Growing Up

I made it! I'm out! I can wipe my hands clean of this bloated corpse the world calls the restaurant industry, finally. My formal new title: Editorial Assistant to the Adult International publishing branch of the English Language Teaching division of Oxford University Press.

A part of me wants to reject the corporatized 9-5 lifestyle, a knee-jerk "eff that!" reaction. But corporatized is the key word here, and wrongly so; students live basically 9-5, weekday schedules, too, so there really is no need for me to identify myself with some middle-management marketing slave when I can just think of myself as a modified student. And my hours are 8-4, anyway.

For the first time in my adult American life -- as in, post-college, not France -- I will have a schedule that allows me to confidently plan ahead. I can buy bus tickets to visit friends a month from now without having to worry if I might have to work that day -- amazing! Expect weekend visits from me, everyone. I can go on excursions out of town, if I feel like it -- take the Metro North up through the Hudson Valley and go camping with Don; take a bus to Boston for the hell of it; take the train out to Montauk for the weekend. Where all of this vacation money will come from is the next step.

But who cares about money when you have health care?

I'm very excited, to say the least. I'm sure I won't be so thrilled when I'm near passing-out on top of a stack of invoices at 8:30 in the morning, but maybe later that day I'll have some workbook pages to edit and then ride my bike home and then go to my Harlem Renaissance class (starts July 5th!), and then everything will be okay. Better than okay; probably pretty great.

This is all also coinciding with the onset of spring, which makes me a little bit insane, allergic, and happy. My and Don's Chestnut Ale will be ripe for drinking soon (we've tested a few early bottles... eh); a new batch of English IPA is on its way tomorrow. New plants are on the windowsill; the Wizard is becoming soft and nice. I haven't worn my winter hat in a week.

Adventures in Technology

Being a newly-minted Linux Ubuntu user has destroyed my technological confidence. Think you understand your laptop? Try reconfiguring your BIOS or disabling your ACPI settings, or converting Ogg Vorbis files in order to use your iPod, or running script after script in the scary Command Center, whose bleak, blinking interface shows me just how weak I am in the face of this monster called Open Source Software.

I've come to some sort of impasse with my Toshiba A135, whose original settings were designed for optimal functioning with the not-so-optimal Windows Vista. I've had to disable the suspend/hibernate settings, and have managed to have a script run automatically on startup in order to allow my system to recognize external devices. (You can imagine how scared I was upon realizing that my "new" computer wouldn't recognize my external hard drive, which contains all my files, music, pictures...) I'm currently having some compatibility issues with music files, juggling between Rhythmbox (music player), GTKpod (iTunes for Linux, but no playback capabilities), and Sound Converter (to convert those .ogg files), all which require their own very tricky set of plugins.

While this all sounds like a huge pain, it give me the same smug satisfaction as does anything handcrafted. Why make beer when you can buy it? Why go out of my way to scoop spices into tiny bottles at the co-op when I can just buy the pre-ground stuff at Key Foods? It's all a part of the same cycle, in my eyes -- using your own energy and creativity to make good use of what some enormously generous individuals have made available to the public for free or at low cost. Using free software to convert files in order to use them on my free operating system is nowhere near as large of an inconvenience as paying some Microsoft person to develop my software, provide me with nonsensical updates, and give me useless tech support. And what do you end up learning from that kind of experience?

Creeping Around, Doing Things

Things have been on the up and up and I've been not writing about them as a preventative method against jinxing myself.

!!

So I started school -- Methods in Research and Literary Criticism, a.k.a. lit theory as applied to 18th century British literature. What a difference from Delaware! -- my professor is Indian; my classmates are various shades of brown and peach, and of various ages; no one is falling asleep or dumb; urban campus. There is something entirely more real about walking to class down a city block, with fat mothers and music blasting from the fake Louis Vuitton store and the teenagers slouching around outside the fried chicken place and the dried fruit vendor reading a magazine, than strolling through a colonial-style Ugg boot-wearing campus. I miss trees sometimes, but not those trees.

Going to school in Brooklyn has also helped to reboot my tourism -- I've been casually exploring Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO (home of my beloved Jacques Torres), and Downtown Brooklyn on foot; nice weather will bring me out on my bike. I've also discovered a new co-op, the 4th Street Food Co-op in lower Manhattan, which is a huge improvement over the incomptetently-run (and overpriced) organic store across the street from me ("what is tare weight?"), as well as more flexible and accessible than the massive, 14,000-member Park Slope Co-op.

Next: MORE BEER! Don and I made another batch of beer last week, and thus far it has proved itself to be far superior to the semi-carbonated, vaguely bleach-flavored batch of "Rye PA" we made a few months ago. This one is a bit darker than the first, with less hops and more barley; it was a Chestnut Brown Ale, and indeed, we threw a couple of home-roasted chestnuts in there for flavor. The batch is already bubbling and perky, and should be ready for bottling in a couple weeks, meaning it should be drink-ready by the end of March. If this one turns out well, our plan is to buy the grain and yeast ourselves (from the co-op!), and make our own batches, since right now we've been using the pre-measured ones from the Brooklyn Brew Shop. I'm thinking, replace the barley with quinoa or brown rice, or toasting the hops, or adding herbs and spices, or growing our own hops...

