My Picture... Meet "Baby Fanaile"

I know, I know... such a cute little girl... Right? [Use this area to insert custom "What Happened" joke here]... This little girl is me, roughly 30 years ago. And yet, this little girl is still the closest photo I have that accurately depicts "me".

You see, most people change a lot as they grow and develop. Life's experiences will make them bitter, cynical, nasty people or - on the contrary - make them sweet, perky, and really just a cup of coffee wrapped in skin. Me? I'm somewhere in the middle, I guess.

You see, when we're kids, we're told constantly that you have to accept the bad with the good... you have to learn to compromise... you have to learn to accept that you can't always have things your way... "The universe doesn't revolve around you." To all of these ideas, I say "nu-uuh".

But to really understand what I mean, you'd have to see the entire picture and know exactly what was going on at the time. You see, I grew up in a landlocked city, Colorado Springs, Colorado. About the time that I was 4, my family and I took our first trip to see the ocean. This trip was being planned for months, and I can still remember being told how much I was going to love the ocean.

Well, as you can probably tell by the picture, I was less than thrilled. The sand got into my shoes and made them uncomfortable. And what's the best way to get sand out of your shoes? Why... take them off and shake out the sand, of course!

To this day, I am exactly the same way. When something in my life makes me unhappy, it does not remain in my life for very long. Gossip, drama, negative energies that invade my life brought in from other people... It took me years to find a way to rid my life of such things. Then, a few years ago, I realized that as a child I had the world figured out. You see, I hadn't been clouded by all the ridculosity that plagues adults. As kids, if you don't like something, you just don't deal with it. You feed the meatloaf that you don't like to the dog, you find new friends, you grab a new book - whatever the case may be. And now that I have figured that out and applied it to my adult life, I find that every thing else is so much more clear.

I think that this photo epitomizes that idea; it contains a message that everyone else can learn when it comes to clearing out the distractions caused by walking with sand stuck in your shoes. This is why I use this picture nearly everywhere... To remind me that occasionally, it's best to stop thinking like an adult would and to remember that kids are brilliant.

And, just food for thought here... The universe is infinite - which leaves room for an infinite number of points and at any time any one of these points can be considered its center... So, yea, I am the center of the universe and that means it does revolve around me!