Mea culpa, Dear Reader

At least it wasn't quite as long as my last hiatus.

I've been a little busy! Since June, I have been to Iceland, the Czech Republic, France, Austria, San Jose, Atlanta, North Carolina, New York, Detroit, Maine, St. Louis, Hawaii, D.C., Norfolk, Richmond, China, San Francisco, Spokane, and Baltimore. I officially moved to Atlanta in September.

Frankly, I'm a little terrified. In Baltimore I had a built-in network of school and friends and colleagues. Finding work was easy. The living was easy. Everybody knew my name. Baltimore was my "Summertime" and "Cheers", since we're mixing aphorisms. So naturally I got bored with it and decided a change was in order.

So Michael Bae (get ready for a lot more where that came from, Internet) and I moved to an amazing high-rise in the heart of midtown with ridiculous skyline views and amenities up the wazoo. (Up? Out? Was always confused as to the direction of wazoo content emanation.) There have been consecutive days where, when I get busy with practicing, I don't even leave the building. The gym's upstairs, the free coffee machine is downstairs, and I trot merrily to and fro in my luxury hamster wheel, vacillating between learning a bunch of notes and despairing that I'll never find work again. Baeowulf* has been patient and supportive throughout, and we have never been closer.

Life is great. Truly. I'm only being half sarcastic. This shake-up was exactly what I needed to get me out of the unmotivated funk in which I'd been festering. My eternal grass-is-greener mentality will always try to sabotage me by convincing me that I made the wrong move. My early precocity and eagerness to please blossomed into a paralyzing perfectionist streak that prevented me from attempting anything unless I was certain to excel at it. Unfortunately, that meant that I simply didn't even try for fear of failure and rejection.

That ends now, hopefully. (Hey, we're making breakthroughs, but we still gotta be realistic.) I will do better. I will try harder. Starting with updating this blog more regularly, even if I'm the only person who reads it, which, judging by my Google Analytics page, is highly probable.

*Told you.

#changes #breakthrough #Baethoven

Style > Substance (?)

I am thisclose to deleting my Facebook.

The social media platform has always been a bottom-feeding time succubus, rife with attention-starved sycophants, starting with silly collegiate antics in the mid-aughts and these days populated more and more with older people sharing disgusting food videos and chain emails circa 1998. Then, ever since the Mephistophelean circus that was last year's presidential election, all of a sudden Facebook was overrun with couch activists on both sides of the aisle screaming into an incorrigible void until my news feed resembled the Greatest Hits of Pathetic Youtube Comments Brought to You By Trolls 'R Us.

We have reached a tipping point where we are bombarded by so much information at such alarming rates, most of it trivial, at best harmless and at worst humanity-condemning, that there is no possible hope of taming the beast. We have already gone over the brink. The center cannot hold.

One of these days I'll gather enough courage to pull off the Facebook Band-Aid instead of letting said Band-Aid sort of half-dangle as I mindlessly pick at the never-healed scab. When that day finally comes I will toss the Band-Aid into the trash, relish my newfound freedom until the pain becomes too unbearable, and promptly proceed to dress the gaping wound with an Instagram tourniquet.

#facebook

I Should Be Doing A Million Other Things

After a chilly first half of May, summer arrived with a sweaty vengeance this morning as I ran early morning errands and tried to organize my life before the Big Migration.

Now I sit, pantsless, clad only in the boyfriend's oversized T-shirt, sipping hot lemon water and Chinese tea, enjoying the green sunlight filtered through the trees in the park, enjoying the relative quiet, enjoying this perfect apartment; one of the last times I will do so.

Summer brings a peripatetic lifestyle of European adventures and California weddings and various concerts and doubtless lack of sleep and my first foray into homelessness and living out of a suitcase for at least two months. The flighty, possession-loathing part of me rejoices. The safe, rational, levelheaded part of me wonders if I should be taking more precautions and planning a bit better. But the flighty, possession-loathing part of me pushes the other part out of the way, throws all her stuff into the garbage, hops on a plane, and says good night and good luck to rational thinking.

#summer #migration