Rachel

When I first met Rachel I certainly didn't think that we would share a bottle of Port in my living room almost ten years later. But that is only because I didn't meet her myself. She ran through the pre-packaged group introductions when she visited our house for dinner my freshman year, but I didn't give it a second thought. Two days later I didn't even remember her name. She was simply "that tall, blond, green-eyed beauty that Isaiah brought to dinner that night" (as we girls territorially described her). Fortunately, our unique household brand of nerdiness was not off-putting to her and she kept coming around. When I was a Junior living off campus she became our honorary roommate so that we could come to our weekly house dinners where there were no boys, guests and no exceptions allowed, except for Rachel who joined us nearly every week. After we graduated she took a job on the other side of the country in Baltimore, and a year later I flew off to my adventure in Germany, but we stayed in tough via a letter that cycled from Baltimore to Germany to the third leg of our triangle in Seattle, Mari. When the envelope arrived we would each add our own letter to the package and send it along ala The Sisterhood Of The Traveling pants, but we didn't think of it like that.
By the time I eventually landed on the East Coast Rachel had moved on to graduate school and I had missed her by just that much. Since I'd recovered from my homesickness and gotten out of practice we stopped writing altogether, and didn't talk again until last fall when Rachel emailed to say that she would be in DC for a conference. Feeling proud of my grown-up life and eager to show it off I told her she had to stay with me (forgetting in my enthusiasm about being a good hostess that I only have a 1 bedroom apartment) and so in February after a flurry of texts clarifying my address as 11 1/2 which is between 11 and 15, she arrived for the weekend. I showed her my tiny town, my frozen back yard, the crepe store, the concert venue where I work and then we went home and talked and talked. Then, once we'd passed through the usual, "how is life/school/your romantic life?" questions we chatted about music. It's a common, and to me, thoroughly enjoyable game of "have you heard?" This is a rare game for me to play comfortably because my musical upbringing was primarily classical so I am still learning the words to common classics from the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Kinks and when you're in my line of work your expected to just know these things. Youtube and google have become very good friends of mine. But Rachel was wonderful to talk music with, and in fact, she introduced me to a spectacular song by the wonderful The Head And The Heart, which makes me want to cry when I listen to it on repeat. When I listen to it in single servings I think of home, of the friends who will still be on my mind in ten years, naturally of Rachel.

A New Project

I've just been reading A Homemade Life. I began consuming this little treasure well over a year ago (closer to two, if I allow honesty to overcome embarrassment in my calculations) after attending a book signing with my sister in Washington DC. But I let life, and to my shame Netflix, get in the way of finishing it and the edges of the pages had begun to turn sepia on my bookshelf until, in a fit of determination to enjoy the humidity of an evening on my back porch, I rescued it from its dusty fate.
Sarah had long been an Orangette evangelist, explaining that once you begin reading her recipes and stories, you can't help but call the author by her first name as though you've known Molly personally for many years. Even more than gaining an imaginary friend, I've again become inspired to actually try to get a salad bowl worthy of the Fennel Salad with Asian Pear, and to pinky-finger-dust between the rows of the keyboard and begin writing again. Of course, the natural danger of sending my thoughts on their merry way throughout the internet is that I'll fall into verbal nausea: spewing my thoughts without purpose or plan; unleashing the hours of silence that comes with living alone on an unarmed audience, and that would be just indulgent. So, in keeping with my daily consumption of music at work and the realization that my days are accompanied by a soundtrack, I'll do what dozens (maybe even hundreds or thousands) have done before me and share the songs background my life and the stories that accompany them.

It's April. I have much to say, and don't say it because I still feel the need to catch you up on what has happened in the last year and a half. So here's the shortest version I can manage. Feel free to nudge me with questions, I'll answer them, but I'm making this post vague in the interests of time, not out of a perpetual desire to be mysterious. Please also note that I can't tell even my own story without interrupting myself, and so those are the bracketed bits. I'm sorry to all you punctuation police, I hope it doesn't drive you too insane.

