Specifically, I finally graduated, and now I’m getting ready to embark on a more serious career, which is actually what sparked my interest in firing up WordPress again and putting down my thoughts. (Hi, HR people!) I won’t name names of places I’m applying for now, for various reasons, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at some of the responses I’ve received, and the salary offerings so far — as a journalism major, I thought my life path was pretty well set: do what I love, but be broke as hell doing it. I will say that there are specific areas I’m interested in (Boston, NYC, Seattle), and the most promising responses are out of Boston and NYC so far. No matter what career path I choose, I feel a bit like I’m delaying our dreams of making it to France eventually (which I think I mentioned in my last post), but I’m excited to take my first steps toward a meaningful career, and I think for now the benefits outweigh the negatives.

Last October, Ivona and I were on our honeymoon in Antalya, Turkey, sitting in a faux Parisian café in our resort, and we made the decision to move to France. We busted out the laptop, spent hours looking into everything from the cost of housing in Aix-en-Provence (the city I used to live in) to claiming my French citizenship. We had just had our second wedding in Bulgaria, and our first honeymoon now that we could finally afford one, and it seemed fitting that we made the decision to go there together, something we had talked about as early as our first date. It was a definite motivator to finish up this year and get my degree, and it was one of the things keeping me from shooting myself at the though of another 80-100 hours a week driving a cab this summer, but as we got closer to leaving Northampton to head to the Vineyard, and looked at the costs of going to France, I realized that working another menial labor job for three intense months with no semblance of a life was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Besides, with the US immigration process being the beast that it is, things will be easier later on for us anyway.

We’re coming up on our two year anniversary, which means that aside from the horrors of just dating me, she’s endured two years of matrimonial unbliss, including my video gaming habit and constant dick jokes (not really — I’m highbrow! No, really). I know everyone says it, but I really can’t believe it has been this long. Luckily for us, we still have the same opinion of marriage that we started out with: our relationship really hasn’t changed because of the rings on our fingers, and we don’t “feel” any more married than when it first happened — which is to say we still think getting married makes more of a difference to everyone around us than it does to us. Hell, we still sometimes feel weird referring to “my wife,” or “my husband.”

Anyway, sorry to make such a rambling, newsy update with not much substance, but I had to break back into it and I’m sure some family and friends who read this will want to get an update on what’s going on. Hopefully I’ll be back on a more regular update schedule, so keep checking.

Going through a couple of my old ones right now, I stumbled upon a couple of those little snippets of thought that I love finding in these things. Sometimes they transport me to the time I wrote them, or at least give me some vague sense of nostalgia, but at the very least I either think “Oh, hey, that’s great, I should use that for something,” or “man, that was fucking terrible, what was I thinking?” There’s even one page where I had written some stupid, out-of-context thought and apparently went back to it months later, crossed it out and put an arrow pointing towards it and a note that said “Thought it was a good idea at the time.” I guess being my own worst critic can be a good thing, but sometimes I feel like it paralyzes me when it comes to writing. Hopefully this blog can help me get over some of those fears. I’ve never feared the criticisms of anyone else, but the most disappointing feeling I’ve had as a writer is when I write something and look back at it and say “Man, that was terrible.” It’s more embarassing than being caught masturbating (especially when you’re masturbating to the writing of yours that you like).

So, for tonight, here are a couple little nuggets from the archives that I liked. There is no context, just loose ideas that I might use for something someday.

1:

I fantasize about yelling at my boss in jobs I don’t even have. Do you know what it’s like to be turned down or overlooked for a raise or promotion in your daydreams? It sucks, man, it really does.

2:

He was the kind of guy that wrote nice poetry to his girlfriend about putting rocks in his shoes so he would remember each step he took towards her and ruined it by later describing in detail the pus-filled blisters and blood-soaked socks at the end of the day.

3:

“If the world were black and white, would color cameras have been invented first?”

4 (from a journal entry when I was driving the buses on the Vineyard. I would write some of these down in the two or three minutes I had at a bus stop during my shift.):

Small, obnoxious kid goes into a frenzy, forcing everyone on the bus to listen to a rant about the entire story of the new Harry Potter, despite pleas from the other passengers not to ruin it. [It had just come out.] Continues anyway, visibly angering a teenaged girl with the book in her hands and a bookmark in the middle. Boy reveals that he is about to be shipped off to camp for a month. Passengers all cheer and applaud the missing parents and sympathize.”

—

Man uses the last two dollars on a $16 change card. I go to throw it away but he wants to keep it. For a scrap book. His used up, wrinkled bus change card.

—

Morbidly obese couple only passengers between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, arguably the more scenic, if not the most, of the down-island routes. The husband asks, “so a lot of people come here, right? From all over?” When I say yes, the wife snorts and shouts, “WHY?” Their grunts, sweating, moaning and complaining about the heat, and the numerous stains on their shirts, combined with their utter ignorance will make me question my next piece of bacon.