It’s two in the morning, and–I know I say this a lot, but–the day has gotten away from me. I slept in until one this afternoon, and even I thought, For crying out loud, Marcus Anderson Coker, wake up earlier. But for the last week I’ve been tired, tired, tired, like seriously dragging ass, and I haven’t been today. Rather, I woke up–how do I say this?–excited to be alive.

So maybe I just needed some serious Zs.

After an obviously late breakfast, I spent this afternoon digging through my old yearbooks–pre-kindergarten through college–because while going through old photos lately I’ve come across handfuls of unlabeled “wallets” and wanted to figure out what picture was taken when. This project took nearly three hours but definitely helped me organize both my photos and my brain. Oh yes–I had braces from sixth grade to eight grade, then I frosted my hair in high school, then I dyed it red in college, AND THEN I dyed it blue (also in college). The other thing this project did was remind me, sort of all at once, how frickin’ awkward it is to grow up or to generally be alive. I mean, the braces, the haircuts, the zits. Ugh. my senior portraits were airbrushed to hell. Not to mention the fashion.

Personally, I did the baggy shirt thing for WAY too long.

I guess about junior high, maybe a little sooner, is when the awkward thing really started for me. I found one photo taken between sixth and seventh grades from a back-to-school pool party in which I was the only guy wearing a t-shirt in the swimming pool because I didn’t like what puberty did to my nipples. I realize this level of criticism is normal. You hit puberty, and EVERYTHING changes–some things for the better, some things for the worse. At some point, you end up despising your own body. (If this wasn’t your experience with puberty, just wait until your metabolism slows down or your breasts start to sag.) But I never remember thinking ANYTHING was wrong before puberty. NOTHING was too big, too small, too anything. It just was. Now I think most things are–too something, that is. Like, I don’t care for my posture, and when I look back at my junior high photos I think, That’s when I started slouching. So not do I pick on the current me, I also pick on the former me.

And he’s not even here to defend himself.

Not that I want to go back to the age I was in elementary school when everything was all “ain’t life great,” but I would like to go back to that level of self-acceptance and self-kindness.

This evening after dinner I went to Fort Smith to help my aunt with her internet and do a couple odd jobs. Then I went to a friend’s house to help them with a phone/computer thing, and since phone/computer things always take MUCH longer than expected, ended up eating dinner again. “Have you eaten,” my friend said. “Well, yes,” I said, “but I’m ALWAYS hungry.” Anyway, this is where the bulk of my evening was spent, at my friend’s house, working and catching up. We laughed, laughed, laughed. This is so important, I think, since it’s really easy to stay at home, dig through your memories, get stuck in your head, and take both yourself and your life way too seriously.

So that’s my two cents for tonight–if you know someone who makes you laugh, ask them if you can come over. (Tell ’em you’ll fix their phone or computer.)

When I got home from my friend’s, it was nearly midnight, and I’d intended to start blogging right away. But then I decided to crop all the “photos of yearbook photos” I took while going through my annuals this afternoon, AND THEN I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to have them all lined up neat and orderly, like in a collage? AND THAT turned into a nearly two-hour long project that involved not only learning how to use a new phone app, but also doing my damndest to not demand perfection of myself.

Maybe that photo should be a little bigger and slightly to the left.

This is apparently a lesson I’ve been trying to learn for a while, the not demanding perfection of myself thing. While looking through my college yearbooks (for three of four of which I was the editor), I noticed a “letter from the editor” in which I said, “You’ll find plenty of mistakes here. But like life, this is meant to be fun.”

This is meant to be fun, Marcus.

I don’t know, if I got to someone’s Instagram feed and find nothing but “perfect” photos, like every single frickin’ one is magazine-quality beautiful, I think, Bitch, please. Because that’s not real life; it’s not even close. Real life is awkward smiles, bad haircuts, and zits on your face. It’s crooked teeth, a stain on your (baggy) shirt, and posture that’s never quite “right.” It’s everything you could fit into a thousand wallet-sized photos. At the same time, it’s not that–because real life is REAL life. It’s something that’s lived, not something that’s captured with a camera. It’s whatever time you woke up today, whatever you did this afternoon, and the sound of two friends laughing. It’s whatever is happening right here, right now.