Jacque Goes to Nashville

Last weekend my husband gave me a wonderful gift: a weekend away to do something that was just for me.

My fellow Moms, Dads and family caretakers of every kind understand what a gift that is.

You see, I am sort of in the midst of what could be a mid-life crisis. I say "sort of" because there is no way I can be old enough to be in mid-life, right?

Anyway, I have felt very unmotivated and unrewarded in my job over the past several years. Not a good thing when it comprises 50+ hours of my life each week.

For a while I have been asking questions like:

• What would I rather be doing?
• What's my passion?
• What's my purpose in life?
• What do I want to be when I grow up?
• Why do I have this much stress over preparing an email for someone else to send that no one will read when there are people in Africa with no clean drinking water?

The result of the dissatisfaction with my job has been that I have changed jobs (within the same company) 4 times in 4 years. Yeah, it didn't make a darn bit of difference.

So what, you ask, does all this have to do with Nashville? Hold your horses, I'm getting there.

I went to Nashville to attend Jon Acuff's Quitter Conference. I have been reading Jon's blog Stuff Christians Like since the day it was launched around 4 years ago. Jon's writing is mostly hilarious and sometimes soul-wrenching as he focuses on what it means to be a Christian. He is also someone who was a self-professed serial "quitter," who had 8 different jobs in 8 years trying to find that one dream job. Once he did get his dream job, he wrote a book called Quitter to help others rediscover their passions and get out of the "I'm a _____ but I want to be a ______" rut. People like me.

You see, I'm a communications manager but I want to be a millionaire philanthropist stay-at-home Mom.

Ok, well perhaps that one is a bit unrealistic, especially with the current economic environment and my lack of wealthy relatives.

More realistically, I'm a communications manager but I want to be writer. Or a coach. Or a dozen other things different from what I am doing now.

The question is how do I get from here to there?

And that's why I went to Nashville. To hang out with 183 other "Quitters" who want to make to their dream job a reality.

Do I know what my dream job is? Nope. Still not sure. But this past weekend gave me lots of time to think and consider and wonder and ponder. And that, my friends, is a gift.

And even better than all that, I got to stay in the best accommodations that the Nashville area offers: Chez Saxon.

Thank you Karen Marie, Dale and Claire for welcoming me into your beautiful home and making me feel like family. And when Claire releases her first CD I can tell everyone I knew her when!

(Me, Claire, Karen Marie)

Flashback Friday - Nashville 1989

Since I am in Nashville this weekend, I thought I would flash way back to the last time I was here. In 1989. 22 years ago!

Picture this: three fabulous UNC-Chapel Hill seniors, fresh from their summer working at Walt Disney World, head out of Chapel Hill in the middle of a snow storm.

Dara behind the wheel.

Me talking non-stop.

Holly trying to get a word in edgewise.

Windshield wipers on full (until one of them flew off!)

REM's "Stand" blaring from the cassette player.

Not a cell phone, laptop, GPS, CD or DVD player in sight - how did we survive??

Destination? Nashville, TN.

Why? To meet up with the rest of the gang heading down from Indiana for our first post-Disney reunion.

It was a weekend to remember.

Let me 'splain. No, there is too much, let me sum up (Name that movie):

• Wandering around the beautiful Opryland Hotel
• Settling in for quite a spell at the Opryland's Jack Daniel's Restaurant and Bar
• Terrorizing students trying to study at the Vanderbilt University library
• Staging our own hotel room parties - sans the rock star destruction

(Left to right: Monte, Me, Dara,
Karen Marie, Scott, Holly, Laura, Suzy)

• Wandering the streets of Nashville from establishment to establishment
  

(Left to right:Elizabeth, Monte,
Dara, Suzy, Scott, Laura)

• Taking over the Vanderbilt Holiday Inn "Commodore" lounge
• Taking over the Lounge band's instruments while they were on a break and singing Jimmy Buffett - and sounding pretty darn good, if we did say so ourselves
• Getting scolded by the hotel band for touching their instruments
• Stumbling, er, I am mean wandering back to our rooms to chat and laugh the rest of the night away
• Diving into the all you can eat breakfast bar at Shoneys

(Monte, Suzy, Karen Marie,
Dara, Me, Scott, Holly, Laura)

It was the first of what was to be many "InX/BC" reunions.

Over the years we have gathered in Kernersville, North Carolina, Crawfordsville, Indiana at the DAR house, a couple of times on houseboats in Lake Cumberland, Kentucky, a cabin in Maggie Valley, NC and at weddings here and there all over the place.

Of course, once we all started having munchkins, finding the time (or the energy or the money or people willing to keep our kids) has been tough and we have not gathered in many, many years.

Y'all, it's long over due.

