Resolution

This has been one hell of a year.

It feels like a lifetime ago that I was having one of the best semesters of my college career (the semester in London doesn't count. That was the best five months of my life, college or no college), when I had two days off a week just to work on the manuscript that would become The Long Road Home, when I was taking great classes with my favorite professors, when I was still dancing, when I spent many an evening up far too late with my wonderful roommates.

I can't quite fathom that it was nine months ago that I stood in that stupid, ill-fitting black gown and switched over my tassel to the other side of my hat. Nine months ago that I stopped being a student and started being an adult.

Things have been... interesting since then. Don't get me wrong. Everything is, objectively, great. I live with my best friend, who is the coolest person I know. We have a fantastic apartment and two incredibly adorable cats (who persist in climbing the Christmas tree). I have a perfectly respectable job, and I'm paying my rent and my student loans and my internet bill. And I am grateful. I am so, so grateful for everything and everyone that is allowing me to take this stab at being an independent, adult-type person.

But being an adult is hard.

I was talking to a writer friend of mine who is also a recent postgrad. She was a psychology major, and she was explaining the concept of an "existential vacuum" to me. It's what happens when there's a sudden absence of something. We were talking about it in the context of "I've just finished this novel what am I supposed to do with my life now?" and also "post show depression," something anyone involved in theatre will know well.

Thinking about it later, though, it explains a lot about how I've been feeling about being a postgrad. I haven't wanted to talk about it much, since I would like to be professional on this blog and being constantly mopey isn't terribly professional.

And I've felt awfully mopey since graduating. I've felt so lost, so mired in worry that I'll never be able to do the one thing I think I'm actually any good at - writing novels. So afraid that I'll just spend the rest of my life saying "may I help you?" to people who often don't care that I'm standing there. So terrified that I'll actually never amount to anything at all, that no one will ever want to listen to the stories I have to tell. If all I have to offer the world are words that no one will hear...

I tend to be pretty good at just shuffling on through. I've done it for classes I've hated, shows that have been stressing me out, the hellish sublet Lisa and I lived in this summer. This too shall pass, I think, and I just buckle down and deal with it till it does. I'm worried I'm *too* good at that. What if it doesn't? What if I just allow myself to get complacent because I think "this too shall pass" and wind up stuck in a job I don't really want in a place I don't really want to be?

I'm a worrier, and that's never been more evident than it is now. I worry about myself, about my career, about my writing, about Lisa, about everything, in a constant loop.

Next year, things are going to change.

Next year, I am going closer to the mountain. I am taking another step towards being where I want to be, and who I want to be. Lisa and I are moving to New York City when our lease here in Ithaca ends. I'll miss my Ithacan friends, of course, and this town has done many amazing things for me, but I need to leave. I need to stop stalling in the place where I graduated from college. I need to get out there and start making the life I really want to have. I need to be in a city again, where there are convenient corner stores and an actual form of public transportation. I need to be in New York, where nothing ever stops. Because I feel like I've stopped. I'm waiting. And I don't want to wait anymore.

I want to run full-tilt at the kind of life I really want, sprinting towards it until I smash into it, until I catch it and tangle myself up in it.

And yes, I know it's going to be hard. Lots of well-meaning people have told me, in the same way that everyone said "Oh, college in Ithaca? It's cold up there you know," that living in New York is expensive. I know. I know everything won't be perfect when we move. I know I'll still worry about money and paying the rent all the time. I know there will still be plenty of days when I feel like a waste of space. But to be honest, I don't really care. I want this, and I'm going to go after it with everything I've got. 

Next year, I'm going to move to the place I want to be in. Next year, Lisa and I will have more city exploring to do. Next year, I'm going to find a job that's more engaging than simply selling stamps. I'm going to call myself a New Yorker, after years of growing up on the periphery.

And next year, I'm going to make a hell of a lot of really good art.

Here's to 2014. May it be kind to all of us.

New Project Time!

So, fair blog readers - I have begun a new novel project.

