Tag Archives: life

Moving to New York, Part One: The Prep

Posted in December by

I’m sorry I haven’t been as present in the past few weeks – I’ve had quite a bit of exciting news lately, and preparing for The Big Move was quite an undertaking.

All in all, though, I couldn’t have asked for an easier time. I had three flights on Sunday starting at 6:45, which meant I had to be up by 4:30 and out the door by about 4:50. Yes, that was hard. But ultimately, all of my flights were incredibly smooth, no delays, and everything went so perfectly.

But first – you need to know about the prep week. First, we had James’s birthday, and the only photo evidence I have of that is this picture of me and his and Rebekah’s dog, Desmond. This is just before Rebekah and I went inside to order the ice cream cake, and Desmond thought it would be a good idea to snarf down about half of Rebekah’s previously-untouched peppermint frappuccino. Whoops! This iron-clad stomach seemed fine with it, though. After you’ve eaten a half-pan of brownies overnight with no incident, you’re pretty much limitless, right?

Friday night we had my official going-away party, featuring these delicious desserts. I thought the chocolate-dipped marshmallows were the most beautiful food on the table, though they all looked incredibly delicious. My mom is a really great baker. I said I wanted to have a cosmopolitan black-and-white dessert bar, and she more than came through for me. Cakeballs, brown eyed susans, peppermint torte, black-and-white pinwheels, salted chocolate cookies, chocolate swirl graham cookies, snowball cookies, chocolate-covered pretzels, chocolate chip cookies, and more. Absolutely delicious.

Then…the packing. I started this on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I didn’t really kick it into high gear until Thursday. This is my room after everything exploded.

And here you have the four boxes I shipped on Thursday – that I received this evening. I’m so happy they got here on time! I have one more overflow box, but I didn’t ship it until Saturday, so I’m not expecting it until later this week.

And the rest of my belongings, packed into two suitcases. They both weighed in at just under 50 pounds at the airport. Believe me, I was sweating it that morning. I’d weighed them, but it was still a pretty scary situation. I never want to be rearranging my suitcase at 5 AM at the airport. Yuck. Fortunately, I was in the clear, so I hugged and kissed my family, and off I went through security.

 

Three flights later (to ATL and BWI on to LGA), I was in New York. And I’ve only been here a little over 24 hours, but I already know that I belong. I’ve missed it so much since I was here two years ago, and this really does feel like the right place for me. This is the time for me to live it up and take every opportunity, and I am so relieved to have finally arrived.

Now, on to finding a full-time job! If you know of any in the city, email me! I’m only a little bit kidding :)

Moving across the country is definitely an exercise in prioritization, though. As I sorted and packed and boxed up my belongings, I started to see things that I knew I didn’t want anymore. Things that I had once loved or that had once meant a lot to me now seemed like a waste of space, and I knew someone else would want them more than I did. So really, this packing experience was really an exercise in paring down my own life. As everyone knows, New York is the city of compact living, so I knew there was no way I was going to be able to continue my trinket-packrat ways. So with that, I sliced the sum of my belongings in half, and only brought what I needed (okay, and some fun things, but you need those, too). Yes, I was worried I’d regret some of them, but I really haven’t.

Have you moved recently? What have you found to be the easiest and hardest parts of leaving your life as it stood behind you?

day six is for skype.

Posted in January, Uncategorized by

Today’s happy moment is one that I’ve had planned for a few days. I had a Skype date with one of my best college friends Abigail. She was a fellow English major and a roommate for two years, and now she’s a fancy law student at OU. Big time, right?

We had to take this screenshot like six times because one of us kept looking blurry or confused. I like this one, though. It’s cute – we’re both smiling and laughing, so I think that’s pretty much all we were asking for at that point.

It was really refreshing to get to talk to her again today. We really hadn’t talked much in the past six months or so, because, well, I didn’t really talk to anyone in the past six months or so. But for as long as I can remember in college, we’ve been friends. We met freshman year when we had Spanish together, and I invited her to come to a “college party” – aka a party at my parents’ house where college freshmen were in attendance, whoooo – and we’ve been friends ever since. Apparently I made her feel really cool (I know, right? You’re not the only one scratching your head on that one, since she’s made of awesome and I’m made of weird), and she hasn’t stopped making me feel cool since then.

She’s pretty much always been there for me, to be excited about things that I was excited about and to be there for me when things were crushing. She’s probably going to be embarrassed when she reads this because she’s so modest, but she really is one of the most balanced, thoughtful, responsible and best people I know.

I had coffee later this afternoon with one of my other college friends who also, incidentally, happens to be a fancy law student at OU, AJ. I didn’t take a picture of him, though. I thought that might have weirded him out since he didn’t know about my blog. Maybe he does. Who knows? Anyway. Getting to see him and do some catch-up and getting advice was fantastic. Love that kid. When you see him run for office, vote for him.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is what it means to be an adult. I’m twenty-two, and I’ll be twenty-three in May, so it’s probably time for me to start thinking about these kinds of things. At least, to the point where I am making decisions about what to do with my life. And that’s scary. Like my dad said the other night, making any big life transition is hard and really scary, and the best thing you can do is try to be the best person you can be while you’re doing it.

I think one big revelation I’ve come to over the past few days is that being an adult is not a lockdown situation. There are no real rules. Well, that’s not true. There are lots of rules and I’m pretty sure they call them laws. But as long as you live by those, there aren’t any cut-and-dried rules for how you think and act. And that means you can define being an adult however you want. You can fill the apartment with playpen balls if you want.

Not that I’m planning on filling my house with playpen balls anytime soon, but if I wanted to, I could. Being an adult means learning how to be happy with where you are and doing the best you can with what you have. It doesn’t mean trying to be serious all of the time. In fact, so much of adult time is spent being serious, why would you want to be serious when you don’t have to? I think this is my new life philosophy.

Be serious when you have to, but otherwise have as much fun as possible.

I like it.

Now, off to the first night of drama tv after hiatus! This is the second-most-exciting tv day for me, after the start of fall shows in September. Judge me. Gonna watch some Grey’s Anatomy and it’s gonna be great.