quarantine in the city

Welp. Things are looking a little different these days.

Normally, as this blog name might suggest, I spend about 50% of my brainpower plotting a variety of escapes. Planning the next vacation, or weekend away, or at least visiting friends or family. Now, in the age of COVID, the idea of planning isn’t even fathomable. I don’t see the point.

We were lucky enough, I guess you could say, to have just gotten back from a trip (to Argentina! thank god we drank all the wine while we could) when COVID really started to take shape. We had just started the vague instagram-inspiration-shot-saving for our yearly September trip (one of the Balearic Islands, we thought, still going back and forth between Menorca and Mallorca) when things exploded on, as I remember it, March 12 in NYC. Suddenly, we got an email from our HR team that we needed to pack up all our things and not come back to the office for at least two weeks (ha, ha). I was headed to an appointment and leaving a bit earlier than I normally would, and haphazardly shoved the necessities into my bag, leaving my poor pothos plant to, now, I’d guess, shrivel up and die on my desk for the next several months.

You’d think this all would feel a little more strange than it does? On the one hand, everything in our lives completely exploded, and on the other hand everything just became infinitely more calm. There’s no sense of FOMO, not even JOMO, there’s just no MO, at all. We’re all sending each other memes and wondering what is happening?

Where we live in Brooklyn it’s relatively quiet, and always has been. We quickly adjusted our lives to make it even moreso, forgoing one of our two running routes in favor of the one that makes it easiest to avoid other humans. We’re running more than we ever have, because there’s nothing else to do. We’re getting used to tying bandanas on our face and adding to our lung capacity, I guess, because we have to.

I give myself a half hour of news-related podcasts a day, and read only the New York Times. I gave up all other political podcasts, because I can’t stomach it.

It might seem strange, but in many ways it brings me back to 2016. I feel like election night was a day that I’ll think about for the rest of my life; a night where a lot of things came crashing down and created, or brought to life, or illuminated narratives that I see playing out throughout this mess, throughout daily frustrations, throughout a variety of relationships. Are they really as related as they seem, sometimes? I think that they may be.

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the nomad

Where are you from?

This didn’t used to be such a complicated question, but I feel hesitant when I try to answer these days. Some people say where you’re “from” isn’t where you lived the longest, or live now, but where you were born, or where you went to high school. For me, most of these key points happened in different places. I was born and lived for the longest time (so far!) in California. I went to high school in Florida and still visit my parents there often. I moved to NYC for college and have been living here ever since (coming up on 9 years!). So I’ve started feeling more like a nomad, with homes and shallow-to-deeper roots in a handful of places.

That might be why one of my favorite hobbies now is traveling–and travel is something I define loosely. It can be a 2-week long honeymoon trip to Italy, or a barely 2-hour drive to a little known town in upstate New York for an overnight stay. Whatever it is, I treat it like an adventure, an escape, and opportunity to see and learn about a new place–and about myself. I love exploring AirBnb for cool abodes and finding inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram. Most of my travel destinations begin as a non-specific NEED to go to a random-seeming place and I generally have little agenda besides a restaurant or a flea market to start.

I’m hoping you’ll enjoy the ride–and share your own adventures with me, too!

OK, let’s go for it.