Category: Uncategorized

If I ever do arrive at the game, I am late for it.  

Not sports games. As a rule, I do not sport. It’s one of my favorite things to submit when “Did you see the game last night?” makes an appearance in a conversation: a short laugh, probably more akin to a bark or cackle than I would like, and that exact sentence. “Oh no, as a rule, I don’t sport.” 

The game I’m referring to here is the intangible one. The conceptual and trend-based game of new restaurants, new smart technology, that sort of thing. And this game that I arrived at in January of god’s year 2024, I am so very embarrassed to say, is one that’s been around for quite some time: the library. 

To those of you already well aware of this fact: how good is the library? It is SO good. THE BEST. It is such an undersold source of joy and adventure and solace, not to mention that librarians truly are superheroes. If you don’t have a library card, let this be your sign to get one. It’s my favorite thing on my keychain, and I’m not just saying that because it has a sasquatch silhouette on it (in case I forgot I’d moved to the PNW). 

Since January, at a cost of $0.00, I have borrowed and read ten books. I reactivated my ancient Goodreads account so I could keep track, 80% to gloat to myself, and 20% because I once read a book in high school that I loved but cannot remember the name of, and still search for to this day, and live in constant fear of having this occur again.  

I wanted to share the two books that I’ve read so far that I just could not put down, the only two that since rejoining Goodreads I have awarded five shiny stars. I set an earlier alarm so I could read them before work, I read them through my lunch every day, and I forewent nightly tv shows for them for days straight. They were The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane. 

They are very different books that have nothing to do with each other, but what a beautiful thing to be reminded, that there are books and stories and people that can make you feel that way. That you want to squeeze extra minutes out of your day so you can devour more pages, that you are tempted to call out sick just to stay cocooned indoors with nothing but a book and tea and the rain outside. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book like that (well, at least, one I had not already read ten times before), and it’s brought me so much joy, joy that I’ve felt very lucky to begin experiencing these last few weeks.

In early March, we went through truly the only non-negotiable downside of pet ownership: we had Chevy put down. She’d been in Stage IV kidney failure since May of last year, and while we were happy to do everything we could to keep her healthy and in our company for as long as possible, on Saturday, March 9^th, one year to the day from when we arrived at our new home here in Washington, she had her last afternoon nap in the sun.  

I know it’s not possible, because while Chevy was many things, she was not capable of reading a calendar (what cat would want that skill). But part of me still feels like she knew she was unwell, but she decided she could give us one year in our home, three-hundred and sixty-five days to make sure we were settled and would be okay, and then that was all she had. Then it was her time.

It was a rough transition, going from a house filled with her too-loud yowls and perpetually under-foot tendencies, to one with just Aaron and me. A three-member family is a small thing; to cut it down to two is brutal, no matter how long you’ve seen it coming. To get through it, we prioritized the things we had put off in the past year while we focused on Chevy’s extra care: we spent whole days together outside of the house, starting with building a set of raised garden beds in our backyard.  

We bought the lumber, dug out the foundations, filled in yard after yard of soil. We put in some starter plants and decided to wait to fill the third bed with seeds that are currently in the early stages of growth on our back patio. And we started to make plans. We made a long-awaited trip to visit Aaron’s best friend just outside of Austin. We started going on motorcycle rides and generally just spent more time doing things. Slowly, we found the beginnings of our new normal.  

As a carer – and by the end I would say we definitely qualified as such for Chevy – it takes a lot of grace to fully process the twins of relief and sadness that come with the end of the life of your charge. But there is comfort in knowing that as cat lives go, once she found Aaron, Chevy’s could not have been better. She was loved from that first moment and returned that love in the fullest measure. And, now that she’s gone, in the worst moments, it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I have roughly 1,000 photos and videos of that silly little four-and-a-half-pound cat being her ridiculous, perfect-circle, half-racoon self that I can revisit as often as I need.  

So yes, I’ll take some joy, late to the game or no. Because it’s not just from reading more books and travelling some. A lot of that joy is rooted deeply in a sense of stability that has felt a long time coming. The amount of transition and upheaval 2023 saw for us is in many ways impossible to measure, and I am very glad to put it behind us. 2024 will have more to come, sure, but it can’t compare to the twelve months that preceded it. (Universe, I would so love it if you did not read that as a challenge to be accepted.) We may not have Chevy with us, but we’ll get through whatever it may be. Throw in a promotion at my job, upcoming friend and family visits, and impending summer and gardening plans – and I’m just feeling content in a way I’ve been waiting to feel for a long time.  

