Ten-year reckoning

It seemed only befitting, after running into an old roommate and acquaintance for the first time since 2001, that I recap what went on in my life in the last ten years. I have, naturally, omitted details and highlighted the general gist. I wish I could, and someday will, load more pictures of those years though I will only throw a few images up there in the margins to visually represent my story.

In 2000 I formally withdrew from Parsons School of Design (of The New School) and attempted to survive in Manhattan's Lower East Side (once known as Alphabet City before the gentrification and de-bumming of Guliani's days) on a video story salary. My folks rightly cut me off when I announced my intentions of dropping out. Ultimately, I packed up my items from the basement apartment and took up residence near the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a couple of guys; one, a horticulturalist who lived off of Campbell's tomato soup and online chess, the other, a bike messenger and embittered scholar of sixties folks music. I worked several jobs, saving every penny burning records and painting for entertainment, all in order to prepare for an indefinate tenure in Europe. I departed, alone in early 2001, for Italy, to connect with Sicilian family while not speaking much Italian. I was employed by a family with a loose connection to my U.S. lineage as a kind of barista and learned a good deal of the language as there was nary an English speaker. I ultimately traveled solitarily for six months throughout Italy, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, France and Scotland, where I settled with an empty bankroll and a job as a chambermaid. I'd had a borrowed bicycle and was living in a B + B. One afternoon, after my tasks had been completed, I was eating lunch watching East Enders. The program was interrupted by live footage of the World Trade Tower attack of 9/11. In reaction to an unseemly guilt at my expatriatism, I borrowed funds from home, made a last stop in Paris to visit old NYC roommates, and returned to the States, shocked at the volume of America in the aftermath of the attack. Once again in Philly, I took up residence with a Philosopher from Columbia in a loft, began weight-training and cycling until a refridgerated box truck ran over my legs. I hung around for a while longer, recovered, road-tripped with two friends starting in Colorado (visiting my Godmother and her family)then from Seattle to Philadelphia... camping in Yellowstone and pulling up to Devil's Tower at dusk... this being my initiation into the West.

Here I must interject, as I would be remiss if I didn't comment that my incredibly supportive parents hosted me at each interim for periods of weeks and months while I pulled myself back together again (trying to decide if I should live in a Maine lighthouse, pursue pre-med, the PeaceCorps, etc.). They are incredible people, and I would post their pictures if my mother hadn't requested that she not be a part of anyone's Facebook (though a blog far trumps such networking sites as Myspace and Facebook).

After leaving Philly I once again pulled together all of my savings and moved to Seattle where I immediately
became entangled with an incredible art community. I co-ran a gallery once called Aftermath, and my former
roommate and co-conspirator now owns a thriving wine-bar/gallery called Vermillion. (http://www.vermillionseattle.com/)

I reentered undergraduate-dom and became a theatre-production nerd. I earned a BFA in Performance Production,
focusing on Costume Design; which had been my initial goal when I'd been at Parsons in New York. For a while
I lived in a cabin on the Olympic Pennisula; shaved my waist-length hair, made award-winning blackberry wine,
learned how to exist off-the-grid, bought a 1967 Triumph, and ultimately became involved with an incredible
anarchistic community and a particularly brilliant botanist (whom I lived with on an oyster-ridden beachfront
property for about two years - all ramshackle and analogue recording equipment... long story there). I got myself a dog, Fern,
my first ever and moved back into Seattle before leaving altogether. It turned out that I was competing with
extremely engrained drug issues in my botanist, and I needed to get out of dodge.... and sort of dry out for
a while (as living in the Northwest is like living in a wet sock, at times).

So, with a pet snake named Abuela (forgot to mention that I adopted a Ball Python), Fern, and a Uhaul...
(my El Camino, the first of two, died) I moved to New Mexico in pursuit of solitude, dry high ground and
the film industry. I lived in a little village in the Pecos River Valley, called Villanueva. The town was
inhabited by 300 Chicanos and some sprinkled eccentric types like myself, adorned with cliff-edged Guadalupe shrines...
I was at 7200 feet in a two hundred year old adobe house. It was austere. I gardened, ran, subsisted on raw-food cuisine, and
hustled work while a member of IATSE, the film union. Somehow, in a land plagued by an excess of
good looking women and few, transient, men, I met my husband. He'd left Wyoming, his home state,
behind also in search of more amenable climes. I had been working as the designer on a film called
War Boys and co-running a costume rental business. Ryan and I quickly became engaged and
willfully pregnant... the whole thing happened pretty damn fast, actually. Our son, River, was born
in our little rental home in Albuquerque with an incredible midwife and hellishly long labor.

Just after River was born I dragged my husband, bolo tied, booted, and belt-buckled to PA to raise up
our boy alongside my nephew (my brother's son was born nine months prior) among other family.
I got into a graduate program, where I was also working as the graduate assistant for my department and earning a teaching
certification at Kutztown University (where my parents met during the Nixon administration).
We bought a big old drafty farmhouse on two acres, I completed my graduate work and am working
on my thesis (vvveeerrrrryyyy sllloooowwwwlllyyyy). Our daughter Ruby came along rather unexpectedly,
and she was born in my library in our home with a different but also quite capable midwife - shorter labor,
but still the hardest gig out there. We have a small apple orchard, a huge fire pit, and a kitchen open
24 hours a day. River is now 2.5 and has a limitless vocabulary, and my husband runs his own
HVAC company... he is still adjusting to small-sky living.

Well, that's the short of it. Thanks for letting me pour this out... Ryan saw me typing and asked if I was
writing a book before commenting that I like to blabber.