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.  

Big Things have been happening! Big happy things! And a new URL and name for this oft-forgotten slice of the web is the least of them! 

New writing initiatives are always one of my favorite things, even if it is not far from the truth to say I have yet to ever truly stick to a single one of them in this life. However, this one is in full swing, so I’m going to be an optimist, as I am wont to do, and say this time, my friends, I will stick to it. Every once and a while someone I haven’t talked to in the longest time will tell me that they enjoy reading my little piece of the internet whenever I take the time to sit down and write. So it is with that energy I sit down and write this, my first contribution (of many, I tell you!) to the internet of God’s year 2023. (That’s my attempt at channeling medieval chroniclers, whose taste for high drama, gossip, and shameless shade in the guise of “chronicling” I always aspire to. You will find no religious re-awakenings here).  

So Big Thing One.  

Has anyone here seen Robin Hood: Men in Tights? When Robin and Marian get married at the end, the ceremony is performed by Rabbi Tuckman (played by Mel Brooks), and it goes roughly like this:  

“Robin, do you?”  

“I do.” 

“Marian, do you?” 

“I do.”  

This always used to seem like an insane way to get married to me. But now, I think it’s kind of great. Like, if all you care about is being married to the person you’re getting married to, it’s really all you need. I say all of this to share that, at some point in the next month or so, county clerk schedules depending, Aaron and I will be doing our own version of this scene. (Except that in the movie, they are interrupted by Patrick Stuart playing King Richard. I would not object to Patrick Stuart showing up but the prospect is doubtful.)

So that is the wonderful and exciting and lovely Big Thing 1.  

Big Thing 2?

We will then promptly be moving to Seattle, Washington, where Aaron has snagged an amazing job working on rocket engines, as he is wont to do. This relocation will include buying our first home (Big Thing 3??), and me finding a new job (Big Thing 4??). It’s a lot of Big Things, I know. But I could not be more excited because I know that as stressful as it will be at times, all of these big things combine to make a pretty fantastic adventure that I get to go on with a pretty fantastic person.  

When I was in between flat viewings in London in late March of 2018, I sat in a pub and re-discovered the Fratellis. I haven’t followed them very seriously over the years, but the summer of my senior year of high school is when their Costello Music album was charting, so it accompanied some of my best windows-down driving moments. And let’s be honest: in a suburban teenage existence, windows-down driving moments are really the only Big Things you’ve got.  

The 2018 album In Your Own Sweet Time is no Costello Music. But it had two songs that I immediately added to the on-the-go playlist I had for that time in my life, and now they transport me as instantly to Portobello Road (because of course that’s where I was sitting in a pub in between flat viewings as an American that had just moved to London) as Flathead takes me to a one-hundred-degree Sacramento summer. And that will always be my favorite thing about music, that time-machine quality it has.  

When I’m experiencing Big Things, like this one/dozen, I always wonder which songs will develop that bizarre power. A song called Feeling Ok by Best Coast was the soundtrack to several London lockdown walks while I was deciding to move back home. When I first moved in with Aaron, it was the song Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart) by Ricky Nelson.  

This moment’s song? The jury is still out. Based on my recent listening, there are a few different contenders. But there’s also a lot to come in the next few weeks and months, so I’m not making any guesses just yet. I can tell you though, that I am already excited to think about how they’ll make me feel for the rest of my life.  

So stay tuned, dudes, for the next few contributions. Because this time around, for whatever reason (read: the song I’m listening to right now), I have a little extra faith.