I am working on it pretty slowly, to be honest, largely because I am usually pretty exhausted. I mean, I sleep. I sometimes conk out at 11pm. Sometimes 10:30. And yet I yawn my way through work and when I get home I would much rather just relax and hang out with my awesome roommate/best friend (whose work schedule actually aligns with mine now so I get to SEE her and it is awesome) and watch my cats play pounce-on-each-other.

And, let's be real here, when one is already tired, there's nothing like a snoozing, purring pile of kittens to make you think "all right, bedtime now."

Nevertheless, I am a couple thousand words into a project currently titled HONOR AMONG THIEVES (because I am so very clever at titles).

It is a story about Venice, magical thievery, curses, ballet, and, most importantly, best friends. It is (le gasp!) NOT a kissing book. (Sorry everybody.)

It is very strange writing this project, though. I don't quite know what it is about it - maybe I haven't done enough research, maybe it's just that I haven't started a new project from scratch in... um... a looooooooooooong time, but I feel like I've forgotten how to open a novel. I keep remembering that the audience doesn't actually know how these characters and this world work yet, and that *I* don't fully know that either.

It is strange writing characters who are so very unlike Maire. For about a year, I lived in Maire's headspace. Her view of the world was dark and angry and "I just want to punch it and make it go away." Risa and Gianna are very different. They're confident. They think, at least right now, that their world runs entirely according to their plans. They're about to find out that's not so, of course, but still. It's an interesting change. Nice, though.

Anyways. I'm going to go do some writing. Or maybe just watch my cats play pounce-on-each-other. We'll see.

Warning: Cuteness Overload

As I sit here and type this, fair readers, I am accompanied by this:

That's right, guys. I have a pile of kittens curled up next to me.

It is glorious.

I had been pretty set on only getting one cat, since I'd assumed that my roommate wouldn't really want one of her own. But then we were presented with this brother-and-sister pair that couldn't be adopted out separately and... well, that was the end of that, really.

Allow me to introduce you.

This is Mr. Darcy, my kitten, and the most photogenic cat in the world.

Here he is being appropriately British in a photo I cannot for the life of me turn the right way. Alas.

He is SUCH a sweetheart. I have never known a cat as social as he is - he loves meeting new people, which is great since they've already met most of our friends. He loves to be picked up and will happily climb into my lap or Lisa's lap and pin us down for a good hour. He's incredibly adventurous and very intelligent - you can really see the wheels turning when he looks up at high places and tries to calculate what he can jump off of to get up there. He purrs like a truck and meows like a squeaky toy - but really only when he's reminding me that it's dinner time.

BABYYYYYY.

And this is Lisa's kitten, Charlotte (Bronte).

Charlotte is the more skittish of the pair and therefore the more difficult to catch on camera. She has two healed breaks in her tail that were there when she arrived at the shelter; our hypothesis is that she was stepped on when she was very young, as she is still a little bit afraid of feet. She's hard to catch and certainly won't crawl unbidden into a newcomer's lap the way Darcy will, but once she gets used to you and if you don't make any sudden movements, she can be just as affectionate as her brother.

She also very much likes being under things, which is problematic when she got under my bed the other day. We're trying to keep the kittens out of our bedrooms for now, but she probably would've been perfectly content to hang out there the rest of the night.

I am really glad we came home with two. They keep each other company all day while we're at work, and they play games of pounce-on-each-other that last for hours. Our house, it turns out, is a cat jungle gym - they get to climb up and down the kitchen chairs and under the room divider screen and in and out of the staircase. They love it.

And, the first night we brought them home, they both fell asleep in my lap. It was the most wonderful thing.

Now, I promise this blog won't devolve solely into cat picture spam... but there are probably going to be a lot more cat pictures on it. Prepare yourselves, fair readers. :)

A Beginner's Guide to Cats

In about three weeks' time, my wonderful roommate Lisa and I are adopting a kitten.

I am ridiculously excited about this, which I know makes my parents roll their eyes a lot. (Sorry, parents.)

But Lisa, wonderful though she is, has spent all her life as a Dog Person. Which means that it is now up to me, a lifelong Cat Person, to instruct her in the ways of cat behavior.

Fortunately, the internet loves few things better than cats. Well, perhaps comparing Benedict Cumberbatch to otters, but that's about it.  So I have compiled a handy list of the strange things that cats do to better prepare Lisa for this kitten.