The week [maybe even the day] after my job as an ABA therapist ended I began working in a small coffee shop/night music venue in Easton. Got a boyfriend, went home for Christmas [loved seeing grandma], boyfriend and I broke up [don't worry, I was surprisingly fine with it], tired of working in coffee [whatever, I really just realized I'm turning 26 this year and can't keep putting off growing up], quit job while applying to work as a marketing director for a 308 seat music venue in Annapolis, managed to sufficiently impress in the interview [because I wore my Audrey Hepburn-esque black trench coat that day, and because I knew the right people], got the job, and have been working like a mad woman. Oh, and I got a new computer [not just any... I finally got myself the mac I've been dreaming about for half a decade, or at least the current version of my old dream], and since the computer responds to the commands I give it without taking so long I begin to tear my hair out, I have managed to write another blog.

The End.

Chapter 2

Now we resume normal chapter numbering as I think I have filled in the necessary blanks.
I began training for the new position as an ABA Therapist in July. This transition was both wonderfully exciting and very sad for me. Sad because it meant that I had to give up my position as Charlie's nanny and exciting because of the nature of the job. ABA Therapy, basically stated, is a positive reenforcement training method for developmentally disabled (usually children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or Asperger Syndrome). The basic idea is that you teach Children by making them happy to do what is socially acceptable through some sort of external reward system. In my training, the most important aspect of this reward system was being personally loudly and energetically encouraging. That meant that when my student did something correctly, I needed to be jump-up-and-down, louder-than-a-4-year-old's-birthday-party, hooray-for-you affirming. While it has been clear to me ever since it occurred to me to figure out my own personality that I am not remotely a bubbly happy person, I had thought that I am generally encouraging and caring in that quiet way. Well, it turns out the quiet way is not what I was being paid for. So I began (with the help of those 5-hour energy boosters) to train myself in the ways of loudness. It was beyond exhausting. Mentally, and physically, I was stretching myself far beyond what I had imagined I could ever do. Naturally, this began taking its toll.
A couple of months after my training was completed the educational situation of my student was rapidly altered, and my position, to my relief, became obsolete.
As I had spent the past several months driving 45+ mins. to work each day, and had tired of the hated Summer Bay Bridge Traffic, I decided to look at a map and see if there were any towns worth mentioning a bit closer to me where I would be able to find a job. And so I found Easton.

Chapter 1.2

To facilitate living so far from where I worked it became necessary to purchase a car. As luck would have it, Jon had a spare sporty thing just waiting for me to swoop in and buy. For people how have seen my DVD collection and realize that I own the new "Italian Job" it's perhaps not too surprising that I like driving quick little cars faster than is strictly legal and that my turns are rather sharper than necessary. So it will be unsurprising when I describe the car as a sliver 2-door with rims and darkly tinted front windows that rode only a couple of inches off the asphalt. Jon and I affectionately called it the go-cart because you really did feel as though you were in nothing more than a turbo-charged cart just built for those drive-under-the-semi-stunts.

Chapter 1.1

It seems I have fallen out of chronology. Before I quit my coffee job my oldest cousin and his wife moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland which is about a half-hour away from Annapolis. Because they have the world's most adorable two-year-old, and because they had twin girls on the way, and because their generous nature involves taking in homeless family members, I decided to move outta town.

Chapter 1

I had been working at the Green Hut for not even ten months before I looked down and realized that much of my soul had been sucked from my body. This was naturally disconcerting. And so I sought the exact cause of my misery. The answer is as old a capitalism. It is the hateful nature of the corporate beast to ignore the individuality of its parts in favor of a uniformed whole. Therefore all the "cool" people to work with had already quit or been "released", and my own unique ways of working were being threatened into extinction. The final straw landed when I began to be graded on customer interactions. Oh yes, that's right; I said, 'graded on customer interactions.' This meant that my manager literally sat down with a piece of paper and watched me as I placed the finished drinks on the counter and informed the customers that their drinks were ready. If I didn't happen to make eye contact with the under-caffeinated grumpy old guy and say, 'thank you,' then it got marked down as an incorrect interaction (presumably to be used as a an excuse when it came time to give me a raise).
So to make a potentially self-indulgent whiney story short, I quit my job at the coffee shop and began to work as an ABA Therapist.