wow, i haven't blogged in months. twice in one day?! geez.

i really think i must do a year-in-review for 2010. why does it feel like more stuff happens every year than what happened the year before? yet somehow they seem to be going by more quickly every year. i usually don't make new years resolutions, but this year i am. maybe "goals" is a better word. here are some of them:

- get back to the gym (typical). i stopped going regularly when i hurt my back (slip disc, let's save that for the year-in-review, if it ever comes...

- look for new jobs

- i forget, but there was more. i'll post if/when i remember. oh yeah, it was not to be walked on. if my family thinks they can just treat me like shit and make obnoxious comments and that i will lay down like a doormat and try to be peaceful and nice and sensitive and caring, like my mom was, they are wrong. it got her nowhere. i need to stick up for me more.

I miss writing. i miss writing just to write. maybe my creative juices haven't dried up. maybe they have just flowed to different outlets. maybe living and people and doing things have replaced thinking and daydreaming and analyzing. maybe it was the time in my life. maybe it was the angst of a teen, now a young adult with different angst and different stresses and different ways to relieve them. in some ways, writing was more pure than the ways i choose to think about things now. i think writing made me face things more, now it seems like i'm running away. i don't know if that's true. i just finished the perks of being a wallflower; i really liked it. i liked the simplistic writing style. i'm attempting to mimic it in this…whatever you call it. i miss my rambles that went on with no punctuation yet made sense only to me my jabber yammers or whatever i used to call them i miss them greatly i never put spaces in them before to indicate pauses but hey some things change right? i like charlie from my book because he thinks a lot, like i used to do. he thinks things i think, he puts things i've thought into words i could not. did i used to cherish the alone time, or did i just come up with ways to cope with it or enrich it, because it was inevitable? that was ten years ago, how can i expect things to have stayed the same? how could i even want them to? can i honestly tell myself i was better then than now? i guess so, in some ways i was. i was more pure, more "good". at least i think so. where am i hoping to go with this? i need a theme, a topic, a subject. love? hate? my mom? i don't know if i want to talk about any of these. i wish i could just always draw robots. they are easy. i wish i could say something profound that would make someone want to quote it. something that would make the cartoon lightbulb go off above someone's head when they hear it. something that makes them go "ah ha!" i miss feeling profound, i miss feeling infinite. can i stop missing things and instead enjoy things now and look forward to things? am i more cynical and negative now? and why do i have so many questions? i bet you half of the punctuation up to this point is question marks. that's sort of annoying. i'll see if i can just make statements. like: i am tired. like: i should really clean my apartment rather than write about nothing. like: somehow this is therapeutic. like: gosh i miss blogging, sort of. i really used to blog a lot. perhaps i'll post this in my blog. i may take a nap.

I'm blogging for the first time in months. This feels weird, but I miss it. Maybe I'll start blogging again.

I was reading someone's travel blog from a link they provided on facebook and was inspired. A lot has happened in the past weeks, months and year that are worth writing about.

Most notably I went to Israel in July! Because the trip was so amazing I will write another post dedicated just to the trip. I've probably told the story about the trip 100 times but it still does not get old. Safe to say I've been "bitten," as my aunt Andrea put it when we spoke on the phone today.

That provides me a nice segue to another topic: reconnecting with family members. To rewind a little bit, things did not go well living with Becky. The situation deteriorated to the point where we were living under the same roof, and could even be in the same room, without speaking as much as a "hello" to each other. It was truly awful, and when I heard she told someone I was "poisoning" the family I had to laugh a bitter laugh. What a joke. Perhaps more on that later as well. So, with the loss of a branch of my family I'm not all too sad to have lost, I decided to reach out to other members of my family. It actually began with an email from my dad, quite a while ago. After a few exchanges I decided his responses were really rubbing me the wrong way, and I wasn't sure if I was prepared to let him in to potentially cause me a great amount of hurt I don't need in my life right now. Between our exchanges, however, my half brother Jacob friended me on facebook and sent me a message. I left his friend request there for months, not sure what to do. Finally I decided to write him back. We have been in touch sporadically since then, and as it turns out my half sister, Mimi, is living in Israel and is in the IDF! It would have been foolish to go to Israel and not meet up with her, so we managed to meet up twice in Jerusalem. It was very cool.

My half siblings aren't the only estranged family members I've reached out to. I also got in touch with my aunt Andrea, who has long been a black sheep of our family. If my family's good at one thing, it's ostracizing select members, or driving them away so that they no longer want to be involved. Being the most recent subject of this awful display of exclusive pack mentality, I started to wonder if my aunt Andrea really did all the awful things I grew up hearing, or if she just didn't want to live her life confined to the narrow field of what my family deems acceptable. When I talked to her I made a couple points about my other aunt that she said were extremely insightful and that I hit the nail right on the head. But we spent little time talking about the side of our family neither of us wants to be a part of, and more about me, my mom and a little about her. She said she will be in town Labor Day weekend, and we may meet up if I'm around (though I have been hoping to be at the beach).