1. They are strangely fond of sleeping in sinks.

2. Similarly, they are incredibly good at being in places where they do not belong.

3. Boxes are basically cat heaven.

4. For animals that are so graceful, they are really quite skilled at being massive derps. For example:

5. Cat hair will get everywhere. I mean everywhere.

6. They are really, really insistent.

(And half the time, for instance when you are eating a salad or something else very unappealing to cats, they will harass you until they are absolutely, 100% certain they didn't actually want it in the first place.)

7. They tend to think that you've died if you close a door on them.

8. This and other cat idiosyncrasies sometimes make daily tasks rather difficult.

 

9. I don't know how they do it, but cat paws on top of you almost always feel like elephant feet. Especially when they are unexpected.

10. But let's be real here. They are just.

So.

Damn.

CUTE.

I, for one, am super excited to have cat hair on everything and enjoy the company of a little fuzzy creature again. I think it's going to be pretty awesome.

And don't worry, dear readers. This is the internet. There will be cat pics. ;)

Thoughts from Places: The Post Market

I'm feeling a little bit lame of late, dear readers. Pretty much all I do is go to work, come home, fiddle with edits or try desperately to catch up on How I Met Your Mother, go to sleep, and do it all over again. Not exactly the stuff of enticing blog posts, I'm afraid.

But I do have a pretty nice job, so I thought I'd tell you some interesting observations from working in a mail room.

1. A huge percentage of people are violently averse to licking envelopes.

2. The sound system plays a Pandora station that is essentially the same twelve songs on a loop, which has led to me making up some weird harmonies to Philip Philips' "Home" to pass the time. It has also led me to be way too amused at the way Pandora censors songs. It doesn't bleep things or add a different word; the sound just cuts out. So, the line in "Some Nights" sounds like "Who the      wants to die alone?" and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" has two: First, "oh yes, but what a shame the poor groomsbride is a     " and "I chime in haven't you people ever heard of closing the      damned door" (so you can say damned but not goddamned? Okay...).

This clearly amuses me way too much.

3. There is such a thing as an international Forever stamp. And they're ROUND. (They're globe shaped. It's cool.)

4. There are a LOT of international students at this college. From all over! As someone who's more than a little sad that she is not currently zipping around London, it's really great to talk to people sending packages to Korea and postcards to Paris.

5. I really like this job. It's not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, of course, but I like doing it a lot, and this is why: when I finish off someone's express mail right before the postman comes to pick everything up for the day, when I tell someone that another customer has left their tape behind and so there's free tape today, when someone finds out that sending a gift is going to be less expensive than they thought, even when I just give someone a booklet of stamps, they really, really mean it when they tell me thank you.

Adulting 101: Bookshelf Tour!

So I know I promised apartment photos, and I will deliver said photos when I have actually cleaned my room. (Some things never change.)

But let's be real, here. We all know what the important part is. We all know that my Friday night was just made by my newly reorganized book collection. And I thought I'd show it to you!

This is the pile of books that lives on my desk, because it is my pile of Favorite Books Ever in the World. Also featured: my red quill editing pen, a candle that smells like tea, and an "Out, Damned Spot!" eraser from the Globe theatre.

My wine box bookshelves beside my desk. Featuring classics on the top and classic fantasy on the bottom. And also the beribboned bludgeoning stick they gave me at graduation for being a smart person. Go figure.

YA fantasy and historical, and my shelf of adult fiction. There are some friends featured here!! Namely, Stefan Bachman's PECULIAR, Leigh Ann Kopans' ONE, Marie-Helene Bertino's SAFE AS HOUSES, and Eleanor Henderson's TEN THOUSAND SAINTS. Also, pictures of London and Paris, an empty Jelly Babies jar from the Imperial War Museum, a temari ball my mom made me, and my Venetian mask. Also my boots.

And last but not least, my shelf of nonfiction and YA contemporary fiction, the latter of which also features my friend Kody Keplinger's first two books! Also included: waaaaaaaaaay too many books on the French Revolution and some more pictures of friends.

