Blog #128: Kendrick Lamar

**This blog is actually hardly about Kendrick Lamar, but I'm also letting it serve as a reminder that I should probably write a lengthy blog post dedicated to him because I love that man.**

Anyway, today I spent a good sum of my day helping my parents roof their building downtown (which is home to my mom's yoga studio and my dad's office). We started at the worst possible time- noon- and finished around 5. Why was noon the worst possible time, you may ask?

Because it was hotter than crawling into an oven heated to 400 degrees, that's why.

Just kidding... it wasn't quite that hot, but it was still pretty dang hot. The sun was directly above us when we started at noon, beating down and giving me sunburns in places I didn't think were possible. Even though I was staying very well hydrated and eating consistently, there were a couple times where I almost passed out because of the sun shining down on me.

At one point, when I was ripping nails out of the old roof to create a flat surface upon which the new plywood could be laid, I couldn't help but laugh.

"You guys," I said, "a month ago... I was at the Taj Mahal."

It was just hilarious to me, because I think that a lot of people I meet, or who know me mostly through social media, think that I live a very glamorous life all of the time. Or, if not glamorous, adventurous. People perceive me as always being in a new place, somehow going from one trip to the next with no care in the world.

And, although some of that is true to a very limited extent, it's also definitely not. I think most of those people would never imagine me on top of a roof on a Saturday afternoon, pulling rusty nails in small-town Osage City, Kansas. Most of them probably wouldn't imagine me changing tires with my dad and hauling them to the local salvage yard, or cutting wood with my family to burn during the winter. These aren't the 'cool' or 'glamorous' things I usually post on my Instagram, but they're also a very real part of who I am.

Anyway, I just think it's funny how diverse my life can be. No matter how far I stray or the things I see and do, I can always come home and get some work done. I like to think it keeps me grounded.

And, now that we're reaching the end, it's time to loop this back to Kendrick Lamar. Today's look at my often dichotomous lifestyle reminded me to, in the words of Mr. Lamar, sit down and be humble.

Just because I'm visiting one of the wonders of the world one week, it doesn't mean I won't be pulling rusty nails the next. And that's the way the cookie crumbles.