I am thinking Nashville.

20 Years Ago... Part V

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Well, as you may have guessed by now, the summer of '88 was THE summer for me.

I spent 3 months working in the Mexican Pavilion at EPCOT, being treated as the "gringa favrita." I also had no fewer than three marriage proposals during that time. To be fair, two were blatantly based on a desire for a green card but I think that Pancho was quite sincere in his quest for my hand. Alas, I had to let poor Panchito down gently, explaining that it was just not our destiny. I did not tell him, however, that I really could not deal with the fact that he was an inch shorter than me!

Me and Panchito in front of Disney U. I was slouching and he was pushing up on his heels

Me, Alejandro, Alejandra and Maria in the Mexican Pavillion breakroom. Alejandro..another suitor :)

During that same 3 months, when I wasn't working, I spent my time playing with my new and dear friends. Spontaneous road trips to Cocoa Beach (yeah, that's right, where Major Nelson and Genie lived!), enjoying quarter beer night at CJ's (and yeah, that's right, way back when they had 25 cent BEER nights), 3am dinners at Denny's on I-Drive (and there are about 100 Denny's on I-drive), going to the Giraffe for free shrimp and wings....ah, those really were the good 'ol days.

But, alas, August inevitably arrived. Time for us all to return to the real world. Back to my final year at Carolina. We said tearful farewells with determined plans to reunite during the school year. It was HARD to leave. Everything felt too good, too fun and too right for that 3 months. Sigh. But, we had to move on...plus, I had spent every penny I made on Mickey Mouse ear hats for like 30 people.

So it was now Autumn in Chapel Hill and I start getting these strange calls on my answering machine. Quuuuuuuuuu...I miss youuuuuuuuuuuu" (for those of you who do not know, my nickname is "Q") And then a click. No name, no nothing. The next time my mystery caller thankfully ended his message with "this is Scott."

Now, as you are likely aware, Scott is a fairly common name. And I actually had a couple of really good friends at Chapel Hill named Scott. So to be honest, I was not sure which Scott this was. Finally, I was actually in my room the next time the phone rang. And lo and behold, it was Scott Hughes....the tall guy....from my summer in Florida. Turns out he was planning a road trip to come visit his buddies in NC (Holly, Heather (Holly's sister, whom he met in Florida in '87) Dara, Suzy T and little 'ol me. He drove down for the weekend and we all got together and had a fun time as friends.

Scott enjoying a lot of female attention, Fall 1988 (Suzy T, Dara,Holly, Q & Scott)

Sidebar: About a year later, when Scott and I were "officially" dating, he recalled exactly what I was wearing and how my hair "was swinging behind my head in a pony tail" when he first saw me walking across the street in downtown Chapel Hill during that fall visit.

Dreamy sigh....

I, on the other hand, had no memory what-so-ever as to what he had been wearing....which is why I take pictures!

The following February 1989, the entire InX gang gathered in Nashville for a winter weekend of fun. Quite the road trip for Dara, Holly and me. It was snowing as we slugged our way through the NC mountains when suddenly Dara's driver side windshield wiper flew off! Dara was concerned about visibility - naturally - but I reasoned that "I could still see" from the passenger side. Yes, I know, what a completely dufus thing to say and rest assured I got razzed about that for many years to come.

After a stop at a gas station where a really nice man put the new wiper on for us, we were ready to get to Nash-vegas. That weekend, I got to meet more folks that hailed from Crawfordsville, IN (Elizabeth T, Karen Marie A) and we made lots more great memories. Like when we took over the "house" band in the hotel bar - dang we had some cajones! Monte on drums, Karen Marie on keyboards, others grabbing available instruments and then we belted out a really bad rendition of "Margaritaville.

Ah, good times. Good times.

Being silly in downtown Nashville (Elizabeth, Monte, Dara, Suzy, Holly, Scott & Laura)

Then Spring came and so did college graduation. What in the world was I going to do now? I had a degree in Speech Communications, which I also referred to as "fluff!" My big plan was to wait tables all summer, save money, and move back to Orlando to recapture some of the summer of '88.

(By the way, you can never go back and recapture it....sorry to say but it is true. So just do like me - revel in the memories and move on!)

Jill already had an apartment ready for us with a couple of other roomies, so I was focused on getting back to Florida. So early September I hopped in to my brand new car (Honda Civic, interest rate a whopping 14% and a monthly payment of $218.31 - it was going to be a long 5 years to pay that baby off!)

Well, I walk into the new apartment and I immediately had a phone call. Strange, but true. It was Scott Hughes. Hmmm. He and I chatted for a while and then I said I needed to unpack my car, to which he replied....
(Welll, you knew I was going to drag it out further, didn't you?! Part VI soon, I promise!)