Well, hello there.
Hello world. It’s been awhile. It’s been somewhere around six months since my last substantive post. One could say I’ve been a little busy…but really, I haven’t--at least, not with anything important. There aren’t really any excuses, so I won’t give any. For now, here I am with a brief overview of what’s been going on lately. For more detailed adventures…I can be found 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on Gchat :)
Family - Mom’s clinic is up and running and she’s doing well with it. Problems with monsoons compromised her office space for awhile, but things appear to be going well with her now. Dad’s the same, been visiting here a few times. He and I have not been getting along as well as usual as of late due to the fact for some inexplicable reason, he is treating me with the same disrespect he treated my mother around the time they separated. That said, he’s coming to visit in October and December, despite not asking if those times would work for me. Ashley stayed in New York for the summer, working three ridiculously well-connected and highly-perk-filled (but unpaid) internships in the music industry. She lived in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn and we spent a lot of time together, which was fun. Very recently, she was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy (which included fun times in a public hospital in the Bronx), but it’s nothing major and she should recover fully in a few weeks/months. Ally is still plugging away at high school. It sounds like she’s doing well, but we don’t talk much--that whole anti-adult high school mentality thing. She’s really into the show House and the musical Spring Awakening. And she rocks at the guitar (she’s on Youtube playing Green Day somewhere), so I’ve been trying to get her to teach herself Barenaked Ladies songs to play for me. I have no idea what’s going on with Julia and her kids, and frankly, I don’t care.
Home - Still living in the same (amazingly priced) apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with the same awesome roommates. Nick is still working at Lambda Legal, though major changes in staff over there has sort of thrown off his work social circle. In more exciting news, he got into and started grad school for gender studies at NYU, which he’s doing part time in the evenings. So, not only do I get to know basically everything there is to know about gay rights law, I also get to learn all about gender studies…free education! He’s also coaching mock trial for Columbia, which seems to stress him out more than it should, but he’s good at it and I think he enjoys doing it, so I’m just hoping it will calm down for him. Donna is back at the grind at John Jay after spending the summer working at the school and also at some professor’s house up in Westchester. She bakes often and 99% of the things she bakes are super delicious (and eaten by me and Nick). I call dibs on her as a housewife after she and Nick get divorced. The makeup of the upstairs apartment seems to have changed (though still NYU kids). We don’t notice much, since we don’t interact with them, but one of the new guys is at least a nice human being (and not ridiculously bad-looking either). They threw one of their obnoxious parties unannounced the same night Donna’s dad came to stay with us, but later felt guilty and left us a gift certificate to the new Indian restaurant down the street. Speaking of, Franklin Avenue is filled with development right now. Every other storefront is under renovation or for sale, new stores and restaurants are popping up here and there and even older establishments have been renovating. I definitely wish I had money to invest in the area, but at the very least, it’s nice to see so much happening.
Work - Basically from the time I stopped writing in Livejournal, work has kind of sucked. It’s nothing explicit, but basically being underworked in general. I realize that’s hardly anything to complain about, but it’s still very emotionally draining and extremely demoralizing. There’s people here who have half the work I have (and yet are still higher-paid), and yet still don’t finish their work. We work on a monthly cycle, and for the last several months, I have finished the bulk of my monthly work 1.5-2 weeks before the end of the month. At first I spent a lot of time and effort pretending to work, but recently I’ve sort of just given up on that because it’s almost more effort to pretend to work than to just be given more work to actually do. I’m hoping with the year-end coming soon, things will pick up, but until then, I’ll be doing a lot of gchatting and blog reading. The social dynamics at work have changed a bit too. My usual lunch group has sort of dissolved in the past few weeks, with people becoming increasingly busy (though not necessarily with work stuff) or just not being in the mood for our daily lunches. There is so much dissatisfaction in the air, our lunches have turned into bitch sessions, and I think that’s wearing down on us. All five of us are pretty desperate to get out of here, with grad school or other jobs pretty much on everyone’s minds. It’ll be quite unfortunate for the department when we all ditch next summer around the same time. It’s pretty ridiculous the managers do nothing to try to keep us happy enough to retain us. That’s just how it is, I suppose. Thankfully I have a great relationship with most of the partners I work with, which means they give me a lot responsibility, autonomy and deference (though sometimes probably more than I should be allowed).
