, but helped her discover her style and pare down her closet in the process.

Thousands of people have done their own version of Project 333 since Carver introduced it several years ago. There is even a Project 333 hashtag on Instagram where enthusiasts share the variety of ways that they have implemented this particular type of capsule wardrobe. If overhauling your closet is something you are interested in, then you might want to give this a read.

The Clue in the Diary, Nancy’s Mysterious Letter, Password to Larkspur Lane, and The Clue of the Broken Locket by Carolyn Keene

I have been reading quite a lot of Nancy Drew books lately. I have been dealing with a lot of anxiety lately (please make the news stop, please make the news stop), so I have been reading these books for the nostalgia factor and also for something comforting and familiar.

That’s it from me! What have you been reading lately? 🙂

As The Page Turns: July Edition

By Mackenzie 8 Comments

Another book roundup! 🙂

Rachel Maddow: A Biography by Lisa Rogak

It seems pretty obvious that Rogak wrote this book without actually interviewing Rachel Maddow. This book felt like I was reading an over-expanded Wikipedia page. No depth or substance & it gave the impression that you were reading someone’s term paper subtitled “What I Learned About Rachel Maddow”. I think Rachel is a brilliant woman and this book felt like a disservice to her.

Hello Habits: A Minimalist’s Guide to a Better Life by Fumio Sasaki

A great read if you are looking to make habit changes in your life but don’t know where to start or can’t find the motivation.

Find Your Path by Carrie Underwood

So this book has a tiny bit of information about Carrie’s life pre American Idol. Then it launches into all the health routines she started to do once she saw what she looked like on TV and realized other people were noticing how she looked as well. In the book, she says she used the negative comments to turn her nutrition around and start a new health regimen. She then goes into a lot of detail about how she accomplishes this. I have seen other book reviewers state this and I will too: if you have/had an eating disorder, this book might be triggering for you. Not only does Carrie use an app to track everything she eats, in addition, she writes everything she eats in a journal complete with how much protein she had that day, how many macros, fat, calories, etc… She doesn’t sit still while watching a television show even though she says that is her “relaxing time” after a long day, because she exercises during commercials. When the show comes back on she sits down, but as soon as another commercial comes on, she is back up doing squats, etc… It was just too much. She works out a lot and also has a personal trainer and a mobile gym for when she is out on tour. *sigh* This is definitely NOT a book I would recommend reading. I like Carrie Underwood as a singer and I enjoy her music. Her book, not so much.

The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

Ugh, bloody awful. I was pulled into the premise of this book which revolved around a book editor sent to interview a reclusive author on a Mediterranean island in advance of the republication of his mystery novel which hadn’t seen a bookshelf in 25 years. In between the book editor interviewing the author and trying to find out why he fell off the face of the earth and what it had to do with his book, every other chapter is an actual story from his book, so there is a lot of bouncing back and forth. And bad writing. It was boring and at the same time frustrating, and the ending was regrettable…for all of us who mustered brain cell usage to get there.

So that’s it from me! What did you read this past month? 🙂