And hopefully, with that, I’ll be here more. 

Habits are funny things. Good or bad, I always find mine to be a security blanket of sorts – those I’ve maintained for the longest time bring me the warmest comfort, and even when they fall temporarily by the wayside, I tend to find my way back to them, the same way you can misplace your favorite blanket because you forgot you wore it as a coat into that one part of the house one time and left it there, only to rediscover it weeks later and once again become inseparable for the foreseeable. 

On so many of my days off in London, I would take the tube to Leicester Square and walk down the road to this little sushi chain across the street from the theater that was always showing that Harry Potter play, the one where the logo looks like a child is sitting in a weird copper nest. I would buy the same sushi roll to go, which wasn’t really even sushi as it was mostly comprised of avocado and fried shrimp and those stupidly delicious crunchies, and make my way down the street towards Foyles, eating it as I walked. The amount of time it took to stroll from the sushi shop to the book shop was exactly how long it took me to finish the roll, complete with using the lid to dip each piece in a tiny pool of soy sauce before consumption (I had this all perfected).  

Once at Foyle’s, I’d do a cursory wander through the medieval history section of the store for new arrivals before heading up two flights of stairs to the café and ordering a frosted coconut and lime bar and a pot of English breakfast tea. I would take that tray of food, walk over to the bar height seating that faced the store’s skylit central atrium, and get out my laptop and write. Long fiction, cover letters, plot outlines, blog posts, I would just write. Sometimes I would get a second pot of tea, sometimes not. But I would spend hours there, and this whole ritual, from the moment I set foot on the platform at Leicester Square Station to the moment I cleared my tray and began walking down the six floors of laminate stairs back out to Tottenham Court Road, continues to be one of my favorite and most enduring memories of my time in London.  

I’m finally in a place where I feel like I can develop new habits, habits like that one, habits beyond the weekly grocery shop and completing a Monday through Friday work week. So while this morning was a lazy Saturday spent with Aaron and the cat, in the afternoon I set off into town to try and find that blanket that I’d accidentally worn as a coat into that one part of the house and left there.  

The town of Sumner is about a fifteen-minute drive from where we live. Its Main Street has that classic Historic District feel, where for a good two hundred yards you can walk past brick Gold Rush buildings, pick through some vintage malls, and peruse a used bookstore before ending at a coffee shop next to the train tracks. It is one of the places I take anyone that comes to visit – my bestie and her partner last June, my sister in October, my mom a month into living here last April – because while Seattle, yes, is only half an hour north, the truth is that Aaron and I don’t really have much to do with it all that often. Sumner is tiny and unknown and quiet, but it still boasts views of Rainier and is honestly a more realistic interpretation of where we live. And now, in the most unintentional way because of an unintentional habit with all of our visitors, it reminds me of people that I love that don’t live nearby. 

Laptop out and a Word document open, I was halfway through my latte and on the last bite of my apple pie donut from the coffee shop by the train tracks when I discovered a solitary blue sprinkle stuck in its frosting. And even though there was nothing blue or sprinkled about that coconut lime bar I would religiously consume at Foyles, there was something about that moment, and that sprinkle, and all of the memories in between, that just really brought me a feeling of joy. For habits near and far, long lost or yet to happen. Just a sudden, comforting feeling of warmth.  

It’s been an afternoon well spent.  

Sometimes, instead of saying normal, I say nermal. Whenever I put something online that has previously only ever existed in my head, I do a quick little google to make sure that my weird personal gibberish is not unsuspectingly problematic or means something I did not realize at all (like the time I referenced a Billy Idol song in a Facebook status on my sister’s wedding day because I did not know about things, the things being cocaine).  

This post is a post celebrating all things normal, which in my brain is very often pronounced nermal, so before writing, I did my quick little google. Nermal, I am happy to report, generally only brings up grey catted Garfield adjacent content – and since grey cats are the best cats (I’m looking at you, Chevy), nermal this post will be!  

At a huge risk of jinxing things, I would like to share that I have a very large and very wonderful feeling that life is suddenly about to start feeling nermal again. Let me tell you, I AM SO THRILLED.  