Health - The tendonitis I had while in high school (from overuse doing tennis, piano, percussion, computer and writing) came back with a vengeance at the beginning of the summer from basically sitting in front of a poorly-positioned computer 40 hours a week. I’ve had to wear a brace and am going to an orthopedist in a few weeks. My doctor prescribed anti-inflammatory medication that unfortunately didn’t work well for my stomach. I also had to get the firm benefits coordinator to do an ergonomics assessment of my cubicle. They installed a keyboard tray for me and are going to get me a new chair, so hopefully those things will work. I think that I might have to change my mouse configuration to a touchpad, though because that causes the most pain. I’ve been riding my bike more often, though mostly just laps in Prospect Park. I’ve been trying to do the after-work commute home more often, but I’m still getting used to riding with the car traffic. A few weeks ago, my friend Tanja and I participated in the Bike Century Tour, which was a bunch of different-level rides across the boroughs. So we did a 57-mile ride through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It was pretty amazing, despite all the pain I was in the following week. I also started taking yoga last week at a yoga/dance center near my apartment, which I’m pretty excited about, though I’m not sure if it’ll fit in my schedule very well. I’ve basically quit swing dancing in New York. I was just getting too frustrated by the social dynamics of the New York venues (it’s hard to explain to a non-dancer). I have done some dancing while traveling, but for the most part I’m semi-retired. I’m hoping to start that up again sometime though.
School - I was getting all jealous with everyone around me starting school again and the complete lack of brain-usage at work led me to scour Columbia, NYU, Pratt, CUNY, etc. for classes I could take without enrolling (and thus paying thousands of dollars). I’ve started taking a class at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The class is Fundamentals of Real Property Law and I’m very excited about it. The majority of class is middle-aged white men working in the finance or real estate fields who are taking the class as part of NYU’s real estate certification or because their work requires it. Me? I said I’m taking the class for fun. Ha. Next month I’ll be starting an online course through Rutger’s Bloustein School of Policy and Planning. That course will be on Geographic Information Systems, which is so pertinent in the field, so I think it will be helpful in future job searches. I also took a set of seminars in May on community development through the Municipal Arts Society and attended various lectures relating to urbanism and such.
Relationships - Well, surprise, surprise. The time no one was expecting has finally come. I started dating someone last June. His name is Roland and I met him through my friend Holly a couple years ago. In fact, we went on a couple ambigi-dates at the time (the hilarious assessment of which can be found in livejournal archives), but it didn’t work out for various reasons. Then he and Holly got in a fight and stopped talking for a year and a half, which basically meant I wasn’t talking to him either. But, they happened to make up a few months before Kennly and I went to visit Chicago last May, and well, it worked out this time. Sadly, he does live in Chicago, so it is a long-distance relationship, which I can tell you is just about the worst thing ever, but it’s working for now. Anyway, he’s a really great guy, despite the fact that a surface assessment of him would result in a long list of reasons why he wouldn’t work for me, yet somehow, it does work and I’m experiencing the best communication I’ve ever had in a relationship. So, we’ll see how this goes. Of course, added high school drama with the fact that Holly has been in love with Roland for just about forever (which is related to why they fought before), so she and he have stopped talking again and though things between she and I are fine on the surface, she keeps bad-mouthing us to people she knows will tell me about it, so she seems to be having this passive-aggressive war on me too. Woohoo, yay. In terms of everyone else, I generally spend most of my time hanging out with Donna, Nick, Ashley, Ali from work and Ronald. I’ve gone out occasionally with Laura (high school friend), Tanja (college friend), Laurie (friend of Amanda’s) and Jonathan (Nick’s high school friend…with whom there was about a day’s potential of something more). Sam Martin has come to visit several times, which in an of itself is pretty crazy, but he’s pretty much exactly the same, so it’s fun (though, in the same way it was fun back in high school).
