A lazy, quiet, Saturday.

It is a bright and beautiful summer day here in New Jersey. Living on the top floor of our two-apartment house, we leave all of the blinds open during the day. It allows the sunshine to dance on the hard wood floors and every time you look outside, all you see is trees. Sometimes I pretend we live in a tree house. It's so sunny and warm that it makes it hard to believe just 3 and half short months ago there was still snow on the ground. It also makes it hard for this California girl to believe that in just about 4 months, there will be snow on the ground again.

My handsome fiancé and myself were supposed to pack up the ice chest full of snacks, beer, and excellent decisions and head to the beach today. I'm trying to get as many trips in as I can before school (aka: the mayhem) begins. But after working a 70 hour week, a machine called "The Wheel" decided to break (again) and he had to go into work on a SATURDAY to fix it. It's just criminal, I tell you. But he took it like a champ, got out of there by 11, and took me to do one of my favorite things in the world- shop for more school supplies. I say more because I've already gone once this week. Now I have two stylish binders complete with brand new pens and pencils and little dividers and folders for each of my classes. Nothing can cheer me up quite like the stationary aisle at Target can. We plan on trying for the beach again early tomorrow morning. Early (sigh) because we want to get a good spot.

It is nearing 2 in the afternoon now and Jason is napping. Not surprising after working more than 70 hours in only 5 and a half days. I, on the other hand, decided to distract myself with my favorite pastime- writing- because however exhausting it may be to work 70 hours in one week, I would suffice it to say that it is almost as exhausting to be completely alone for 70 hours in one week.

Well, that's not fair. I'm not alone anymore. I now have my kitty cat Augustus who keeps me wonderful company, if I do say so myself. He yells (meows) at me when I'm doing something wrong, cuddles me when he's waking up from yet another nap, and has no problem letting me know when he wants to play fetch no matter what important show I'm watching or book I'm reading. Yes, my cat plays fetch. He admittedly plays fetch better than any dog I've ever played fetch with, in fact. He stays very focused. He only stops going to get the ball after over 20 times of bringing it back to me because he is suddenly oh so exhausted and falls wherever he is standing to take, you guessed it, another nap.

I love him.

Yeah, life is pretty good. I miss home, sure. Especially on long days like the ones I had this week where the waiting never seemed to end... Waiting for Jason to get home, waiting for the weekend, waiting for my birthday in New York, waiting for school and my life to start... A lot of waiting. I feel as though I've spent the past 7 months of my life waiting. Which draws quite an excellent parallel to our lives, I suppose. Aren't we always waiting for something?

Voltaire said, "We never live; we are always in the expectation of living."

However, on the 2 week home stretch of this 7-month excursion of which I have found myself, I am declaring, right here and right now, to live. I will finish the book I'm writing. I will go to the beach. I will read and nap and enjoy the downtime I have left. Because I have a feeling 17 units of classes will quickly make me miss all of this expectation of living.

Until next time.

-City Girl from Cali

Random ramblings and not sleeping in the city.

I don't even know where to begin as I sit here to write this post. I just know that I've been dying to write, feeling a burning, constant need for it, in fact, but I have not a clue as to what to write about.

Life, as of late, has been a series of lows and highs. I suppose life is always that way, but I've just happened to take more notice of it in particular over the past week or so. Since visiting home and then returning to New York and Jersey, my time here feels incredibly different. I figured that I would go home, it would be refreshing, and then I would come back, picking up where I had left off. But, that hasn't really been the case.

Home, as I wrote about in a previous post, was not what I thought it would be. So naturally coming back here hasn't been what I thought, either. It feels more foreign to me now than it did before. I don't mean that in a negative way or in a way that would imply I'm having second thoughts about my decision to move here. I simply mean that since returning to life on the East Coast after only one week of my old life, this new life feels even more outrageous than it did before.

On some levels, this is a good thing. It's a good kind of outrageous. On other levels, aka the days that I feel terrified and miss home, those feelings are amplified in to a bad kind of outrageous.

I've talked about this before, and I'm sure this won't be the last time I write about it either, but I knew that this was going to be hard. I knew that moving across the country was going to be obviously difficult. I knew I was going to miss home. What I didn't know was just how hard it was going to be. I couldn't have known.

Maybe I'm starting to sound like a broken record to whomever is keeping up with these blogs. I know I certainly am to myself. I just need to address how I'm feeling and let it in, so that I can then let it go.

This really is the adventure of a lifetime. Yes, I am very idle for most of the week. It is in these quiet moments of solitude, with nothing but the sound of the air conditioner around me, that I yearn to be near the people I love the most. Because it really is the people in our lives that make our lives WHAT they are. I've learned this more than I thought possible over the past few months. But that doesn't give me an excuse to feel sorry for myself.

School will be rescuing me in less than 3 months. That means I've made it through more than half of the toughest part of my time here. And if quiet moments of solitude with an aching heart that's reaching for home is what it takes to experience the loud moments of life I have every time I go in to New York City or feel the rush of driving around in a place that's brand new... then maybe those moments are worth it. 

I've been watching the seasons change, I've dove into a river near a waterfall after a long hike through a green forest, I've gotten engaged in Central Park (for crying out loud), and just last weekend I pulled an all nighter in the city that quite literally never sleeps. 

My handsome fiancé and myself ventured into the city at (Oh my Goodness) 9 PM to check out a supposed "awesome new club", meeting up with a couple friends of ours later in the night. Well, being the unbelievably cool people that we are, we were the first to arrive at the club. Literally. The only ones there.

After we checked in and the bitch at security took away my scented hand sanitizer (Like, really? What do you think I'm gonna do, snort it?), we took a look around at the empty place and naturally found the nearest bar. The cleavage-clad bartender took our orders and we sipped our overpriced cocktails, eventually giving up on trying to talk over the obnoxiously loud music. (Clearly, I'm such a party animal.)

We did, however, have fun. We danced like the nerds that we are and showed embarrassing amounts of PDA, interchangeably groping each other and making out against a wall. Not even a little bit ashamed.

We also missed the last train home and were forced to stay in the city until 7 AM when the first train out would be arriving. Make-up smeared and feet throbbing from my heels, I would have totally felt like a hooker doing the walk of shame if it hadn't been for my s/o, who was doing said walk of shame with me. And who did we sleep with? The City, that's who. Only there was no sleeping.

I mean... this is it. This is what I've been waiting for and working toward for what feels like my entire life. And I'll be damned if I let myself, or any sort of quiet moment, get in the way of that.

Yeah, I really did need to write. I apologize for the random rambling. I apologize if I sound repetitive. But I really did need to write.

Til next time...

Xx

Taylor