Budget budget budget budget

This has been a good resetting weekend, cleaning and seeing friends and generally getting ready for fall, aka The Most Glorious Season There Is, All Hail The Death of the Hateful Heat of Summer. But as I dug in on my budget, I found myself poking at some ideas that... I may have explored in this space before or possibly not who can be fussed to look at the archives anyway let's get into it.

The impetus for this budget thinking was a nice benchmark for me: after eight months in my beautiful, stable, benefits-and-vacations-and-all job, I finally looked at my last few months' budgets and decided that I was ready to start automatically diverting about a quarter of my paycheck directly into an online-only account. This has always been the best way for me to ramp up my savings, and after the tumult of the last couple of years, it feels really good to be on solid, rapidly-tucking-it-away ground again. Moving from "safety nest egg to cover expenses if I lose my job" to "saving for long-term goals" is a great pivot to make.

As I made the decision, I also sat down with my budget for the year-ending trip to Japan I'll be taking. I've been delighted to discover the country is affordable, as long as you don't want the high-end luxury experiences, and are willing to shed any stick-in-the-mud "but I want to stay at a Hilton" preferences. If you're down to roll with the local scene and just be in Japan, lots of things open up.

To wit: staying at just about any western-branded hotel in the country is automatically going to run upwards of $100, and probably upwards of $150 a night even in low season. By contrast, staying in a guesthouse room with a tatami-mat floor with a futon and green tea table in the corner is running me about $30-40 a night, and that is obviously the kind of experience I want to be having, come on.

It's the same on the food front; much like most travel outside the States, if you want the kind of experience you have at home, or are gun-shy about trying out restaurants or environments that you're not familiar with, you'll pay $30+ a meal easily. If you want to dive into the magical-seeming world of kushikatsu (fried skewers), yakitori (grilled chicken parts), or bowls of noodles, you're gonna be solidly under $15 and probably under $10. If you stop by a konbini (convenience stores), which have outlandishly good reputations for their food, you'll probably be under $5.

Needless to say - as with ordering a cappuccino and cornetto at the bar in an Italian coffee shop instead of paying ten times as much for a hotel lobby breakfast - you will end up closer to the culture, having a more immersive and worthwhile experience than if you fuss and overpay.

As ever, a little knowledge goes a long way: depachika (the food halls in department stores) prepared food are crazily highly regarded, and about an hour or 30 minutes before close, the shops discount everything heavily. If you do as the thrifty Tokyoites do, you'll save cash and up your culinary game by pouncing on the deals. (Scotland has something similar, but Tesco's food is uhhhhh less refined, is my experience.)

Similarly, while there are some relatively high-priced attractions (paying money just to go to the top of a building will never make sense to me), tons of things are priced affordably: temples are usually only a buck or three, shrines tend to be free (minus the ¥5 coin you toss in their offering box), sento (public baths) are about $5... some arcades are extremely affordable. You can carve out a packed itinerary for well under $20/day, if not half that.

This also means doing the research to know when it is time to splurge. I don't need to pay $80 for a food tour of Osaka, but I might absolutely pay that much for a walking tour in Kyoto that will give me cultural and spiritual context for what I see over the rest of my trip. I won't spring for tasting menus at Michelin-starred restaurants, but I'm looking into classes on the tea ceremony, on textile dying, on ceramics, to get a little closer at an experiential level. I don't want to pay $150 to stay in a Hilton Garden Inn, but it might be worth $200 to spend the night in a ryokan in the mountains between Kansai and Tokyo if I know that the price includes a seasonal, local kaiseki feast in my room, breakfast the next morning, and an outdoor onsen (hot spring bath) that overlooks a snow-blanketed forest.

In any case, it's been fun marking out a budget for this trip, and having done that math is making it even easier to cut costs day-to-day now. When I know how many unique experiences I could cover in December by foregoing a lazy-night delivery of Thai food here in Chicago, it gets a lot easier to pocket the cash.

So: budgeting! It's fun! Money is still a made up artificial construct that in our current era has wildly warped so it bears basically no coherent relationship to the labor it ostensibly represents, but if you are clever with it you can sometimes go eat a dumpling in Japan!