So there you have it. My lovely collection of books! My room feels so much more like MY room now that they're all set up and organized.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to round out this incredibly nerdy Friday night with some Michael Buble and some postcard poster organizing.

Well... now what?

The Irish Novel is packed up and shipped off to beta readers, waiting for their seal of approval (more likely, their long list of notes and things to fix).

And so... here I am... waiting for comments.

I hate this part.

It's very strange, not having anything to do. I don't have a book to read right now. I just finished rereading The Book Thief for the fourth time in preparation for seeing the movie in November (for the record: I still cried at the end. Zusak!!!) I have Cornelia Funke's most recent book on reserve at the library and quite a lot of bookstore gift card money from writing contests last semester, but I just haven't gotten around to getting down there and picking things up. (The one downside of living in the middle of nowhere is that you are in the middle of nowhere.)

And I haven't felt like starting another writing project just yet. Which is, admittedly, terrifying. Just at this moment I don't feel like I have a story I NEED to tell, and since that's kind of the THING that I DO all the time... well, it's a bit concerning that I'm not immediately wanting to jump into the next project. I'm hoping it's just post-editing laziness, and that an idea will come along and need me to write it soon.

I guess that leaves me to catch up with the couple of friends who haven't graduated and just moved back to school, make cookies, and continue working on this whole "being an adult" thing that I'm doing now. I think I'm steadily getting better at that. :)

Tell me, dear blog readers: do you always have another project you jump right into after finishing the last one? Or do you let yourself laze around a little bit first? 

Moving is Exhausting

I could, honestly, simply post that title and leave it at that. But I won't, because I'm not that lazy. Well. Barely.

My lovely roommate/best friend Lisa and I moved in to our Actual, Real Adult Person Apartment. And it is AWESOME. Or at least, we are in the process of making it awesome. All of Saturday (the part that wasn't spent driving up from New Jersey) and most of Sunday was spent in cleaning and a bit of organizing and unpacking. And the organizing, unpacking, and purchasing of furniture continues. A little more than half of my stuff is unpacked, since I currently am out of places to put it in or on - I don't, for instance, have a dresser, so my clothes are mostly still in the suitcase (although I totally had a Mr. Collins "shelves in the closet" moment and have since Macgyvered my closet into usable space *dusts off shoulder proudly*), nor do I have anyplace to put most of my shelf things. Like the Carnevale mask I got in Venice or the temari ball my mom made or my zillions of picture frames.

But the kitchen and the bathroom are all shiny and put together!! We have yet to figure out how the dishwasher works (it's on wheels and is not hooked up to anything, and although we have now put water in it and plugged it in and turned it on twice today, the dishes are still not clean, so, we'll be asking our landlady about THAT one) but it's coming along nicely. And it's really exciting to see things start to come together.

It's rather like that moment when you're editing a manuscript and all of a sudden you see the light about what exactly needs to be done in order for everything to fall perfectly into place. Except, this one involves a lot more physical labor and dust, and the manuscript one involves a lot of mental labor, typing, and chocolate fortification.

Speaking of editing... I really need to get on that.

Would you be interested in apartment pictures when all is organized and settled, fair readers? Or am I boring you by gibbering on about my foray into the "real world"?

Getting Somewhere

I'm not going to lie to you: graduating from college kind of sucks.

This summer has been a weird limbo, even though I tried so hard to avoid that very situation. But I stayed in the same place I had been in, even though most of my friends moved on, some to do very exciting and important things like the Peace Corps in Madagascar or teaching English in South Korea.

Whereas I was stuck in Ithaca, in a sublet that was filthy and uncomfortable and felt rather unsafe, with a job that, let's be fair, made me miserable. I had thought that I'd be okay at letting hotel guests vent their frustrations on me, but I wasn't. Ultimately, I left that job, deciding that struggling to get more than four hours' sleep a night was not worth it. That being treated like a failure by at least half the people who came through the hotel was not worth it.

I think that, no matter what you end up doing immediately after you graduate, you're struck with this paralyzing fear that you're doing it wrong. I had a full time job and a place to live and everything, and yet I couldn't help but feel like I'd skipped a step. Like there had to be more to it, even right away - that all the hard work I'd put into school for all those years, culminating in a bachelor's degree with highest honors, couldn't possibly put me into a job where people looked at me like I was an idiot eight hours a day unless I had, in fact, made a mistake.