Travel - I’ve been doing a TON of travel in the last several months…because I love it and can afford it at the moment. I’ve recently traveled to Atlantic City, Boston, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Duluth, Columbus, Indianapolis and of course Chicago. From Memorial Day to Labor Day weekends, I spent 40% of the weekends in New York, 40% in Chicago and 20% in other cities. After planning two weekends in a row to Chicago for Memorial Day and UofC Alumni weekends, I went from being on the fence in the Chicago v. New York debate, to a full-fledged Chicago-supporter. Don’t get me wrong, I still love New York, but I really really miss Chicago. Which was the entire point of leaving Chicago in the first place…to remind myself how much I like it so I could choose to go back there rather than stay out of inertia. So, it’s been quite convenient that I have a boyfriend to visit there so I get to go back often. I’ve been dancing more often there in the past year than here. Also, my friendship with Kristl has inexplicably become much closer since I moved…I think we’ve hung out more since I moved away than while I was living there. I hope to travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Seattle in the next few months. Nick and I are also hoping to go to Europe (some combination of Paris, London or Barcelona) during his spring break, if he doesn’t have obligations. There’s also the tentative plan to go with Lisa to Scandinavia next summer if I quit and find a new job.
Fun - So basically what I did all summer when I wasn’t traveling was go out to concerts and bars and restaurants and movies and Broadway shows and lectures and museums. I could fill a book with all the things I did, but suffice it to say, there is no dearth of amazing and new things to do here. I’m just hoping that Donna and I get through our list of bars/restaurants before we leave. Currently holding the top spot in our New York burger quest is the juicy and excellent burger at Alphabet City bar Royal. Favorite Broadway shows of last season were Spring Awakening and The Coast of Utopia. Great concerts that I can remember off the top of my head from the last few months were Swell Season, LCD Soundsystem, Balkan Beat Box and the Charlie Park Jazz Festival.
So yeah…that’s that. I’m sure I’ve forgotten to include TONS of stuff that happened. My general problem is that I keep too good of records of things (I love Google Calendar, Facebook, Netflix, Goodreads, Lala and Google Documents), so I get sort of overwhelmed when I think about putting it all out in narrative form. So…after several false starts trying to do that, I think I will not and I think the above is a pretty good peek into what I’ve been up to lately. Perhaps I’ll start posting again, perhaps not. But, at least you know I’m still alive!
Family - Mom’s clinic is up and running and she’s doing well with it. Problems with monsoons compromised her office space for awhile, but things appear to be going well with her now. Dad’s the same, been visiting here a few times. He and I have not been getting along as well as usual as of late due to the fact for some inexplicable reason, he is treating me with the same disrespect he treated my mother around the time they separated. That said, he’s coming to visit in October and December, despite not asking if those times would work for me. Ashley stayed in New York for the summer, working three ridiculously well-connected and highly-perk-filled (but unpaid) internships in the music industry. She lived in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn and we spent a lot of time together, which was fun. Very recently, she was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy (which included fun times in a public hospital in the Bronx), but it’s nothing major and she should recover fully in a few weeks/months. Ally is still plugging away at high school. It sounds like she’s doing well, but we don’t talk much--that whole anti-adult high school mentality thing. She’s really into the show House and the musical Spring Awakening. And she rocks at the guitar (she’s on Youtube playing Green Day somewhere), so I’ve been trying to get her to teach herself Barenaked Ladies songs to play for me. I have no idea what’s going on with Julia and her kids, and frankly, I don’t care.
Home - Still living in the same (amazingly priced) apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with the same awesome roommates. Nick is still working at Lambda Legal, though major changes in staff over there has sort of thrown off his work social circle. In more exciting news, he got into and started grad school for gender studies at NYU, which he’s doing part time in the evenings. So, not only do I get to know basically everything there is to know about gay rights law, I also get to learn all about gender studies…free education! He’s also coaching mock trial for Columbia, which seems to stress him out more than it should, but he’s good at it and I think he enjoys doing it, so I’m just hoping it will calm down for him. Donna is back at the grind at John Jay after spending the summer working at the school and also at some professor’s house up in Westchester. She bakes often and 99% of the things she bakes are super delicious (and eaten by me and Nick). I call dibs on her as a housewife after she and Nick get divorced. The makeup of the upstairs apartment seems to have changed (though still NYU kids). We don’t notice much, since we don’t interact with them, but one of the new guys is at least a nice human being (and not ridiculously bad-looking either). They threw one of their obnoxious parties unannounced the same night Donna’s dad came to stay with us, but later felt guilty and left us a gift certificate to the new Indian restaurant down the street. Speaking of, Franklin Avenue is filled with development right now. Every other storefront is under renovation or for sale, new stores and restaurants are popping up here and there and even older establishments have been renovating. I definitely wish I had money to invest in the area, but at the very least, it’s nice to see so much happening.