Bostonia

I had an odd milestone today. In a final push on my last dissertation chapter (don't worry! still got revisions and defense to go!) I opened a browser that I don't usually use, the better to not get snared in my Gmail/open tabs while looking up a translation. And that's when I realized I hadn't used this browser since I left Boston.

Its autocomplete suggestions drew on my last address there, and its website autocompletes related to my Boston life. (Speaking of which, this is how I found out that Bee's Knees, once The Only Decent Breakfast Place near my Allston apartment, is now closed, because of course it is. Boston: you're not very good!)

Anyhow, I realized in that moment that it really has been a bit since that move. The summer in Europe skewed my sense of timing, but it's now been about a year and a quarter since I left the city behind. It's sitting with me, a little while after my brief and weird trip down memory lane. After a few settling-in months in Chicago, the "how did you like Boston?" question faded away, and so I haven't really thought about it til today.

And the answer, with a bit more distance, is... largely the same? As I say: Boston's insane price spikes (more recent than I realized, to hear from a friend who used to live there) make it nearly impossible for good or creative restaurants at the lower end of the cost spectrum to make ends meet. Its public transit is neglected and inefficient. Its stubborn conviction that old things are to be accepted rather than improved still sort of makes me nuts. It's a city that really only works for those affluent enough to live near where they want to be, or with the money to jump cabs routinely. And its people still strike me as more [openly?] rude, sexist, racist, and homophobic than where I am now. All of which is to say: it's still not my city.

That said, there are some real solid good memories in there. A few spots (largely in my Jamaica Plain year) that had that hum of creativity and experimentation that I love. A few music venues that gave me some lovely nights. A neighborhood eatery that, while pretty unremarkable, was worth tromping through a blizzard to get to to make sure they felt supported when the whole city shut down. The Boston Symphony, which in my first two years was a great weekly reset thanks to a generous student ticket program. And a tiny core of amazing people - variously brilliant, kind, creative, and thoughtful - who got me through the worst, most challenging, and occasionally most exhilerating, years of my life.

Most of all, though, I miss New England. After visiting a friend in Madison, I miss Boston's sense that in 90 minutes you could be anywhere: the coast, a mountain, a forest, a lake, or Portland (arguably a better food city), which was my unplug-and-relax haven from Boston work. I miss the Amtrak that made it easy to have productive weekend getaways. And yeah, I miss the short-hop cheap-as-dirt flights to Europe.

All of which is to say, I'm scheming ahead. Come my defense date, I'm hoping to tack on a few days after whatever comes in order to tromp around the region a bit. To see my friends, yes, and to see Boston with fresh eyes after a stretch away. But also to poke up further into Maine than I got to go during my school years. To drive into Vermont, which tight budgets and a cohabitative schedule kept me from - ever - experiencing. And to exhale at the end of this process that, even as its end approaches, seems endless.

More to come soon. Including, probably, an update on a family trip to Colorado and some solo midwestern hopping around. But first, let's knock out this chapter and round the corner to the final stretch.

New Orleans: The Good and the Soul-Feedin'

As I mentioned in my last post, I kicked out a chapter before heading down to New Orleans. This was glorious; after almost a year of being stuck, writing slowly, hitting walls, dealing with shifting geography and employment, it was elating, giddy-making, to get that out the door. And then New Orleans came along, right on cue, to feed my heart and steep me in the richness of life, fully-lived. After the jump: a long weekend in one of the great Real Cities in America!

Fun New Orleans fact: the swamp is extremely good. Please go visit the swamp. There is also a city but there is also a swamp. Which I recommend visiting. Due to its goodness. OK goodnight.

Two days before I left, I got an automated message from Amtrak letting me know that there was a "service disruption" to my overnight train. I'd booked a sleeper car, maybe my favorite way to travel; now, thanks to crumbling infrastructure, we'd be making about half the journey via coach bus. I took the offer of a refund, booking a last-minute flight down to the city, and with it bought myself one more night and an early-morning wander. That set the template for the whole week, and stood in well for New Orleans as a whole.

If you think New Orleans is a city that you should visit in a rushed or overly organized manner, perhaps you should "hold your horses!" Hello! I am resigning from blogging, writing in general, and society as a whole, goodbye forever.

