...and we're back!

I've taken an unannounced break, and now I'm back to blogging.  It's been quite a month -- packed up and moved out of DC, traveled 4,000+ miles across country from DC to Memphis, Memphis to Urbana, Urbana to Milwaukee, Madison to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Pierre, SD, Pierre to Rapid City, Black Hills to Little Bighorn, Yellowstone, Grand Teton to Reno, a stop in Lake Tahoe and finally, arrived in Santa Cruz.

One of the terms of my funding with UCSC is establishing residency ASAP, so my first order of business after unpacking our shipping container was registering my car and getting a new California license.  The woman at the DMV said "Welcome to California!  Now you can live la vida loca."  It made me laugh out loud, and I've been thinking about this general laid back attitude around me.  It's infectious.  Most of the people I've encountered at the DMV, the farmer's market, the shops in downtown, and even at big box stores like Costco and Target are polite without being in your face and pushy.  I think part of what I'm feeling is a real community vibe, like everyone knows that we share this space and that we rely on each other in some way as consumers, merchants, neighbors, etc.  I like it a lot so far.

In my own way, I am living la vida loca.  I have absolutely no obligations at the moment.  I don't know how to emphasize that I have never really experienced this level of freedom before.  I've been unemployed for only 2 stretches in my life: once after returning home from a year in France and once for a few weeks before I started the master's program.  Neither of those times were relaxed, however, because I was unwillingly unemployed and was consumed with incessant job searching during that time.  This is different.

I sleep until I wake up every morning. I read a lot and have already finished Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism, which I've been trying to read for a year now.  And I'm reading Marx's Capital (Das Kapital) in conjunction with David Harvey's online lectures.  I'm exercising daily at a gym with kickboxing and/or pilates.  I'm keeping in contact with friends through email and Facebook.  I'm  enjoying the ocean and the adorable downtown Santa Cruz, cooking everyday and eating healthy, and generally just being relaxed.  This is a crazy new kind of life for me.

Sure, school will be getting busy, but that's another month away. And I'm recalibrating so that I'm ready to be a normal kind of busy rather than a crazed-lose-my-hair-ruin-my-fingernails-can't-keep-up-with-friendships-no-time-for-exercise kind of busy.

Part of my crazy new life also includes writing everyday, so I'll be blogging regularly again.