So enough of that. I'm going to worry that I'm failing no matter what I do, it's just my nature. But I don't need a job to reinforce that worry so very strongly.

But now I have things to look forward to. On Saturday, I'll be moving into the real grown up person apartment my roommate and I found. It's beautiful, and it's going to be clean, and OURS in a way no place other than our flat in London, perhaps, has been yet. I'm starting a new job on Monday, which hopefully will not be quite as soul-crushing as the last one. I'm making progress on editing The Long Road Home. And my school friends, those who haven't graduated yet, will be back in Ithaca in a few weeks' time.

I have things to look forward to again. Things to be excited about. I've got an apartment to decorate the way I want it decorated. I've got a job where I (hopefully) won't have to wear a name tag and get demeaned by everyone who walks in the front door. I've got a manuscript with edits that are beginning to look manageable rather than impossibly daunting.

I'm feeling a little bit more like I can do this whole "adulthood" thing, rather than feeling like I've failed before I've even begun.

And hopefully, it'll only go up from here.

The Little Things

I discovered that being alone for a week and trying to figure out adulthood can make me kind of grumpy.

My apartment is filthy? I have no internet and setting it up is unexpectedly complicated? Job applications are incredibly frustrating? I have no one to talk to? There is an unexpected fourth roommate no one told me about? Under normal circumstances, I save swear words for really choice moments; since I don't swear much, if I do, anyone who knows me is well aware that I REALLY mean it. Last week, though, the aforementioned circumstances had me swearing like a sailor to myself (well, maybe not quite that badly, but comparably speaking...), since nobody could hear me anyway and I had to vent my frustrations about ants and dust and no internet somehow.

Sorry, Mom.

My made-of-awesome roommate and best friend has returned, though, thank goodness. And I have discovered that, as in studenting, it's the little things that make adulting bearable.

Things like:

1. Drive-thru banks are kind of entertaining.

2. Finding a candy from the front desk at the hostel in Toronto in your purse.

3. Phone calls.

4. Making CD covers for the music you get to play in YOUR CAR.

5. Having time to write.

6. Getting a library card.

7. Reading books that were not assigned to you.

8. Feeling loved because you have seven zillion Facebook notifications after not having been online constantly.

9. Buying stamps with tigers on them.

10. When you finally do get the internet back, it is AWESOME.

Thoughts from Places: Pomp and Circumstance

On Sunday morning, this happened:

That's me on the left of the sign. They emailed me and said "hi there, you are a smart person and we like you. Want to carry a thing at graduation?" And I said "yeah, sure, why not?" They also gave me a wooden baton I get to keep, which my roommate (standing on my left) and I will use to bludgeon potential home intruders.

I marched into the football field - the one and only time I have BEEN to Ithaca College's football field - at the head of my school, sat with my very best friends (except the one who sat with the School of Music), stood with those friends when they asked those graduating Summa Cum Laude and Magna Cum Laude to stand, listened to David Boreanaz tell us not to get stuck on your sister's uncomfortable green couch and go out and DO the thing that you're meant to be doing, and flipped my tassel from the right side of my exceedingly stupid hat to the left.

I graduated.

To quote the brilliant John Green, because, as I have mentioned half a zillion times before, he says all the things I want to say, except more succinctly and more cleverly, "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations." I can't quite wrap my head around the whole thing yet. It hasn't really hit me, in spite of the fact that I've got all the graduation paraphernalia stuffed in my suitcase in my room in the new sublet I'll be living in for the summer. It feels, right now, that it's just over for the summer, like always. It feels like I'll be heading right back to classes in August. I wonder how long it'll take me to realize that that's not the case.  

There are some not-so-nice things about graduating. Things like having your gown not fit AT ALL and having people ask eight hundred times what all your cords are for (Summa Cum Laude cords, history honor cords, Italian honor cords), being annoyed that you didn't get to throw your hat, getting frustrated to the point of tears when your lunch plans refuse to coordinate nicely, getting a raccoon-face sunburn so that everyone knows you've been crying FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.