As my outstanding host and spectacular human Caroline pointed out, New Orleans has a sort of loose "whatever you can get away with" energy to it, which can be invigorating or frustrating depending on the energy you bring to the table. I found it dreamy and wonderful. Much like southern Italy, things that would drive you nuts in a more systematic town are charming here, and something about the city's architecture psychologically prepares you to go with the flow and take the days as they come. Spanish moss drooping from the trees, beads from the previous Mardi Gras dangling from branches, balconies hanging off of paint-stripped buildings: the whole city invites you to relax, to bend, to sway. And as soon as you do, great things unfold.

Swampity swamp swamp boardwalk loveliness. NATURE FEEDS THE SOUL

Caroline's immediate piece of advice was spot-on: spend your first day in the French Quarter, and as soon as you get sick of it, get out to other pockets of the city. My first day, I started to wander the Quarter, quickly realized there was no reason to explore it "before the crowds," and cut over to Cafe du Monde for beignets before taking a riverside stroll on the Crescent Park trail, indulging in an obscenely delicious breakfast at Elizabeth's before returning to the Quarter.

Duck down side streets and kick around the joint, it's extremely lovely and whatnot and so forth!

Here's the thing: yep, Bourbon Street is gross and crawling with a lot of terrible tourists clutching plastic grenade-shaped cups full of slushy sugar spiked with cheap booze. But there is also busking of the screamingly best caliber, running the gamut of styles and ensemble size. There are atmospheric bars dating back to the 18th century. There are pockets of great food amidst the garbage. And there's the ebb and flow of a city whose local population hasn't turned away from its touristy center, so if you're lucky (we were!) you'll encounter a second line for whatever occasion has called for one.

Armstrong Park sculpture party!

But a day was more than enough French Quarter, so with Caroline's generous leadership we hustled all over the dang place: bouncing in and out of the music clubs on Frenchmen Street (once "where the locals go," and still a step up from Bourbon Street if not the real underground scene), thrifting along Magazine Street, scooting up along the bayou for po' boys after a few false starts, wandering the glorious sculpture garden at the Museum of Art, and hiking out into the swamp of Lafitte Park. It was all magical - stupendous food, expert cocktails, perfect weather, and hours upon hours of catching up on life and mulling over all the complications of being a human. We wrapped up at the Tree of Life, an ancient and sprawling tree as old as the city itself, and a place where Caroline has gone again and again for centering and guidance. My heart a splode.

Tree of Life! Caroline is hidden a the base of the tree on the right. These are... these are all big trees.

One last thing to note - the main reason this trip was so glorious was that Caroline opened the door into her own life, which is a lovely and special thing. Visiting her church on an Easter Sunday, stopping at a friend's house to see his grandchildren put on a play about bunnies, and all the million little encounters that spring up when you explore the city at the side of someone who knows it well. But I don't think you'll miss out on that experience altogether if you visit without a friend who lives there.

But for real if you do have a friend there you might get to see some wildly delightful backyard theatre, highly recommended.

My last night in town, Caroline had a choir practice in the Bywater, and I spent that hour wandering the neighborhood, walking down to the river and eventually perching on the stoop of a corner house or shop of some sort. The owner stuck her head out after a while, looking for a package, and after ascertaining why I was sitting on her stoop, asked, "Would you like to see a cool space?"

I stepped in, and she showed me her photography studio, her place of work and exhibition since the late 90s, when she moved into what had previously been a pharmacy. The early-twentieth-century glass counters were still in place; rotary fans lazily spun overhead; the tile floor spelled out the pharmacy's name in mosaic. It was just a couple of minutes, but it was, as Caroline later told me, "a real New Orleans encounter."

Not the studio, but the view from its stoop! Bywater's cool, guys.

I'm not really getting into the details or recommendations (though reach out if you're going, for I have many of both). In part that's because I've only had this one long weekend and barely scratched any kind of surface, but moreso it's because of what Caroline told me my first night in town: New Orleans gives you the trip you need, not always the trip you want or plan. This is a city that, if you are open, if you are receptive, will take you in and teach you things you weren't looking for or thinking about. And I cannot wait to return.

