Skip to main content

June to June

Google can waste your time. Case in point: I was noodling in my mind the idea of writing a short blog entry to encapsulate the feeling I have here on a Friday morning - pithy, oh so pithy - and I searched for an image to describe this feeling. Voila' - I'm transported into a blog that chronicled the trials and tribulations of last year's World Cup from the perspective of a couple of fans who witnessed the spectacle from the comfort of well-established UK media channels (BBC, who provided the image here of the Italy-Australia match last year, ITV, etc.).

Instantly, I am transported back to last June. Newly arrived in DC (well, almost, but stay with me here), I was settling in to an apartment near my "soon-to-be-but-never-fully-realized-that-I-would-be-so-lucky-that-she-might-later-become-my-wife" girlfriend. I was settling in to a job that started to make sense after 6 months (I'm not quite there yet - and now another year on! - but that is another topic), and I was preparing for some big upcoming events: my first trip to China and the wildly anticipated World Cup. June to June, I'm engaged (my dreams came true!), I bought a townhouse with my fiancee' (the bills take my breath away!), I'm in a new position in the company (same thing with a different title!), and I'm generally realizing that I have become a full-fledged adult.

Stay with me, my mind keeps wandering. It seems that adult life is relatively more boring. Gardening! Laundry! Running errands! Falling asleep on the couch! (exclamation points added for effect). But in the grand scheme of life and events, the rhythm feels just about right. And of course, there are always the memories, in this case captured sparsely in the blog archive from June 2006. Bouncing back and forth from past to present, I'm enjoying a moment of revelry that wanders between and around moments of joy and exasperation; taking the philosophy of enjoying life and the wonders of this world before life moves on to the next big thing has given me this luxury. And now that I have wasted enough time, I'll snap back to the task at hand by answering the ringing phone on my desk.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...