whoa!
stop freaking out!
it's not that i'm giving up blogging all together. . . i'm just moving my blog somewhere new, giving it a fancy fresh title, and focusing on an actual semi-theme (or so i hope).
why the change? i like change. i think change is good for one's constitution and one's ability to master the arts of flexibility and making do. in this particular case, my entire life is changing right now, and i want my blog to reflect the transition. i also want it to be harder for my new employer to find me online, as there are stories (true stories) about the company firing employees over personal blog content completely unrelated to the business. yikes!
i've had a good 8 year stint in california, and now i'm finally ready to leave. i realized, however, that many of you don't even know how i ended up here in the first place. most of you know i'm a native east coaster, but i rarely talk about how i came to be a california girl.
like most of the transplants i know, i came to california in hot pursuit of...well...a californian. after graduating from university i did trail work for a few months in vermont and then headed to the bay area to live with one of my sets of parents for a while while i looked for a job. the boy i was obsessed with was an orange county boy (why, oh why, did this not set off an alarm in my head), so i began to look for any job i could find in socal. i ended up getting hired to work as an outdoor education instructor in julian, ca (apple pie country), and on the drive down, i made arrangements to see this boy. it should be noted, that i hadn't seen him in 5 years, and he was likely very confused as to why i notified him that i would be swinging by his house (his parents' house).
i saw him, hugged him, and immediately wondered what the hell had happened to him. 4 years at stanford had apparently transformed the awkward and brooding little punk-ass skate rat into a vapid and uninteresting investment banker. ack! on the plus side, he fed me my first cherimoya...straight off of a tree. delish.
i spent a few months in julian, a few years in san diego and la jolla, and then hit a point where i was unilaterally frustrated with every aspect of my life: i was bankrupt, my boss was an evil cheapskate micromanager, i was having roommate problems, and i found out that my boyfriend had voted for george w. bush. i packed up my suv and hit the road for vermont. six months later i decided that vermont wasn't working out for me, so i packed up again and headed back. i found myself once again in the bay area, and stumbled into a job that kept me housed and fed and at least mildly intellectually stimulated.after i grew tired of my job (which never takes me very long), i looked into grad schools with environmental management programs. i applied to duke and ucsb and got into both. i was hell-bent on duke until i visited both schools. once again, i was apparently not ready to trade the west coast for the east coast. at ucsb i was wined and dined on a terrace overlooking the ocean. samosas, vegetarian sushi, cheeses from around the world, a chocolate fountain, and organic wine were just some of the many tasty treats at my disposal. at duke i found myself face to face with an all-night pig roast, some macaroni salad, and about 13 kegs of beer. an actual pig? on a stick? being roasted by shirtless former frat boys trying to one-up each other's manliness? meh, not so much.
the whole time i was in grad school i told everyone who would listen that i was moving back east lickity split after graduation. easier said than done apparently, as almost a year later i'm still here. fortunately, things finally fell into place.
first of all, i have an awesome non-environmental job lined up in boston (and i actually turned down a great environmental job in el segundo because at this point i feel confident that i'm for cereal ready to leave the state).
second of all, at long last, i'll be close to my east coast family again. my littlest sister is going to start university about 1.5 hours outside of boston in the fall, and my other little sister is still in vermont, and will likely end up staying somewhere in the mid-atlantics or new england for the next few years.
third of all, there are a bizillion other awesome things in the works, but y'all don't really have the security clearance to know about them. trust me though...life is good.
i plan on being in boston by june, and i welcome any and all advice from people who live there or who HAVE lived there. i'll be working in the back bay, and i'm trying to figure out (1) where to look for a 1 bedroom apartment, (2) who to hang out with once i get there, and (3) where i should go to find a good vegetarian burrito.
if you want my new blog address, you're going to have to shoot me an e-mail and ask me for it. i'm not posting the URL here, because that would defeat one of my main purposes for getting a new blog, which is making sure it's tricky to find.
one more thing. a note to all of my most fabulous and fagulous san francisco friends: i'll miss you dearly, so start saving up those frequent flier miles and plan on visiting me and my rockstar ass just as often as you can.