Jackson Square! Or, One More Statue I Wouldn't Mind Seeing Taken Down Ah Well

Water is very relaxing, did you know this, did you even dream of such a thing

Let's all take one last slackjawed look at the Tree of Life! A+++ tree would climb on and stare at and wonder at its age and reflect on life and all its thorny complexities again.

Columns

A chapter out the door meant permission to duck out of town, and New Orleans was as glorious as advertised. More so, and in different ways than anticipated, even. Much more on that soon, but first, this. After the jump:  m o n u m e n t s.


My first morning in New Orleans I rode a streetcar into the French Quarter, not realizing that I'd glide right past Lee Circle, one of the sites of a removed Confederate statue. It was the first time I'd been to one of these sites in person, and while it seems like it shouldn't have had a huge impact, it very did.

When the debate over monuments to the Confederacy was in its loudest phase, I remember reading statements from southern Republican politicians opposed to "erasing history" by removing the monuments. In particular, in one telling exchange one of these politicians was asked: what if we remove the monuments from their place of public pride and display them in a museum contextualizing the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement? A heaping pile of bluster and refusal ensued, and that sort of sealed it for me. If the only commemoration you will accept is in the public square, there's something nasty afoot, particularly given the origin of a lot of these monuments. As The Atlantic noted:

"A timeline of the genesis of the Confederate sites shows two notable spikes. One comes around the turn of the 20th century, just after Plessy v. Ferguson, and just as many Southern states were establishing repressive race laws. The second runs from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s—the peak of the civil-rights movement. In other words, the erection of Confederate monuments has been a way to perform cultural resistance to black equality."

Keeping these statues in public squares, in front of courthouses and in front of major civic buildings, has felt like a defiant tribute to white supremacy rather than any kind of remembrance of history or an honest reckoning of treason in defense of slavery.

But rolling past the column where Robert E. Lee's statue once stood, the physical reality of the space exposed a whole new layer of the bad-faith argument against removing these statues. Because where the statue was, now there was tangible absence. A column still stood at the center of a traffic circle, ringed with fences and bare at its apex. And that's when it struck me that removing the statue didn't erase history, it added a layer of history.

Riding past Lee Circle, now defined by an empty column, two stories are told: first, that once there was a statue here erected in memory of a man who went to war in defense of chattel slavery, and second, that we have decided to stop honoring someone who would do that. Not erasure, but addition and expansion.

Anyhow. It was an interesting start to a phenomenally complex city (we could talk about Jackson Square and that problem, or Jean Lafitte and those problems, or.... well everything, really) but I was glad to start the trip with a rush of uplift at the decision Landrieu made to remove the city's civil war statues. Let's keep it going. Tear 'em all down, and let the scars in the landscape tell the story of who we were, and how we hope to be better.

Wheels Up

This week, in one of the better developments to happen since the snow melted (in...February? It's been a lame winter, gang), I got my bike out of storage and started cycling to work. It's been glorious for my mind, theoretically will be glorious for my shedding-winter-weight goals, and perhaps most importantly gives me the excuse for my first post in (checks timestamps) seventeen years. After the jump: bikes and brambles!

Anatomy of a breakup: playlist fun!

Billy Wilder supposedly had a rule about the projects he worked on: if he was feeling depressed, he worked on a comedy; and if life felt great, he worked on bleak stories and tragedies. It grounded the laffs in real pain, and it leavened the darkness of the dramas to have them come from an upbeat (at the time) auteur.

Which is a roundabout way to say, there's almost no musical genre that I find more weirdly satisfying during happy chapters of my life than the breakup song. They absolutely serve their purpose during the freefall and rebuild, but there's something kind of delightful about rocking them out when you're not wrestling with relational Hard Times. As a category, they tend to be rich - either cutting against the pain or wallowing in it, letting out a wild surface-level howl or burrowing into the heart of what feels broken forever.

Either way, I have a weird and powerful love of 'em.
I could probably do an entirely separate playlist on songs that have gotten me through breakups, but that's not what this is. "Next Year," for example, got me through the back half of 2016's crawl back to feeling like a human, but it's not a breakup song on its own terms. These are the songs that are clearly, in some way, responding to/describing/anticipating a breakup.