Work - Basically from the time I stopped writing in Livejournal, work has kind of sucked. It’s nothing explicit, but basically being underworked in general. I realize that’s hardly anything to complain about, but it’s still very emotionally draining and extremely demoralizing. There’s people here who have half the work I have (and yet are still higher-paid), and yet still don’t finish their work. We work on a monthly cycle, and for the last several months, I have finished the bulk of my monthly work 1.5-2 weeks before the end of the month. At first I spent a lot of time and effort pretending to work, but recently I’ve sort of just given up on that because it’s almost more effort to pretend to work than to just be given more work to actually do. I’m hoping with the year-end coming soon, things will pick up, but until then, I’ll be doing a lot of gchatting and blog reading. The social dynamics at work have changed a bit too. My usual lunch group has sort of dissolved in the past few weeks, with people becoming increasingly busy (though not necessarily with work stuff) or just not being in the mood for our daily lunches. There is so much dissatisfaction in the air, our lunches have turned into bitch sessions, and I think that’s wearing down on us. All five of us are pretty desperate to get out of here, with grad school or other jobs pretty much on everyone’s minds. It’ll be quite unfortunate for the department when we all ditch next summer around the same time. It’s pretty ridiculous the managers do nothing to try to keep us happy enough to retain us. That’s just how it is, I suppose. Thankfully I have a great relationship with most of the partners I work with, which means they give me a lot responsibility, autonomy and deference (though sometimes probably more than I should be allowed).
Health - The tendonitis I had while in high school (from overuse doing tennis, piano, percussion, computer and writing) came back with a vengeance at the beginning of the summer from basically sitting in front of a poorly-positioned computer 40 hours a week. I’ve had to wear a brace and am going to an orthopedist in a few weeks. My doctor prescribed anti-inflammatory medication that unfortunately didn’t work well for my stomach. I also had to get the firm benefits coordinator to do an ergonomics assessment of my cubicle. They installed a keyboard tray for me and are going to get me a new chair, so hopefully those things will work. I think that I might have to change my mouse configuration to a touchpad, though because that causes the most pain. I’ve been riding my bike more often, though mostly just laps in Prospect Park. I’ve been trying to do the after-work commute home more often, but I’m still getting used to riding with the car traffic. A few weeks ago, my friend Tanja and I participated in the Bike Century Tour, which was a bunch of different-level rides across the boroughs. So we did a 57-mile ride through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It was pretty amazing, despite all the pain I was in the following week. I also started taking yoga last week at a yoga/dance center near my apartment, which I’m pretty excited about, though I’m not sure if it’ll fit in my schedule very well. I’ve basically quit swing dancing in New York. I was just getting too frustrated by the social dynamics of the New York venues (it’s hard to explain to a non-dancer). I have done some dancing while traveling, but for the most part I’m semi-retired. I’m hoping to start that up again sometime though.
School - I was getting all jealous with everyone around me starting school again and the complete lack of brain-usage at work led me to scour Columbia, NYU, Pratt, CUNY, etc. for classes I could take without enrolling (and thus paying thousands of dollars). I’ve started taking a class at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The class is Fundamentals of Real Property Law and I’m very excited about it. The majority of class is middle-aged white men working in the finance or real estate fields who are taking the class as part of NYU’s real estate certification or because their work requires it. Me? I said I’m taking the class for fun. Ha. Next month I’ll be starting an online course through Rutger’s Bloustein School of Policy and Planning. That course will be on Geographic Information Systems, which is so pertinent in the field, so I think it will be helpful in future job searches. I also took a set of seminars in May on community development through the Municipal Arts Society and attended various lectures relating to urbanism and such.
