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Monday, March 19, 2012

comebacks are harder than they look

in my case, this is not because there's so much fanfare [crickets] or the expectations are too high [haha], but because i want to try to find my voice as i am now. when i was writing before i was in a different place in my life ("places" to be exact). in fact, in rereading a smattering of my old posts, i realized how much happened in the few years i had been keeping this blog, and it is nice to have a document of how i felt and the thoughts coursing through my head at that time. of course, i was not and will never be an effusive writer, so there is a great deal that i left undocumented and unremembered -- because of my own nature and because of the nature of the medium. (and isn't that a huge part of the craft of writing in any medium... editing... selecting the parts you want to share and withholding unnecessary or otherwise troublesome details?)

so, here i sit about to write my second blog post in 2.5 years, and i don't really know where to begin. i feel like i gave the quick run-through in my last post, and now i have to dive into the here and now. in some ways, i wonder if there is a here and now. despite my husband and two kids, i feel far from settled. four months ago we quickly departed our apartment of 3.5 years and neighborhood of 11 years for the relative unknown of tribeca/battery park city. it's a beautiful neighborhood, but it's populated by a different breed of new yorker from the upper west side. the level of wealth seems to have jumped up a notch... and there is a very large international contingent (it is not rare to hear children speaking russian, dutch, french, mandarin, or german in the playroom and some of these toddlers speak all of the above). i also noticed that the parents downtown are way "hipper" than the ones on the uws... (my use of the word "hipper" proving my utter lack thereof.) i overhear parents in black leather motorcycle jackets with precisely mussed hair discussing their upcoming concerts or webcasts over the sandbox. these are not my people. my people write scientific papers and consider a trip to the bookstore a major outing. even the schools are hipper... veronica's art school has harvey keitel on the board and yoko ono as a benefactor. her community center has a jazz trio that comes to entertain the kiddos on sunday mornings. what's an unhip girl like me supposed to do?

anyway, this post was about the unsettledness of my life right now. i sometimes feel like there is a pendulum swinging overhead that is dictating the course of my life. i try to lean one direction to get the pendulum to go where i want it to, but my leaning has no impact on the speed and length of its arc. of course, mil's medschool is the pendulum... his performance has a huge impact on my life, but i am not really in control of it. he will either pass or fail. he will either continue on and become a doctor, or he won't, and my leaning will likely have nothing to do with it. if he does succeed [lean, lean, leeeaaannn], then we have two more years in this new neighborhood before we head off into the unknown. if he does not, then it is more likely that we have a year or less of this life before we gather our things and shuttle ourselves off to less expensive pastures. so that is where i am... in a very cool, very hip, unknown.