Don't Jump; Jump

Balance is a tricky ol' thing. We've all got our tendencies, and most of us have multiple contradictory tendencies. For me, I'm as apt to pinch pennies for weeks on homemade lunches as I am to decide to spontaneously splurge on a coat/meal/trip, and I'm as apt to spend months researching a trip I might not even take as I am to make a kneejerk decision to zip off to Cuba for the weekend. (I have not made a kneejerk decision to zip off to Cuba for the weekend, but I am nearing a "you finished a chapter what's a fun cheap flight" milestone, so we'll see.)

There's a sweet spot in between there somewhere, and that's what I want to kick around in this post. How do you navigate that razor-thin balance point between "don't jump" and "jump"?
As I say, I'm an inveterate researcher. I was recently clearing out old files and was surprised to see how long ago I'd started reading up on Florence, Vienna, and a slew of other eventual destinations abroad. We're talking years before there was any concrete possibility of visiting, but apparently I'm a pretty enthusiastic daydreamer. And the way that I travel tends to follow this instinct: I'll have a deep pocket of more possibilities than I can live out by the time I arrive at my destination.

Sprawling past and present piles of research and possibilities in their nascent outline form. My Google Docs are a dense tapestry of Jackson Pollockian chaos.

The unhealthy version of this is when it turns into checklist tourism: a to-do list careening around a city without taking the time to just sit at a cafe and take in how people go about their daily lives (which is kind of an essential component of any satisfying trip I think). I've done that for sure. But the inverse is also true - arriving somewhere with nothing planned can lead to aimless wandering and lethargy, which also feels like a missed opportunity.

What I've had on my most delightful trips is the capacity to arrive with an array of possibilities that I'm willing to abandon in the moment when something more satisfying or exciting comes along. That ability to jump. I think about tossing plans in order to take a ferry somewhere unexpected for adventure and the unknown, or (maybe my favorite spontaneous travel decision) deciding one morning in Vienna to scrap my arrangements and grab a last-minute bus to Prague to surprise my dad at his choir's concert there, following the performance with some Czech takeaway pizza down the road. I think what I've realized after the past two years of fairly muscular travel is that these moments of impulsive jumping really only work when they're coming from a place of stability and preparedness - that for me (we'z all different folks) knowing where home base is makes it infinitely easier to dart out at random, that knowing the melody makes it easier to improvise freely.

Sometimes your ferry getaway leads you to peacocks that want to be your friend or maybe more accurately just want to walk around your things and get their smelly old feathers all over everything and specifically do not want to be your friend.

I've been finding a pace that really works for me, not just in travel, but in life. I've gradually been growing into my domestic aesthetic, having articulated the kind of feel and look that feels like home to me, and it's been a productive exercise to match my eagerness to get my whole place pulled together with a deliberate, researched, budgeted approach - which caution makes it all the easier to jump when the perfect piece of furniture turns up. (As a side note, it's kind of amazing how good it feels to jettison cheaply made furniture for the good stuff, taking time and finding things secondhand and on sale. Guess what this author likes, do you give up, it's wood, did anybody guess it.)

This author is also a very keen fan of Australian souvenir tea tins found at thrift stores in Chicago. He contains a certain number of multitudes.

And you know, beyond the stuff-ness of life, is the live-ness of life, and that's feeling much the same. The more anchored I am with healthy relationships and routines, stability of schedule and finances, the more freed I am to be impulsive and a little adventure-seeking in the ways that make me happy without losing equilibrium. It's very Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs, but uhhhh turns out that theory exists for Reasons and is, in fact, #good. Knowing where home base is makes it an awful lot less fraught to deal with uncertainty, curveballs, and chaos. If anything, it turns them from crisis points into moments of possibility.

So yes. As I fill my post-work, post-writing time with idle trip planning/doodling during my solo nights (balance in socialization is also extremely keen, turns out) I'm practicing this habit, both for some planned weekend getaways and for a longer finish-line trip. Oceans of research without getting married to a hit list, geographic possibilities that leave room for riffing and in-the-moment spontaneity, the capacity to let it drift if it's a balmy day and there's a path by the river that I didn't know was going to be there. It takes a minute for me to be ready to jump. But more and more, I jump. And the road is all the better for it.