Things like that.

But there are also some awesome things about graduating. (And the week before, which for Ithacans is Senior Week, in which every day is Friday. And then Friday is Friday to the power of Friday, which makes it EVEN BETTER.)

Things like getting to jump into Ithaca's famous fountain. It was freezing, but so very very worth it. It felt even more like a culmination of the last four years of hard work than actual graduation.

My roommate Lisa and I also went to pick up our honor cords from the registrar right after Senior Splash, in spite of the fact that we were soaking wet. It was the best idea ever.

Things like getting to spend every day doing exactly what *I* wanted to do. I read some books *I* wanted to read, I napped, I cooked, I sometimes got dressed up and went to senior events, and, most importantly, I hung out with my friends. I used my too-big graduation gown as a cape and made airplane noises swooping around in the gusts of Ithacan wind, and also as wizard robes in a chopstick wand duel with my roommates. (How nerdy is it that I've been planning that for four years?)

The whole thing is surreal. I keep waiting for a sense of accomplishment to hit me, a sense of "LOOK AT ME, I DID IT, I GRADUATED, WITH EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF HONOR CORDS TO BOOT!" But that hasn't arrived yet. I don't really know if it will. School is, at this point, really the only thing I know how to do. So, you know, I just did it.

And now I have to figure out how to do something else. How to be an adult.

It's weird, but I'll do that too.

For now, though, I think I'll revel a little longer in what just was. The hard part of all this is knowing that I'll never again be in the same place with ALL of my friends, those friends who provided a support network for all four years of college.

There really are no words to encompass everything my friends have done for me over the past four years. Whether it was forcing me to buy clothing that actually fit, making me dinner on my birthday, commiserating about terrible novels our thirteen-year-old selves wrote, going on European adventures, or simply talking very late into the night, the friends I made here at IC have really shaped who I am today. They took a shy, gawky, hellishly awkward high schooler and turned her into a (more) confidant girl who can at least pretend she knows how to talk to strangers and is capable of wandering around foreign cities on her own and can (sometimes) simply let herself relax and have fun and not care what other people think.

That, my friends, is entirely your doing, and I am so grateful. Sitting here in this sweltering Waffle Frolic (which has delicious food and free internet but, alas, no air conditioning), I miss you already, even though I only said goodbye to you yesterday. I WILL pester you all into keeping in touch if need be, and you may hereby kick me if for some inexplicable reason you do not end up on the acknowledgements page of my future novel.

I feel like this post is rather rambling and nonsensical, and for that I apologize. I wanted to say something Grand and Important and All-Encompassing, but I think my mind is still reeling from the shock of it all, and I can't quite find the words I want. Really, the most important words are: thank you. To everyone who helped me get to the point where I flipped my tassel from one side of my hat to the other, and left a football stadium an Ithaca College alum, you are the best. My family and my friends and my wonderful professors and my writer friends and you, dear blog readers: thank you. You helped me, in big ways and small ways, to get to the point where I could jump into a freezing cold fountain, have a chopstick wizard duel in overlarge robes, and write "graduated Summa Cum Laude" on my resume.

Here's to the next four years, then, hmmm?

Side note: if you are related to me and would like to keep in touch (or if you are not related to me and would like to keep in touch) send an email to coconne2 (at) ithaca (dot) edu and I'll send you my new address and all that jazz. :)

This is Home

Ever since I got back from London I've been struggling a little bit with the concept of "home." Home is, of course, the house I grew up in, the little red house with my bed and walls and walls of bookshelves and the view of the park from the front windows. Home is my mom and my dad and my sister and my cat. Home was the place I went back to from school, where there were home-cooked meals and less homework and catching up that needed doing. Ithaca wasn't ever home in that sense - Ithaca was a place where I went to school, that I missed when I was away more because of the other people who gathered there than because of any specific ties to the place itself.

And then I went to London, and things got complicated. Those old-fashioned streets where they drive the wrong way became more home to me than Ithaca had ever been. My little Victorian row house of an apartment started rivaling the little red house in New Jersey. I was independent there. I was my own person there, in a way I'd never really been before. I could catch a bus to Cardiff or a plane to Prague if I felt like it. But that home was the home of adventure and independence, not the home of home-cooked meals and mom and dad.

