Vaycay!

Tomorrow’s my last day of work for ten whole days, and I am really excited about my vacation. What, in particular, am I excited about regarding my vacation, you ask? Well I’ll tell you.

I am tooootally psyched about

• Gardening!
• Taking some pictures with Meg’s camera
• Visiting my mom in DC for a night
• Visiting my sister in Charlottesville for a coupla nights
• Shopping for clothes, a bike helmet, a bike lock
• Writing a couple of short pieces on neat artists and makers for RM, and making a little extra cash-money

And then there were the bigger things. Like, taking 400 Words in hand. I have wanted some time to do some blogwhoring. To look into grants, for that matter. I think my project is grantable. I think it could be. And…I wanted to distill my thesis back down to regular-paper length and send it to some journals. In case I, you know, ever want to go to school again. So researching what journals I could send to, and how. And I wanted to do some writing of my own. And make a pitch to The Believer that I’ve been wanting to make for over a year now. Digging back into that stuff. A-and thinking about jobs. This one. Other ones. Maybe changing. Where the project fits into that. What I’m, like, trying to do overall.

“That’s way more than you can do in a week,” my mother said last week on the phone, as I was excitedly describing my plans for this vacation. She is right.

Well, at least the weather ought to be very nice. And I’m looking forward to a break from NY’s endless pavements, looking forward to new green leaves. It’s a really good time of year for Virginia.

KS & NYC Celebrate Paper Anniversary; KS Takes Stock

I wrote this on March 29. Just came back to it. Maybe I'll add more soon...

I have a pretty lousy memory for dates, but for some reason March 27, 2006 has become pretty indelible. It's the day I walked into the offices of S--- for my first day of work. I'd arrived in New York only a couple of days previous. During that first week of work, I was still sleeping on the not-quite-body-length couch at Small But Charming Apartment while Meg's roommate Jamie got ready to move out and vacate the room that was going to be mine. I had just the few bags of stuff I'd brought with me from California. Some boxes were on the way, and a few weeks later, my dad would make a hero of himself in my life yet again by driving up from Virginia with furniture including my bed.

So last week it occurred to me that it was both my one-year job anniversary and my one-year anniversary of being (back) in New York. My first calendar year in the Big Apple.

So, you know, I'm always introspective. Too introspective probably. But this anniversary has me feeling especially in a take-stock kind of mood.

It's been quite the year. (I mean, aren't they always. But still.) Such as:

• Carried on a long-distance relationship for basically a full year, with all the attendant ups and downs.

• Worked a 9-to-5-type job for a whole year, for the first time in my whole almost-28.

• Moved from one Brooklyn neighborhood to another, into a place I reasonably expect to stay for a while.

• Put out the second issue of my zine—and there'd been times when I wasn't sure if that was going to happen.

• Went back and wrested a master's degree from my two years at Cornell.

• Had zine written about in Newsweek, which made me happy for an entire month.

• Threw launch party for zine, had it attended by 30 or 40 people, looked out across lagoon of faces, thought 'wow, I sort of do have a community here. Awesome!'

• Put some thought into parlaying what I've learned through job into other areas—could I use it to do something for myself? Do I want to work for the man for the rest of my life? What do I want, anyway?

• Got a real, major distributor interested in zine.

• Re-connected with a few old friends. Observed, like many before me, that socializing here is hard, or at least different.

• Got a bit of writing done. Not a ton, not even a fair amount, but a little.

• Just recently, got to feeling kind of sad. Not fatally sad, just maybe, after the thesis got done, a little bit flushed with the 'what am I doing?' questions, a bit overwhelmed.

And oh yeah:

• Had a brief and not entirely resolved brush w/ chronic disease!

Man, yeah, all right. That's a year. A full year. I'd say.

So I'm sitting here thinking of all that, and thinking of what I want this next year to be 'about.'

So, uh, here are some reflections on the year that just passed. Maybe they'll help light the way forward. Maybe they'll simply help pass the time before I get to get up and leave this chair and office, and commence with the evening's friend-meeting and beer-drinking.

The long-distance relationship. It was hard! Leaving California was hard, wondering what was going to happen to us was hard. Staying in touch and maintaining that feeling of closeness when not in the same place was really hard, leading to this emotional sine curve with peaks during visits and troughs at the mid-point in between them. What can you say? Connecting was good, visiting was good, parting was hard, deciding to say goodbye was really hard—and a long time coming, a very long slow thing. Somewhere along the way, I made a commitment to being in New York for the foreseeable. I still fantasize about Portland and about smaller towns, more manageable cities, nature, land, a small house. But having a hub feels important to me. And even though it's a hell of a place to try and feel 'at home' in, sometimes, I am glad to be here.