What's travel good for anyway

One of the great myths about travel is the idea that it does things to you, or enhances you in some way. You've probably read the quotes: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" (Twain); "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled" (Muhammad); hundreds more, apocryphal and accurate alike.

I think this is all bunk.


It's not bad, and I think at its best, travel can live up to these sentiments. But this notion of travel is bunk for a few reasons, not least of which is that it rests on a foundation of often-ignored privilege. It's all well and good to lecture people that traveling would broaden their minds and teach them inclusivity and sophistication, but the reality is the single parent working two jobs far from any major airport isn't exactly staying at home out of lack of imagination or small-mindedness. To be clear: I think that people who can travel, who have the luxury of time and money, absolutely should. But let's start by acknowledging that it is a luxury of sorts.

The main reason I think these sentiments miss the mark, poetic and lovely and grand as they are, is that travel doesn't impart these qualities. Rather, travel is a superb reflector. It reflects the traveler back to herself, presents her with a wide platter of realities, and leaves it up to her to accept the growth, wisdom, flexibility, and understanding on offer. A traveler is just as apt to reject the offering, to retreat into his preconceived realities, and to bristle at his reflection rather than taking it in. We know this, I think, when we take a second to think about the loudmouthed tourists we've seen abroad barking at waiters and complaining about the culture, oblivious not only to their prejudices but to the reactions of those around them. We also see it in ourselves, in those moments of travel frustration when we just want a comfort from home, or when we let our impatience run away with us and start traveling thuggishly.

What travel does is show yourself to yourself in extremis, exposing you to uncertainty and newness at as rapid a pace as you can take it. You find that this culture doesn't "do" toilets the way you do. That this mode of public transit doesn't get where you want to go. That that bus sometimes just doesn't show up. That these people will suggest "intestines" as an alternative when you tell them you don't eat "meat." That you've booked the wrong nights and haven't got a place to stay tonight. That you must be mispronouncing the name of your next destination, because nobody knows where to send you. That this culture doesn't really know what to do with a solo diner. That all the food places in town closed at 8, not midnight.

Your reaction - or more precisely, your awareness of your reaction - is what dictates what happens next.

These moments throw up a choice, whether we're aware of it or not, to embrace the circumstance or block it out. It seems to me that it's most useful when we acknowledge the totality of the situation - to take a moment to let it be terrible to be stuck without dinner, to register how frustrating it's been to get where you're getting - and also to look at it from the outside. It's that tricky process of holding something gently, staying in touch with your reactions but open to growth. One of the better takes on travel I've heard is that "everything can be a great experience, or a great story, and ideally both." The active work of keeping this in mind - of walking around your situation and appreciating it from that years-on perspective even amidst disasters - can get you to some pleasantly growth-looking places.

And then of course, getting out of one's head (it's very easy and not at all a thing that I am constantly struggling to do, everything is extremely chill and good here all the time) and into the world again is the next facet of the challenge. How do you improvise? How do you let go of the things you thought were important? How do you MacGyver your way out of your situation? How do you stretch your sense of self, your sense of order, your sense of reasonable, your sense of geography, to fit the circumstances you're fortunate (whether you see it so or not) to have encountered?

This isn't limited to international or intercultural travel, obviously. One of my more cringeworthy memories of travel comes from a trip to San Francisco - not even my first! - and an impatient, idiotic, childish moment of pushiness and stress over a ticketing machine. I was thirty-three years old, an alleged adult, and I couldn't handle it. I was, in that moment, shut-down, closed-off, inward-focused to a keen and painful extremity. What travel reflected to me - what I didn't register for months - was a state of extreme and largely unacknowledged anxiety, unready to stretch after (and, eventually, before) a year of tectonic shifts (aren't they all). It was a real hard boiled eggs moment that spilled out in all kinds of toxic ways. Travel didn't miraculously expand me; it shone a spotlight on my raw, rough state of being. It telegraphed some major structural problems, but I wasn't ready or able to engage with that reflection until well after the fact.