More news: I moved to a new apartment on Friday! The reign of the awesome but "bad joo joo" (as Alena put it) is over!!! My new place is great. A really big one bedroom with high ceilings and three HUGE closets. Seriously, the folding table that belonged to my grandmother's uncle Charlie fits into the smallest of the three. So, I had LOTS of helpers, which made the move a lot more bearable (and fast), not to mention that everything was down an elevator, then a block drive away, and I'm on the ground floor here so there were no miserable steps to deal with. Jax, Paul and Paul's friend Todd came first, followed soon after by Colin and Jimbo, with Jimbo's pickup truck. We got the move started, Alex's friend Dom came, and a little after that Geoff showed up. Alena came when work was over, around 3:30, and we were already mostly done! I had "reserved" the freight elevator for 1:30 (aka happened to see the man who operates it - Harry - a few hours prior and asked him if we were all set, to which he responded the woman who works in the management office NEVER told him about it, but that he would be there). We didn't start the move til about 2 and I thought it was going to take way longer than it did. Everyone said I did a great job having everything packed and ready so that really helped. When Alena came she packed all the food from the cabinets, fridge and freezer. Pretty awesome. I'd say with that time included, we were done everything by 5 and enjoying drinks at my new place (which has a little courtyard).

So hmmm what else is up? Oh I also went to LA for Coachella in April, and back to LA for Memorial Day weekend. I've been quite the traveler this year (and my bank account reflects that, sadly). I've also kept up my concert-going pretty well, having seen Spoon/Arcade Fire, Silversun Pickups, Blitzen Trapper and Stars to name the most recent ones.

I also did Race For The Cure with Ryan in May -- we raised $825, which is pretty amazing. I definitely want to do it again next year.

I've made it to the beach a bunch of times too. Ocean City, Stone Harbor, Ventnor, Wildwood, Sea Isle. I haven't gotten to Newport but I may try to go in the fall if I can convince Alena and Amy to drive up. It's just much easier to drive an hour and a half and be at the beach, rather than 5+ hours when you only have a weekend.

So there's a general synopsis of my life in the past many months. I'm going to continue unpacking and I plan on blogging about Israel later. I've been so busy most every night during the week as well as weekend, but I like it that way.

I hate you because whenever I hear that Stevie Wonder song I think of you. I really believed it when you played it for me all those years ago. It must have been about 4 years by now. It only makes me believe more firmly in that line from Vicky Christina Barcelona that only unfulfilled love can be romantic. But I still hate you.

i cried at work today.

oh, i guess it's been long enough since i've written in here that i didn't actually have a job last time. i started on the 25th of january or somewhere around there. i'm now in my 5th week. one of my coworkers, rich, is out for the week traveling for work. today, 2/22, which is typically a bad day, was a bad day. it's one of those days that is bad every year but i don't realize til halfway (or more) through that of course i'm having a bad day, it's 2/22. so it's not like i anticipate it being bad or set it up or anything. it just ends up sucking every time. i think i took my mom's unlucky numbers and they became my own.

so, like i said, one of my three coworkers is out for the week. that meant that the three of us that were there had it busier than normal. it also meant that i was on the help desk inbox, which i thought about last week but forgot about today, and which my boss reminded me of around 11:30 or so. there were already over 10 emails in there, half of which i didn't know what to do with, and every time i tried to look at them the phone rang. there were a few rude people i spoke with and a couple that were simply exasperating. around 3:30 or 4 i found out i messed up some tickets i'd done. i hadn't included some necessary info, and the company gets audted on these issues so they need to be done right. it's reversible and i will fix it tomorrow, but my boss has to run a report to find all the tickets i created for this issue and just the fact that i fucked up and all the calls and all the emails finally got to me and i got really overwhelmed. and i started to cry. which i hate doing in front of people. it's so embarrassing. omar, the one guy left, was really nice and understanding about it, but i just felt like such a jackass.

since then i've been in a pretty weird mood - half neutral and half depressed. feels pretty crappy. i'm going to bed.

i can't believe i cried at work. ugh.

Do you believe in "meant to be"? I don't. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. I think if things are "meant to be" they will work out (sometimes with effort), and that some things are not meant to be, but I don't believe in predestined anything or fate or soul mates.

I still repeat the same mistakes. Will I spend my whole life repeating these mistakes, over and over? I do learn sometimes, but is my learning curve really fast enough?

It's amazing how we all live in the same world, yet can view things so differently.

I ran 6.1 miles today. Outside.

I am so proud of myself. Left the apartment at 4:26 figuring I'd last MAX 40 minutes but not expecting it to go even that well. It's cold out, I've never run in the cold, I haven't been running outside at all recently, and I've never run more than 5.4 miles. I started out at a slow pace, one I felt I could maintain the entire time. I ran to Broad and Bainbridge, down to Front, up to Chestnut, then to Market, then to JFK around 16th, up to 20th or so, then back to Market, up to 23rd, back to Bainbridge, then down to Broad and South. Google maps says that's 6.1 miles. I could have done the Kelly Drive loop!! Or run to Penn! I felt so great, like I could have kept going, but I told myself I'd run an hour or until I couldn't handle it anymore, whichever came first. So, after my hour, I walked a few blocks, came home, stretched, and did a few crunches (still sore from yesterday's crunches).

So happy. Also, so hungry.