Things got weird when I came "home" from "home." Which one was really home? What was I supposed to do about it? I couldn't just up and move to London - for one thing, the visa stuff would be a nightmare, and for another, I couldn't permanently move across the ocean from my parents. I'd miss them too much.

And then one of the biggest connections to my first home broke. The girl who'd been my best friend since we were in the fifth grade stopped speaking to me, for no discernible reason, in August.

I haven't really wanted to talk about this online, partially because I was too devastated by it to form coherent, not-whiny thoughts, and one does not wish to whine about one's personal life on the internet, especially if one wants one's blog to remain a professional writing blog. I'm past the point where I think I would come across whiny, but that has changed everything for me. It's turned what used to be home into something like deja vu - something I recognize, but that's out of place, not quite right.

I'm not moving home after graduation next month. There are a lot of reasons for that, some probably better than others. I'm not moving home because I really love living with my roommate Lisa, because she's the coolest person I know and because she's my best friend and because she's super easy to live with, and because if I stay with her I won't have to find a new place to stay by myself. I'm not moving home because I don't want to have a kind of limbo waiting period - I want to start my adult life, I want to take care of myself, I want to have my own place, my own things, and here, I'm lucky enough to be able to do just that. I'm not moving home because I think I still need more time to get over the most epic of all friend break-ups, one that I'm still having a hard time keeping from coloring the past eleven years as some kind of lie. I'm not moving home because I can't afford to live in New York City yet.

Those reasons for not moving home don't include disliking home. I have an awesome relationship with my family, one that I think is far, far better than the one most people my age have. Of course I'm going to miss them a lot.

But I'm going to be in Ithaca, not London. I can always visit that first home, and I certainly plan to.  Hopefully my family will come visit me when they can, too. (I've already made plans to kidnap my sister after she graduates high school.)

Lisa and I just put a deposit on the apartment we'll be living in for probably the next two years. I'm trying to find a job to keep up with that apartment, but aside from a slight sense of panic that graduation is SO SOON and things are ending SO SOON, I'm extremely excited. I love the apartment. Our landlady is extremely nice. It looks like an area that will be beautiful when the leaves turn in fall.

I'm excited to carve out a new kind of home for myself - to get a real person job, to have my own place, to get my own cat (his name shall be Mr. Darcy and he and I shall be the best of friends). I'm ready for some new adventures. I'm ready to figure out just what this concept of home really means.

Thoughts from Places: Oh Ithaca, My Ithaca

I tend to refer to my college's town as "the frozen north," and it is never so appropriate as when nature fittingly gives us an April Fool's Day dusting of snow that's still clinging to the ground in the face of the next day's sun. And let's face it, it's probably going to snow again today. It precipitates so much in Ithaca, and often of such an indeterminate manner of precipitation, that my roommate's freshman year RA started calling it "Ithacation" and the term's stuck.

But for a place that is grey and dreary for about nine months of the year, it sure is gorgeous when the sun comes out.

This is the view from my apartment window. I'm spoiled forever.

My family stopped in Ithaca when we were on vacation in Watkins Glen, a few years before I was applying to colleges. We walked around the Commons - Ithaca's downtown area for pedestrians - and got delicious smoothies at Collegetown Bagels. (By the way, if you are ever in Ithaca, GET THEE TO COLLEGETOWN BAGELS POST HASTE.) I liked the vibe of this place, this strange little city essentially in the middle of nowhere. "There's a college here," my mom said. "We could look into it."

And now here I am.

I have a tendency to refer to Ithaca as "Hippieville USA," and it is. But I like that. I like that I can compost my plate in pretty much every cafe and that so many interesting people can be found here. I like that it's a little microcosm of a town set in between Ithaca College and Cornell University.

For most of my time here at IC, I was basically a hermit. I didn't really go much of anywhere. I stayed inside on weekends, watching Disney movies and doing laundry with my roommate. And now there's so much I have to catch up on before the great and terrible diaspora of graduation - things that technically speaking I'd have time to do later, but not with the people I want to do those things with. I have to go to the gorges and waterfalls that Ithaca is so famous for (we have t-shirts that say "Ithaca is Gorges," as well as various spoofs; my favorite is "Ithaca is Cold"). I have to go to Waffle Frolic (seriously, what a great name for a restaurant). That lake in the picture above? I've been staring down at it for four years and never been.