Aaron and I have had quite a six-month period of changes and hard work. It has been, in short, very exhausting for the both of us. This has been coming from many directions, from the early learns of new home ownership to job stress to medical pet stress. As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of it has come from my crisis of career (and capitalism. Still blaming capitalism). Tied in with all of that is the lack of routine that comes from the lack of a regular job. It’s just been…a lot. But something about the last few weeks has led me to believe that things are about to change. 

Looking back, I think it started with the fantastic trip to Sacramento that I took at the beginning of August. It wasn’t the first time I’d left the area since our move; Aaron and I had been in the house for just over a month when we took a quick trip down to San Diego to see friends get married last April. I remember at the time thinking that when we returned from San Diego, it would be our first time arriving back at our new house, to fly to SeaTac and not San Jose, and that it would make the reality of our move hit home. And it didn’t, really. It just felt like another day. 

My trip to Sacramento was different. I got to see all of my friends and family, and because my Sacramento trips when I was living in San Jose only lasted a max of 48 hours, this 7-day trip felt super cushy and relaxing. And it gave me the gift of missing my home, of missing Aaron and Chevy, and of being excited to get back to them. Amongst the very weird things my job life was still going through, it was a huge positive moment in making me realize that our little plot of land and our hilltop house really has come to feel like home.  

Now if you follow me on Instagram, which I assume you do because how else would you have ended up on this post, you’ll probably have seen the gorgeous blue-skied ferry content from my commute to my new job on Vashon Island. Perhaps you have also noticed the sudden drop-off in that content in the past two weeks.  

Well, in a textbook example of Instagram vs. Reality, whenever I posted those stories, I would omit the fact that that commute was total garbage. Ha! So refreshing to reveal that secret. That ferry ride, while beautiful, was a mere 15 minute chunk of a commute that ranged from 90 minutes on a good day to two full hours door to door on a bad one. On top of that, the organization the job was with was just unfortunately not the right fit. So I kept working there, and kept my 1-2 days a week at Earthwise, but started looking for something else.  

Friends, I am here to tell you, there is something about the six-month mark for me. It took six months for me to find Filoli after moving back to California from London, and it took me six months for me to find something that’s finally brought me the same level of career excitement. In a couple of hours, I’ll be heading over to LeMay, America’s Car Museum, for my first day as their new Database Coordinator. Well, today is only a partial day because I’m just filling out paperwork. But starting tomorrow, this writer has a brand spankin’ new, Monday through Friday, 40 hour a week full time job that pays her a decent wage. Let me say again: I AM SO THRILLED.  

I do wish that jobs didn’t matter so much, and they don’t. That’s something I have talked at length about with my friends and family and even this blog. But as much as they don’t matter in the “they don’t define your identity” sense, they inarguably do matter in the “you need an income and ideally don’t want to be miserable for 40 hours a week” sense. I am very hopeful that in this new job, I have locked down the latter. More than anything, I am just so excited for nermal. For stability. For the nest-y vibes and calmness I felt in San Jose, only new and improved with the surety that comes from knowing we will not be moving again any time soon.  

This woman is ready for some serious-ass nermal. And because I am me, and everything feels more complete and satisfying when I have tippity-typed it up for posterity and the internet, I wanted to come here and share that.  

Sure, it’s a little jinxy. But I have a whole lot of faith that this is positivity well placed. Life is not and will not be perfect. Our amazing, wonderful, best cat in the world Chevy is in the final stages of kidney failure. Her day to day is fine but we’re giving her subcutaneous fluids every other day and refer to this time that we’re getting with her as Bonus Time. House stuff will continue to happen and cost money, and work will likely become stressful. Gas will probably never be less than $5.00 a gallon for longer than ten minutes ever again. Student loan payments are starting back up. As my bestie and I shared the other day – being alive in 2023 is just fucking hard, dude.  

But I am very, very grateful that I have so much good going on, so much wonderful lovely nermal. So find your nermal and let’s celebrate it, guys. To the next six months. May they include many things, none of which is having no less than having five different jobs in succession.  

In the past month I’ve met my fair share of new people, so for the first time in at least a little while, I’ve been repeatedly asked the following question: “So, what do you like to do for fun?”  

I’m a chatty person and on the spectrum of open-ness, I’m probably as un-clammed up as you can get. Not only that, but the answer to this question has remained unchanged for most of my life – it’s always been writing, duh, so you’d think it’d be easy enough to answer. But if I’m being honest, I don’t always lead with that. For one, saying you like to write makes it sound like you’re a writer, and that is a whole bucket of imposter syndrome I’m not going to touch in this sentence or the next. For two, saying I like to write almost always prompts a follow up question of “Oh! What do you write?” and…I don’t feel like I have an interesting or valid response to that.  