All of which is to say: the window doesn't close. The process of travel can extend long after your trip does, as your memories and the lingering scars and badges fade into the patchwork of your life. The possibilities of travel are remarkable, as broadening and edifying as the cheerful quotes all suggest. It can reveal endlessly: ourselves to ourselves, ourselves to other cultures, other cultures to us. But it only can; it's only one possibility. It only reveals; your growth, or stagnancy, or self-involvement, or cultural edification, is yours.

All travel is friction. It's an immovable object and your traction across it can charge your cells or slow you to a halt. It's what you do with it that makes the difference.

2018

Okay, so yes, but what's next, anyway? A few things!

First, the job. I'm digging in and working on Being Useful in all the ways. I'm still agog at the joy of benefits, vacation pay, paid holidays, sick time... not to mention a salary that, after years of grad stipends, feels positively luxurious, so we're firmly in the land of "be good at job, job very nice." The folk at the job know I'm writing my dissertation and may be looking to make moves if I don't land teaching work once I finish, but (or is it so? Regardless!) I'm still very much pulled to keep putting my best foot forward.

Second, the dissertation. It's shocking how the mental clarity of having a job has kicked me into gear on this front. I'm moving and enjoying it for the first time in ages, rather than sort of bailing water as I felt like I was doing this fall. Feeling optimistic about having a chapter done this month, and a full draft before the end of spring. The hopegoaldream is to defend this calendar year (academic year would be a tight squeeze) and I think it's highly doable.

Third, flexing fun/creative muscles. I got to perform last month for the first time in ages in a staged reading (loved my director, loved my cast, loved everything about it) and this week I've got my first audition in a couple years. Grad school/life really boxed me out of this one, but I keep re-discovering how good it is for me. Hoping to keep up that collaborative, failure-as-process work this year.

Fourth, trying to do good. I'm hoping, especially as I finish the dissertation, to take not just my token donations but my energy and time to work for the change I want to support, which this year likely means volunteering in the IL-6th district and hopefully helping with whatever manner of voter-rights struggle is happening in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker's racist policies have deliberately made it hard for low-income and African-American citizens to get the right to vote (or even to vote, given the allocation of voting stations). I wanna be a boot on the ground if I can this year.

So those are the four major sort of platforms of the year. What travels lie ahead? Well, I am still very much loving the "I don't have to go anywhere" vibe of this chapter so far, but I've definitely started the "reading and daydreaming" phase of travel planning. 2018 will likely be pretty mild in comparison to the berserk last few years, and almost or entirely domestic.

What's on that horizon? Very likely a lot of pal visits to places I've either never been, or need to revisit: DC and Seattle for the latter; Los Angeles, New Orleans and Dallas for the former. LA is a particular priority, and a longer trip; two years ago I had mapped out a very different trip that ultimately didn't happen for extremely lame reasons, so I'm hoping to catch a week of that friends-and-exploring fun I'd grown excited about before it fell apart. All that and a family reunion in Colorado will be plenty (okay, I might sneak up to Minneapolis again, I love it up there, and I owe my Madison pal Tim a visit, and who would deny me at least a day trip up to Three Oaks) and I might not even get to it all. (I'd also like to visit Portland OR, Austin, and ok fine a little New England runaround after I finish defending. Very little of this will actually happen.)

The major test will be seeing how my finances are by the year's end; if things have gone rather particularly swimmingly, I may springboard a somewhat more ambitious post-Christmas trip (University recess policies are amazing vacation-makers)... Which is likely to be either Portugal (the one European destination that still tugs at my solo-travel string, though there are plenty of spots I'd explore or revisit with a friend or partner) or Japan, which is for sure the next major horizon. In general, my "everything in order" madness is drifting toward Asia, with inspiration from my sister and her thoroughly excellent boyfriend's travels there last year. One lives in hope?

Anyhow. It's weirdly comforting to be back in the mode of daydreaming rather than planning, and to be finding the everyday joys and tasks that keep time flying by as I find myself increasingly happy in the moment. Here's hoping your 2018 is also, both now and in the months to come, full of contentment, peace, and just a really snazzy excellence, you know?