And finalement, a cat! Don and I adopted a two-year old stray about two weeks ago, who had been found by the NYC animal police and kept in kitty prison since August. She was discovered wandering around the south Bronx with a sketchy older man cat, and was nearly euthanized for "questionable behavior." She's long-haired and green-eyed and has a broken tooth. Her name is The Wizard.

Her fur was patchy and dull when we first got her, and she stank (she had some bad hygiene when she arrived..). But the dullness has given way to a fluffy white cravat of fur and a puffy tail, and her behavior is certainly not questionable. She chirps instead of meows, and will hit you (clawlessly) if you anger her. It's nice coming home to a little wild, chirping creature every day.

...And I think that's it. There are more changes (which may involve me having to leave my cheesemongering job...), but I'll post those as they occur. I'm feeling invigorated and excited, and still have the impression that I just moved here. I haven't even touched the techno/club scene or independent film, and am just starting to get a feel for the food microcultures that exist all over this city. It seems like the busier I get, the more time I have for active exploration...

DFW

I've been thinking about David Foster Wallace a lot lately. I hope you know who I mean; when I finished Inifinite Jest I almost felt like I could never read another book again. His prose makes you feel like your mind is unraveling in a sinister way, and after having finished perusing a passage or two you could look up at everyone around you and feel convinced that something insane and secret has just happened to you. He committed suicide by hanging in 2008 at the age of 46; he could have been the next literary revolutionary of my generation. The more I learn about him, the more I feel like I miss him, like I missed him, like I wasn't paying enough attention to his writing while he was around. Isn't that nuts?

This is a commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, called "This is Water." I read it twice over and for some reason it made me want to cry. Here also is an interview with him and Dave Eggers for The Believer in 2003. I can never get enough of this guy.

La Nostalgie

I just finished making a photo album from France, spanning September 2009 to May 2010. It doesn't really capture a lot of what happened there, I realized: most of my pictures are beautiful still lifes (nature morte, in French), often taken during my vacations or from out my window; a couple long-armed shots taken of myself almost get it right, but the lonesome, snowy hikes were only a fraction of my daily life. What's missing from my family-friendly album is the ephemeral and half-assed photo -- the stupid image of some piece of cheese; the digital macro of a pinecone; the zany action shots taken during Skype sessions. During my most memorable moments, however, I was without a camera: during class, during my weekly rock climbing sessions, at a neighbor's house for dinner.

I can't get it all right, I guess; between this blog, my journal, and these photographs, I suppose I can recreate enough, though perhaps that's not the point. Keeping my memories alive and sharp seems as important to me as keeping my planner organized -- an admirable but unattainable goal. I'm afraid if I don't pay enough attention, or go out of my way to revisit the past, I'll lose my memories entirely, a fear that I suspect stems from the anxiety-ridden and all too frequent task of trying to remember my dreams just as I'm waking up, and just as they're slipping away. I guess there's just a lot I need to get used to.

Fancy

So maybe the cubicle is kind of lame, and I don't really dig wearing office-casual shoes, but working on a four-person media team for the American English Language Teaching division of a world-famous publishing house? Excellent.

Lo-Res

I like to think I started a tradition for myself with last year's recap of the top ten great things I'd done with my life since the previous year. My reasoning: there are lots of things I'd love to do, promise to complete, aspire to finish, etc. -- what better way to self-fulfillment than reflection and a little pat on the back?

In no particular order:

1. Reunited with my family on my native turf.
2. WWOOFed for real!
3. Visited all three major parlimentary capitals of the EU (The Hague, Luxembourg, Brussels).
4. Said goodbye to my life in the Vosges.
5. Moved to New York City with someone I love.
6. Joined an orchestra.
7. Got into graduate school (I start in two weeks!).
8. Bought my first grown-up Christmas tree.
9. Got a real-ish job (I start in two days!).
10. Went on a Belgian adventure with a great friend.

I like how diverse my lists are -- my life seems to run on seasonal semesters, and so a January-to-January summary will span several very different periods. The New Year's Eve celebrations alone are enough to warrant their own list (maybe in 8 years?) -- this time last year I was in Paris, miserable and alone, sitting at a bar so I could at least be in public to listen to the Parisiens count down to midnight: "Dix, neuf, huit..." Pathetic. This year was a bit more social: Don and I went to his improviser-friend's apartment in Chinatown for a party, which was fun until we tried getting a cab... (think of the elements in this equation: 2:30am, Lower East Side, Snooki-lookalikes...).

It has been, finalement, a pretty interesting and rather rough year. The transition from alpine tranquillity to the harried New York life has not been easy, nor has the adjustment of living with a significant other (the rewards, needless to say, always outweigh stress). I'm still very much set on retiring to the Vosges one day  -- or the Berkshires, whatever -- but I think for the moment, the city life suits me well. It would be a crying shame to have finally begun living the New York lifestyle proper -- by which I mean taking advantage of everything the city has to offer, not shopping at Hermes and spilling coffee on commuters -- only to escape from its frenetic grip prematurely. I'm going to stick this one out.