I’ve realized that the answer to that question can’t be contained by any one genre or medium. The truth is, I write whatever makes me happy. There’s genuinely no other through-line to every single thing I’ve written on my many days off, in all my past afternoons of free time. Sometimes it’s a high fantasy novel. Sometimes it’s a screenplay. Sometimes it’s chick lit. And usually, it is a blog, which I’ve come to accept is a bizarrely public way for my adolescent journaling habit to have manifested in adulthood.

But blogging really does make me happy! It brings me joy to write these little snippets about my own little life, and to be able to look back on them no matter where I am (internet connection notwithstanding). Rather than the huge plastic box I have been lugging around for many, many moves in the past decade and a half, this form of journaling makes these memories accessible, and infinitely easier to flip through. And because the past decade and a half has taken me a whole lot of places, that accessibility and ease are invaluable qualities for me.  

All of that to say, here I am, at it again. I’m writing from the comfort of our backyard patio on a blue-skied PNW summer afternoon, listening to a playlist based on the version of David Bowie’s Changes that features Butterly Boucher (a tune, as SHOCKINGLY were many songs from the soundtracks of the Shrek movies). And as I was bopping along to Cass Elliot’s deeply joyous Make Your Own Kind of Music, enjoying this gorgeous eighty-degree June day, I found myself wondering: what the fuck am I doing with my life?? 

Which sounds like a VERY extra thought for a person who is actually super happy to be wondering. Especially a super happy person that just got married and bought a house!  

Believe me when I say I am so happy in my relationship and the amazing home we have created and share with our amazing, perfect cat. But, please also believe me when I say that no matter how happy you otherwise are, shedding your career as the primary thing you have in one way or another spent your entire adulthood deriving your identity from AND divorcing yourself from a capitalist definition of success is, well, a total bitch of a process.  

I wrote a post years ago about how I found the concept of producing compelling content to be terrifying, because the very idea of that starts to inextricably link something that brings me joy with a quantifiable, judge-able value. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never seriously tried to make writing a career – those are dangerous waters that I don’t know I’ll ever be brave enough to face. But for whatever reason (read: capitalism), it felt totally natural and even correct to inextricably link my career and the money I made with my self-worth, and everything that steep judgement curve brought with it (read: high highs, and low af lows).  

In the past two years, I’ve found myself in a situational first: as one half of a partnership, no longer having to be the only person in my financial corner, no longer having to be my own safety net. Sure, for the majority of those two years, I didn’t have to lean on that partnership in that way because I had a pretty great job that rescued me from my last career crisis. But I always knew that if something happened, that if I had to accept support from my partner, I could. And let me tell you, that surety gave me a real false sense of progress in the vulnerability/self-worth department.  

I started job hunting here in Washington as soon as our offer on the house was accepted, and though it was in a new industry – outside sales in the field of higher education – I pretty quickly found a job that paid real well. And in doing so, I thought I had avoided having to test out that whole accepting support from my partner bit.  

Spoilers: that job ended up being the weirdest dumpster fire and I left after two weeks, and since the end of April I’ve been making twenty dollars an hour working Tuesday through Saturday in an architectural salvage shop as a retail associate. 

There are a ton of pros to this job: it keeps me busy, I get to see some really cool stuff almost every single day, and the crew is awesome. But at twenty dollars an hour, I suddenly find myself…you guessed it: actually having to accept support from my partner. And it is some hard shit. Not because of anything he is doing – he is wonderful and happy to support me! But fuck if it is still one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do.  

All of this, I am quite sure, is connected. That’s why it’s so hard. It’s not as simple as being back at the pay rate I was on when I was twenty-three or as simple as being back in retail (albeit the coolest possible version of it). It’s not as simple as feeling like a failure because on my own I am fiscally “failing”, or as simple as not having a remote clue as to what better job I should even be looking for. All of those things together are wrapped up in this complicated relationship I have with what I am worth in relation to my job and money. And it doesn’t matter that I am surrounded by people that know and tell me on the regular how valuable I am. This is something in my head, obnoxiously and firmly stationed in my bones, and I’ve got to start working through it. 