I've had so many adventures in places that are not here, and I think it's time to fix that.

I never really thought that I'd stay here after I graduated; I'd always thought that my chosen college town would be the place where I went to college and that would be that. But here I am, making plans to stay. And I like that. This town is giving me the chance, or at least, I hope will be giving me the chance, to make my transition from "student" to "real actual adult person" a little easier. I'll be able to tear off the Band-Aid slowly here. This is a place that is safe and familiar for me, a place I've spent four years tucked cozily away between cinder block walls and cocooned by textbooks. It's a place where I have friends - my roommate who will be staying here with me and who is kind of my best friend, as well as some other friends who won't be graduating yet. It's a place where I can navigate all the scary things adulthood brings - paying rent, buying groceries not on my parents' credit card, owning a car, paying off student loans - with some sense of solid, familiar ground.

I'm looking forward to discovering this place I halfway know. I'm looking forward to turning Ithaca into more than just South Hill and the IC campus. I'm looking forward to really claiming this place as mine, for a little while longer at least.

And, let's face it, I actually really like snow.

Imagining the Future is a Kind of Nostalgia

This is one of those blog posts in which I will take several paragraphs to say what John Green said in a single sentence. Looking for Alaska is not my favorite John Green novel, but the line "imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia" will never fail to pack a punch for me. Because it is so very, very true.

Nostalgia in the not-Alaska-Young-defined sense means looking back, milling over the past and wishing for its comforting certainty again. It means a longing for a kind of lost perfection that may or may not have really been there in the first place.

But you can do that with the future too. Spinning out hopes and dreams, constructing the perfect future in your head, isn't that rather like constructing the perfect past? All these things that you hope will happen - getting perfect grades, falling in love with the perfect person, finding the perfect job, getting the perfect agent or book deal - won't happen, at least, not in the same way you dream they will. Sometimes you won't get exactly the grade you want. The person you fall in love with will have his or her own flaws. Even dream jobs can drive you crazy sometimes. And getting an agent or a book deal only means there's more work and more rejection ahead.

But that's okay, I think. As long as those perfect ideals we build up in our heads don't become all-encompassing, it's okay to build them. It's okay to strive for that perfect dream.We need something to reach for, even if that thing isn't something we can ever truly catch.

I'm in a place right now where I feel like my life is made up of nostalgia, of both kinds. I'm in the last seven weeks of my undergraduate education, and soon I'll have to start acting like a real adult. Getting a job. Paying rent. Buying my own groceries. All this is both terrifying and exciting. And I'm stuck in a weird in-between space, where I'm both missing the past and longing for the future. I miss the (rather insane) confidence I had when I first started writing (probably the only thing I will ever miss about being thirteen). I miss being able to solve all my problems simply by going home. I miss London every single day - I miss the way London made me feel like I could go anywhere, be anyone, do anything; all I had to do was hop on the Tube and go.

And yet I have all these plans, plans that require me to move beyond what has already happened. I'm going to get a job. Some kind of job. Any job. One that'll pay the rent and where I can work with nice people. Hopefully that'll get the chorus "I really need this job / please God I need this job" out of my head (I am SUCH a musical theatre nerd guys). I'm going to get my own apartment with my made-of-awesome roommate. I'm going to get a kitten and call him Mr. Darcy. (Because what else does one name one's future cat, right?) I'm going to get to the other side of this querying tunnel, find an agent, sell a novel. I'm going to be a real, proper, adult-type person, one who is confident in her own skin, one who really can do whatever she wants rather than just feeling like she can.

I'm going to do all of those things. Probably not as perfectly as I imagine them - the pile of query rejections in my inbox, which is now being joined by job rejections, will attest to that. But I'm going to do them.

For now, though, I'll content myself with nostalgia, with sending off a zillion emails and hoping against hope that I can reach that unreachable star.

... More musical theatre jokes? No? Okay, I'll stop.