Relationships - Well, surprise, surprise. The time no one was expecting has finally come. I started dating someone last June. His name is Roland and I met him through my friend Holly a couple years ago. In fact, we went on a couple ambigi-dates at the time (the hilarious assessment of which can be found in livejournal archives), but it didn’t work out for various reasons. Then he and Holly got in a fight and stopped talking for a year and a half, which basically meant I wasn’t talking to him either. But, they happened to make up a few months before Kennly and I went to visit Chicago last May, and well, it worked out this time. Sadly, he does live in Chicago, so it is a long-distance relationship, which I can tell you is just about the worst thing ever, but it’s working for now. Anyway, he’s a really great guy, despite the fact that a surface assessment of him would result in a long list of reasons why he wouldn’t work for me, yet somehow, it does work and I’m experiencing the best communication I’ve ever had in a relationship. So, we’ll see how this goes. Of course, added high school drama with the fact that Holly has been in love with Roland for just about forever (which is related to why they fought before), so she and he have stopped talking again and though things between she and I are fine on the surface, she keeps bad-mouthing us to people she knows will tell me about it, so she seems to be having this passive-aggressive war on me too. Woohoo, yay. In terms of everyone else, I generally spend most of my time hanging out with Donna, Nick, Ashley, Ali from work and Ronald. I’ve gone out occasionally with Laura (high school friend), Tanja (college friend), Laurie (friend of Amanda’s) and Jonathan (Nick’s high school friend…with whom there was about a day’s potential of something more). Sam Martin has come to visit several times, which in an of itself is pretty crazy, but he’s pretty much exactly the same, so it’s fun (though, in the same way it was fun back in high school).
Travel - I’ve been doing a TON of travel in the last several months…because I love it and can afford it at the moment. I’ve recently traveled to Atlantic City, Boston, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Duluth, Columbus, Indianapolis and of course Chicago. From Memorial Day to Labor Day weekends, I spent 40% of the weekends in New York, 40% in Chicago and 20% in other cities. After planning two weekends in a row to Chicago for Memorial Day and UofC Alumni weekends, I went from being on the fence in the Chicago v. New York debate, to a full-fledged Chicago-supporter. Don’t get me wrong, I still love New York, but I really really miss Chicago. Which was the entire point of leaving Chicago in the first place…to remind myself how much I like it so I could choose to go back there rather than stay out of inertia. So, it’s been quite convenient that I have a boyfriend to visit there so I get to go back often. I’ve been dancing more often there in the past year than here. Also, my friendship with Kristl has inexplicably become much closer since I moved…I think we’ve hung out more since I moved away than while I was living there. I hope to travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Seattle in the next few months. Nick and I are also hoping to go to Europe (some combination of Paris, London or Barcelona) during his spring break, if he doesn’t have obligations. There’s also the tentative plan to go with Lisa to Scandinavia next summer if I quit and find a new job.
Fun - So basically what I did all summer when I wasn’t traveling was go out to concerts and bars and restaurants and movies and Broadway shows and lectures and museums. I could fill a book with all the things I did, but suffice it to say, there is no dearth of amazing and new things to do here. I’m just hoping that Donna and I get through our list of bars/restaurants before we leave. Currently holding the top spot in our New York burger quest is the juicy and excellent burger at Alphabet City bar Royal. Favorite Broadway shows of last season were Spring Awakening and The Coast of Utopia. Great concerts that I can remember off the top of my head from the last few months were Swell Season, LCD Soundsystem, Balkan Beat Box and the Charlie Park Jazz Festival.
So yeah…that’s that. I’m sure I’ve forgotten to include TONS of stuff that happened. My general problem is that I keep too good of records of things (I love Google Calendar, Facebook, Netflix, Goodreads, Lala and Google Documents), so I get sort of overwhelmed when I think about putting it all out in narrative form. So…after several false starts trying to do that, I think I will not and I think the above is a pretty good peek into what I’ve been up to lately. Perhaps I’ll start posting again, perhaps not. But, at least you know I’m still alive!