In short; trains, wine, and toilet paper.

Hey there, readers.

It's been quite a while since my last post. As you can imagine, adjusting to my new routine has been quite the, well, adjustment. It has taken time and a little bit of tears. (Okay, a lot a bit.) Regardless, I have slowly but surely gained a foothold in this East Coast way of life. Not to mention, I'm still working on gaining my foothold in this University way of life. It is much more difficult than community college ever was. Which is to be expected, I suppose. But I think the whole riding the train to the light rail to finding your way around a fast-paced city thing (especially doing all of these things for the first time) adds a certain layer of "difficult" to the already "more difficult".

Nonetheless, I am adjusting. However, I miss home more since school has started than I ever did in those first 7 months of living here. Which seems strange- right? Shouldn't my unbelievable ache for home happen during the time when I have nothing but time to think about how unbelieveably much I miss home? Now, I'm so busy I have to hold my breath because there's no time for irrelevant things like breathing and I miss home even more than I did before. 

It's the worst when I'm on the train. Sometimes I look out the window, listen to music, and pretend to live out my very own music video fantasy. Mostly, though, I just think about my mom's warming ways, my family's lilting laughter, and my beautiful bestie. All of whom I miss something fierce. Everytime I say or think this lately, I feel like such a broken record that I annoy myself. Like, okay, I get it. I miss home. Blah...blah...blah... But I did choose this, remember? Do you remember that part of it, self?

I chose to uproot my entire life and move across the country. Therefore, no matter how badly I miss home, I have to keep moving. I have to keep riding the train and avoiding the bums. (At least the ones who rudely get in your face when you tell them you don't have any cash on you... HELLO! I'm not lying! I'm a college student. If it weren't for FAFSA, I'd be on that curb with ya, Pal.) I have to keep paying attention in class and doing all of my assignments. I have to keep trying to appear as though I've got it all together, even though this couldn't be further from the truth. At least, most of the time. Sometimes I do have it together. Like when I'm shoulders-deep in a hot, candlelit bubble bath with a mason jar full of wine. That would be an occasion when I would say, yeah, I've got my shit together. Sure.

When I'm running to catch my train or walking in to my Management Skills class with toilet paper stuck to my shoe... Not so much.

Until I'm bursting with inspiration and too much to say...

Xx,
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