Finding Magic In The Mundane

Exactly a year ago, I was meandering the streets of Barcelona. It was a magical weekend of being tipsy off of gin & tonics and uncontrollable laughter {I might've walked into an elevator wall, oops}, and breathing in that gorgeous Catalan air made up of intermingling tapas and sangria and the romantic Spanish language. I was speechless upon seeing La Sagrada Familia and enthralled by Gaudi's masterpieces – some, a mere few steps around the corner from our hotel.

A week before that, we were fresh off of an adventurous St. Patrick's Day weekend in Dublin and seeing the expansive Cliffs of Moher after an exhausting seven-hour bus ride. Then, we drowned ourselves in afternoon tea and scones one final time in London before retreating back to Oxford for an infuriatingly stressful week of staying up way too late, scrambling to finish end-of-term essays, fueled by "intellectual vitality" and, really... the chips and cheese fried up in a food truck down the block that tasted so amazing only at 2 am.

Right after Barcelona, my best friend and I took a train on a whim to spend a quick 24 hours in Paris – we feasted on fondue in Montmartre, shared macarons and crepes, and had to take the red-carpetted stairs right from the Champs Elysee entrance straight to our hotel room.

Not long after that, I came home to Stanford for a very go, go, go quarter that began with surprising my roommate and culminated in road-tripping the Pacific Coast Highway down to LA and an internship that had me in New York City living in the East Village and working at 30 Rockefeller. As if all of that wasn't a dream already, my sister and I decided to pop on over to China for a week in September to see our family and "relax." Because thirteen hour flights are so relaxing.

2014 was absolutely extraordinary. And in so many ways, it was exactly that – extraordinary. It was the outlier of a year. And so far, in 2015, it's been a bit of a struggle coming to terms with that. When I'm watching my eighth FRIENDS episode in a row in the dead of night and Netflix is cruelly prompting me "Are you still watching?," it's hard not to let my mind wander back to "last year this time, I was...!!! Oh how the mighty have fallen!"

It's not that I'm not thrilled to be where I am now. I am. I could never not be thrilled to be here in sunny Stanford with my best friends in the passenger's seat. It's just ... different. It's finding happiness in the mundane day-to-day life. It's being content – more than content – in treating myself one too many times (to foot reflexology and new skirts and acai bowls and artisan ice cream and Chipotle bowl(s)(s)(s)) and in the unintentionally hilarious quips courtesy of my friends and in getting all comfy just to watch The Mindy Project.

I realized something as I was watching FRIENDS (a good thing too, or else it'd be wayyyyy too many hours of my life gone down the drain) – it is ten seasons' worth of peeks into mundanity. I mean, sure they go to London at one point and Las Vegas and the Bahamas, but 9/10s of the show is simply the six friends in an apartment or in a coffee shop, having a great time and laughing all the dang while. Sometimes the ordinary can be even more exceptional than the extraordinary, y'know?