the up side of moving

i am getting ready to move into my 6th apartment since I moved to Boston 6 years ago. there is nothing fun about psychically carrying everything i own down the stairs, into a truck, and up the stairs again. there is nothing fun about spending hours or days getting the logistics of finding a new place and getting to that place figured out. 

what makes it slightly more tolerable, though, are the zen-like realizations that come along with moving. a home is one of the most important things to me. i want a place that i come into and feel relaxed after coming home from wherever i have been. i spend time and energy arranging and rearranging furniture, buying art for the walls, and doing everything possible to make an apartment a home. then, about once a year, i pack it all up and start over. 

it is nice not to be tied to one room, apartment, or neighborhood. it is also nice not to be tied to too many objects, because there is never time to collect too much before i need to move again. then, i have the privilege of seeing everything i own in boxes in the back of a truck. i can see everything i own and realize that it is all just stuff. most of it is stuff that makes me happy, but in the end it is just stuff. 

so while moving is a giant pain in the back, literally, it is also an incredibly cleansing experience. 

which comes first

i have always loved sports. 

let me start that again. 

i have always loved watching sports. my first love was baseball and i gradually moved on to football. these were the two sports that my mom was interested it, so they were easy fits. when i came to college, i finally developed a love of hockey that any good maine girl should have (thanks to live, good college hockey), but still had a hard time watching it on tv. i still believe that, more than any other sport, hockey is best watched in person.  recently, i have started to casually follow the celtics and the bruins as well.

why do i get so into these sports, though? all of the teams i root for have won national championships in the past few years except for the bruins, and they are better this year than i can ever remember. do i just follow them because they are winning? it sure makes it more fun to watch.

but i think there is also a subtler theme. it seems that the more time i have on my hands, the more sports i watch. i guess this makes sense. i have plenty of time now to pick up some hobbies, so why wouldn't i just get more into something that i have been interested in for my entire life? but would i really be watching all of these sports if the teams weren't doing as well as they are?

that, my friends, is one of life's little mysteries. i think for now, i will just enjoy the fact that my friday and sunday nights were incredibly busy because the sox, bruins, and celtics were all playing on the same night.

tis the season

boston is a college town, plain and simple, and i love that about it. there is this vibrancy, idealism, and liberalism that makes the city feel fresh and young. some of the smartest people in the country, and world, work 10 minutes away from my apartment. 

sometimes, all that youngness really makes me feel old, though. may in a college town means graduation. it is a yearly reminder of how far away from that youthful vibrancy i am. now, don't get me wrong. i am 23 years old. that is not old. what is old, though, is my state of mind. i have had a 9-5 (or 6..or 7..) job for the past 2 years. while my idealism is not gone, it is reconciled with the fact that certain things just don't happen in the real world.

graduation is exciting because the opportunities are limitless. you can do anything you want, and be anyone you want to be. the real world, on the other hand, is pretty limiting. you have bills to pay, which means you need a job. from asking around, it is rare that a job actually fulfills the ideals of youth.

there are parts of being in the real world that i love. there is no homework (other than the work you bring home). there is a routine to life. there is more weekend time to hang out with friends rather than study. there is more disposable income. there is vacation time. it would just be a lot easier to appreciate all the good things if those youthful ideals weren't 10 minutes down the road.

Why Blog

it's funny, really. while i work at a textbook publisher (which is not known to be technologically advanced), i work in the media department. i make media related products that we want to sell to instructors for their students to use. i make things that are supposed to use the technology that kids use everyday for personal reasons and translate it to school. yet somehow, no one around me seems convinced of the usefulness of most social networking sites. 

i have a facebook profile, i updated my livejournal pretty steadily throughout college, i recently joined twitter, and now i jumped ship to create my own blog. some common complaints i hear about these sites are that they are narcissistic and egotistical. people tell me it is narcissistic to write 140 characters about what i had for dinner, or egotistical to think that my opinion is so important that it deserves a blog entry about it. but i am not forcing others to read what i say, and i have opinions about everything whether i write it down or not. 

but the biggest criticism of social networking is people who think it can be replaced by a simple telephone call. i have two words for these people: ashley davis. ashley and i met in college and saw each other every single day for two straight years. we were constant in each other's lives. as happens with college friends, though, we went in different directions. while i finished by four years in boston and stayed here after graduation, ashley catapulted a third (and final) year abroad into a life that has take her from england, to new york, to arkansas, and now to sweeden. 

through these travels, ashely and i have talked on the phone and visited in person many times, but it is just impossible for the two of us to talk every day, as we did in college. it is for this reason that i love when ashley tweets about her kickball team winning or posts a picture of her grad school classmates. these are things that i would miss out on if we were not on facebook or twitter. i can read her blog about life in sweeden (who knew milk was so complicated?) and get those little tastes of ashley that i loved having in my life. 

sure, not everyone that i am friends with on facebook is like ashely. there are many people who i took one class with or met at one party, but i would take 100 of those people, whose updates i can just skim past and do not even register on my radar, for one ashley davis.