How have I already been here for three years? HOW? Someone tell me. I demand to know. Time, you are a slippery little fish.
I’ll be honest: this third year wasn’t my favorite. I’m not sure why, but it’s getting harder and harder to be away from my family instead of easier, and my anxiety has sort of skyrocketed since last May. I think it’s mainly a combination of two things: Continue reading
Before we moved here, I always pictured California as a just-like-the-movies SoCal paradise: perfectly manicured palm trees, glittering sidewalks dotted with stars, 85 breezy degrees forever and ever and ever.
But Silicon Valley is a whole different beast. If you were expecting excessively Botoxed platinum blondes or shirtless yogi dudes who travel via surfboard and only know the word “brah,” then you’ve come to the wrong place.
At first, I thought Silicon Valley looked almost like the Midwest — well, plus some mountains — in that everything seems fairly “normal” upon first glance. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of flashy extravagance. Run-down strip malls line the roads. People ride bikes. There are no throngs of paparazzi following Kim Kardashian to dinner.
But once you’ve been here for a while, you begin to notice that it does NOT in fact resemble where you came from, and that the differences go far deeper than a mountainous landscape. To a Midwestern mind, there are some things that seem pretty unusual — but in Silicon Valley, they’re not weird at all. Continue reading
It’s been a long time since I let myself cry. Months, maybe. I’m not talking about the welling up that happens when your baby does something magical, or the occasional wobbly chin because that sneaky-sad P&G commercial caught you by surprise. I mean a heaving, hearty cry that lasts way longer than a single sob, the kind that makes your eyes puff up by morning.
I cried a lot more often in the beginning, when we first moved — but I was pregnant then, and I got to blame it on hormones, and after the baby was born I told myself to toughen up, sister. Most of the time, I am moderately successful at this: I try to end every day (and every post) with a glimmer of hope; I’m a fanatic about practicing daily gratitude; I never go to sleep without counting my blessings, and there are so many — so, so many. An immeasurable amount. I am deeply, guiltily aware of how much worse things could be, and for that reason I sometimes pretend to have no problems at all. Continue reading
I have a confession: when I was a teenager, I told my parents I was going to move to California.
Back then, I wanted to act. Still kinda do (minus the whole stage fright thing). I’d performed in school plays (Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz), community theater (Anne Frank in The Diary of…), and landed roles in TV and radio commercials through a local Michigan agency. My SAG-AFTRA card has been firmly in hand since I was twelve, and for many years, I openly dreamed of leaving Michigan.
“Mo-om, the weather is, like, SO MUCH BETTER there,” I said on more than one occasion. “Why would anyone choose to live in a place with so much snow?” I went on and on about it, actually, much to my parents’ chagrin. I swore I would get out of Michigan and give acting the ol’ college try right after…you know, college. Continue reading
We’re in! We’re in the new house! And all the fun things like TV and Wi-Fi are (mostly) set up, so I can finally communicate via blog without having to sneak away to a coffee shop somewhere, which clearly could not happen anyway because I’d have to drag along a 3-year-old and a baby and somehow try to accomplish something and just no.
If you’ve known me for two seconds — or even if you’re a complete stranger who just happened to read the intro on my home page — you are aware that I’m not a huge fan of change. I get so comfortable in my surroundings that it’s maybe a little bit self-destructive.
I am a total anti-hoarder when it comes to things, but with people and places my head is kind of a cluttered mess. I hold on much longer than I probably should. Fully letting go makes me uncomfortable. Every time I’ve had to move out of something — my parents’ house, my dorm room, my very first tiny third-floor apartment — I’d get all weepy and wistful. This happened whether I lived there for two days or two years. I could take a mini vacation, and as the hotel room door swung slowly closed, I’d be like, “BUT THE MEMORIES!” Continue reading