I am not less valuable because I’m making significantly less money (that is capitalist rhetoric, Kathy, get out of here with that nonsense!). I am not less valuable because I have help. I am not less valuable because I don’t have a career that makes “sense”. It is okay to not know what I want to do and to be unsure of how to go about finding it. Even though I am thirty-four.  

So, my current plan is to focus on the many, many good and true things that are easier to believe at this particular moment in my life. That I have a beautiful home with an amazing human and a (let’s be honest) even more amazing cat. That they both love and support me in their own way. That I have the best friends and the best family, far away though they may be. That this playlist really is full of jams and that I now have at least ten new songs to add to my Summer Jams 2023 playlist.  

That even though all of this is a struggle, and hard, even just writing about it makes it feel a little less so. And that I am almost certain that will always be the case.

I promised a whole lot the last time I wrote. Living it all spread across six weeks was overwhelming, and yet sitting down and trying to write about it in a single post is somehow even MORE overwhelming? (Not really, but, I do not have it in me.) So today, you just get to hear about the wedding, which was one month ago this past Friday (HOW) and totally perfectly imperfect.  

Remember how I made a big do about how Aaron and I would have a courthouse wedding? Well, that courthouse wedding somehow casually turned into a very small, very last-minute ceremony at Filoli after I finished my last day of work. The day was captured predominantly by a polaroid camera on a blue-skied winter afternoon, and it was filled with adventures and fun memories galore. 

Here is a word-based movie montage of a few of my favorites: 

• My colleague (and fantastic friend) Kevin had joked when I announced Aaron and I’s engagement that he’d obviously be officiating our ceremony, right? Somewhere along the line of trying to book an appointment with the county clerk, I remembered this, and we decided to take him up on the offer because honestly, Kevin > most people  
• It stormed the night before and the morning of the wedding day, resulting in a power outage on site and closing Filoli to the public. So come 4:30pm, when the skies cleared and our party of ten arrived, we were the only people on site, which was so memorable  
• Sometime last spring, I was browsing at an antique mall in San Jose, and discovered the most amazing gold and ivory floral dress from the 1960’s, complete with a matching coat. I had zero occasions on the horizon for which this dress would be appropriate, but I tried it on anyway – and when it fit like a glove, it came home with me. Turns out it was THE perfect outfit for a wedding planned in a week, who knew! 
• Maybe this is a wedding day faux pas, but I count myself incredibly lucky that I was able to wear four very special “something borrowed”s, one from each of my sisters, one from Aaron’s Grandma, and one from my bestie  
• Aaron’s Grandma and Grandpa, who celebrated their 65^th wedding anniversary last August, were also the witnesses on our license  
• There wasn’t exactly an “aisle” in the traditional sense, but my mom walked me to the ceremony (from the Bourne Door to the Garden House, for those Filoli familiar) 
• And probably the most memorable: that same storm I mentioned earlier caused a historically low snowline, meaning between road closures, it apparently being locals’ night, and everyone in a ten-mile radius wanting to come see the snow, our planned casual and quiet reception dinner at Alice’s Restaurant in Woodside was an absolute SHITSHOW 
• Not only was it a SHITSHOW, it was an icy shitshow, so once we finally made it there, Aaron (who rode his motorcycle while I took my car) had to immediately turn around to go back down the mountain before it got too icy in the dark for him to ride, while I drove in front of him to make sure he got down safely 
• …it then ended up being too icy anyway, so because a tow was $600+ and 3-4 hours out, we had to ditch his motorcycle on a freezing, pitch-black turnout with the intent of rescuing it in the morning 
• We then drove home in my car, had our usual order from our local taqueria for dinner, and then Aaron’s AMAZING friend Roy came to the rescue and actually picked us up, drove us back up the mountain, and towed the motorcycle home for us some time around midnight. WHOOF.  

Like all of the things Aaron and I made happen in the last sixty days, the wedding and the seven days it took to plan it were a whole lot.  So here is my favorite photo to show you that it was all worth it: 

We did in fact also squeeze in buying a house, moving into said house, and me getting a job into that same sixty day period. But like I said – there is definitely such a thing as too much content for one blog post, and for me, I’m very happy to leave it here.  

Besides, unsurprisingly, I am super excited to share some photos of the house with everyone, but am also unsurprisingly writing this in a room that’s still 80% filled with boxes. So, y’know, you’re all going to have to exercise some patience till the next one.