HOME!

So I’m home, back in D.C. again and living in my new row house with some great roommates and starting a new segment of my life. My house is in a sketchy part of town which I find rather amusing and adventurous. Apparently there have been some major drug busts in the area in the past few years, mostly cocaine I think. These days though the major drug of sale in the immediate blocks is just pot and you have to go a bit further down to run into the crack. This could just be rumor on the street though, I’m sure it’s, erm, perfectly safe? According to the neighbor if you make friends with the homeless dude on the street he’ll see to it that your car never gets broken into. The outside of our house and the other houses on our street are no great shakes but the inside is delightful! We have three floors and a tiny little veranda where we can get some sun and we’re about a 25-minute walk from Chinatown and probably a ten-minute walk from the Convention Center metro stop. We had a housewarming party on Saturday which was good fun and I’m still working on getting my room together. Another IKEA trip is definitely in order. My EMT program starts tomorrow night and I’m crossing my fingers that my background check will be completed in the necessary time for me to stay in the program. If I have to drop out and wait until fall to take it I’ll revert to plan B which is to look for a real job. So far the transition is going as smoothly as I could hope although I still have to do before I would consider myself “settled-in”. I’m learning how to drive in the city and have already experienced driving downtown and on the beltway during rush hour which is pretty terrifying, but teaching me that I need to be assertive to survive here. Anyway, things are definitely a lot different here now that I’m not an intern living in Capitol Hill but I still feel very at home and excited to be here.

Ich muss irgendwo hin!!

OMG insatiable wanderlust! I need, NEED, need to leave the country! I haven’t had it this bad in a while, but there is only so much midwestern farm culture that I can handle before I start to lose it. I also just watched “Blood Diamond” so that doesn’t help matters either. I want adventure. I want to go to the Himalyas and Brazil and Indonesia and Africa and Patagonia, and anywhere! Montreal is looking like the only place within reach at the moment so I just might do that…practice my French. But I want the adventures that inevitably accompany travel in the developing world…waking up to roosters on beds and getting a van full of tourists stuck in the mud for an hour, getting lost on hills of coffee trees, swimming in the Nile…Oh dear lord I never stop. Why can’t I just settle? Why??? Ahhh, I haven’t been to an airport since January and we are now in April! That is 3 months without being on an airplane. This is some sort of anomoly. I only have five more weeks in Iowa, I can survive that, right? Five more weeks and then I get on a plane for New York, and then I can go to Montreal, and then I drive off to D.C. to leave Iowa for good. No more ties to the corn fields.

Drinking Memories

In tea leaves their dreams were pulled from a garden where the bugs and the burrs settled in and the sun speckled them through. Their dreams of the past they were planted, buried in composted soil, watered for the present, and nurtured for the future. Their dreams, of more unified souls, and happier homes they were plucked and dried and stirred into memories. With a dollop of honey and a splash of milk, we’re drinking their dreams, we’re drinking their memories, into our own.

Greetings and Saluations!

The task of writing my first blog post is rather intimidating but I suppose I had better just get it over with, eh? I feel like there’s an awful lot of pressure to create some sort of masterpiece that will leave my readers mystically drawn to read more from that whitty Gabi girl. Of course I guess I still need to establish a readership so I may as well just write whatever I please and be satisfied. Afterall, I’m sure the purpose of a blog is not to cater towards those who may chance to read it, but rather to faciliate my own purposes while by chance providing pleasure to a potential consequential audience. or something. Undoubtedly I am being far too analytical about this entire affair as I am apt to do with just about any siutation that may come my way. Precisely why I am a horrible decision maker. Good grief, well with all of that behind us, what fascinating tidbits do I have to write about this evening? For starters, I am adding this lovely picture of myself and my travel companions on my latest adventure in Texas! Do make note of the sunny sky illuminating our happy faces. And why are they happy faces? Because there was sun, and warmth. Something we are still dearly lacking in Iowa where I once again woke up to snow, only this time we can’t use the excuse that it is, afterall, still March. Because today, my dear people, is April! I have entirely given up hope of spring still existing in the midwest. And for that matter, I do believe that the drastic change in temperature from mid-70’s and sunny in Texas to a gloomy, snowy, vitamin-D deficient, 32 degrees upon my return may very well have been the cause of my now week-long killer viral infection that still has me squeaking in hoarse undertones. So there you have it, all the proof needed that my decision to forever leave the mid-west is the right one. And with that conclusion, I think this will suffice for a first entry.

One quick note- I still haven’t made up my mind what I want the title of this blog to be, and as it is easily changeable it just may frequently change, or I may keep it just as it now is. We shall see…