Their happy is too loud...

Two things:
1. Bridget if you read this... I'm sorry for the horrible grammar, but you know I just don't see it.
2. If anyone is reading this (and that's a giant IF to begin with) please don't think that I'm like this all the time. I've just found myself in a somewhat mercurial frame of mind recently.  

I've started back at the gym again and while my gym doesn't have everything I'd like (workout classes for example) it does have those nifty elliptical machines with TV screens attached to them.  I'm not always sure how all of this technology stuff works, but I have managed to figure out how to turn it on and that each day on channel 125 there is a movie that loops all day long.  If I don't like the movie I just read my book and listen to music to drown out the chatter of my fellow gym goers.  Last week when I arrived at my gym I got really excited because a movie I'm VERY fond of was on loop. If you haven't seen We Bought a Zoo yet set sometime aside and I mean now.  It's based on a wonderful true story and honestly, it's probably the first time I actually liked Scarlet Johansson (she normally bugs me and I can never put a finger on exactly why... and that bugs me too).  Anyway, there is a sweet and sad little scene near the beginning of the movie when the 6 year old daughter who has recently lost her mother to a long illness goes to get her father after she should have been asleep, because she can't sleep.  The neighbors are having a get together and "their happy is too loud".  I'm not sure if any of my potential readers know this about me, but I;m not usually a big crier in movies.  I love movies, and I can quote them backwards and forwards, but there really has to be a deep personal connection to my life to make me cry about a movie.  Well friends, during that scene, at the gym, on the elliptical, I shed a few tears.  Why was I crying at the gym? good question.  I can't tell you how much that one phrase resonates with me.  I moved to Utah almost two years ago.  I moved to Utah because as much as I LOVED Pennsylvania in so many ways, the truth was: I was lonely there.  My sister and her family had moved six months before and apart from the people that I worked with, who truly became a second family to me, I really had no one there.  I was alienated from a lot of the surrounding LDS YSAs by distance and (I've since learned) a few people who didn't like me for petty reasons mostly related to jealousy.  so I finished out a degree and planned to move, but where to move?  My sister was in Oregon, but I wasn't about to follow her across the country to a small town because I was lonely.  I could have moved home to Houston, but I wasn't really ready to head back to Texas and besides apart from my parents and a brother with a family and small children of his own I only had two friends from high school back home.  They are two of my very best friends, but we had managed to stay close with me living all over the country so far, so I wasn't too concerned about the friendship surviving and they both have busy lives of there own down there.  Sure they miss me and I miss them, but they don't need me and had I moved there then I would have needed them.  The truth was, I wanted to move some where for me.  I decided to move to Utah.  I had friends out here and honestly, I only spent 6 months out here before I moved to Austin to live with my sister through her divorce and then her newly single life, brief though it was.  I wanted to move back to Utah to really finish out my experience here, I didn't feel like I was done with this place.  Now to be clear, I wouldn't have traded my time in Austin, TX with my sister for anything in the world.  It's when I really met her.  It's when I grew to love all of who she is and discover how she thinks.  Living with my sister during that time produced many of my happiest memories.  It allowed me to make a very best friend and it allowed me to be a part of one of my siblings courtships and engagements, which is something that previously I'd only been able to hear about in brief snippets of stories punctuated by laughter from witnesses to the event (usually other siblings).  In short, prior to moving to Austin and living with my sister I had spent 90% of my life feeling like an observer of my siblings lives instead of a participant in them.  I spent many years hearing my brother talk about how horrible it was to be stuck as the middle child.  While his claims most likely have merit, I believe it is the curse of the youngest to never know your siblings until you are grown.  More specifically, the oldest three kids in my family got to be good friends and have fun in Provo together at college while I was still trying to grow up.  Living with my sister, gave me a chance to experience a little of that, but moving back to Utah seemed like a way of getting a little more of that, the College experience this time.  What I didn't plan for was that the Provo that I moved out of was far different than the Provo I moved back to.  The city its self hasn't changed much at all. Yeah some of the restaurants have closed or reopened elsewhere, but the town and the people in it are basically the same.  No, the difference is very much with who I was and who I am now.  At 18 and 19 I was very different than I am at 26.  I became best friends with all of my roommates back then, now all of my roommates already have best friends out here.  I went out on dates all the time, and when I'd come home all of my friends would get together so we could gush about our dates... now all of my friends are married.  Interesting factoid: married people don't gush about their dates.  Their date holding their hand is expected... and they already know exactly what it means.  Also, my friends keep moving away.  Had I known that was going to happen I'd have made other plans!  Most of the guys I have dated out here this time around haven't been the greatest, I've got a few ideas on why, but mostly I just try to keep up my spirits with little mantras like "you are not the common denominator, you are just in a dating rut" and "not all guys are this way... remember when you got asked out by normal guys.  There are still some out there, they have to be out these somewhere..." and my all time favorite: "if I start telling myself that I'm okay with never getting married then it won't hurt as bad when the next rejection comes".  Anyway, my point is, I've always tried to make sure I'm a glass-half-full kind of girl.  For the most part I'm happy with my life and content with the direction that I'm headed in, but right now I'm finding that other people's happy is too loud.  It's really hard to find myself back in the position of watching other people moving forward with their lives and not being able to move forward with them. I'm tired of feeling like I'm still waiting to grow up so I can be a part of the lives of those I care about instead of just a bystander, a silent observer.  I spent the first 18 years of my life in that position and I'm so ready for a promotion!  I want my happy to be too loud, but for right now I'm just really lonely.  I miss having friends close by.  I miss wanting to gush over my dates... and more recently I miss having dates.  My sister's pretty busy with 3 little rascals and a fourth on the way that's been keeping her sick not to mention a very steady stream of family or friends in town to visit, my brother is kept equally busy with 3 ankle bitters and a very busy job and now that they all live close to each other my parents who both work, are kept equally busy with family events usually surrounding the grandchildren.  It's hard to be the one who is all alone in a different state catching snippets of stories of my family's lives when/if they have time to answer or return a phone call.  It's lonely and isolating. some days it is just plain hard.  Those hard days are the ones when everyone else's happy is just too loud.