Hey friendslist! What if I were to recommend a bunch of random things to you! Great, let's go!

Two things for your ears and brain:

[+] Friday Night Comedy podcast from BBC Radio 4: when cheapmetaphor came to visit she brought this with her, and it's like the most glorious love child of QI and Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Hilarious! Topical! Yes, sometimes they talk about unfathomable internal British politics, but you can feel international while you listen, and know more about Members of Parliament than any of your friends.

[+] WNYC's Radio Lab is a great podcast in general, but I particularly loved the episode New Normal?, and you will too if you like studies of baboon behavior and human-instigated natural selection in foxes. Science!

Two very different books I could not put down, like, I read these while I was walking places:

[+] The Help, by Kathryn Stockett: The experience of reading this was so intense I was almost glad when I finished, so I could breathe, even though I really loved it. It's about black maids in Mississippi in the early 60s (right at the same time as Mad Men, for a contemporary look at a completely different America). A white author writing in the voice of black characters always makes me leery, and I think the answer to how well she pulled it off is complicated, but the characters were so vibrant, the claustrophobic, menacing atmosphere of the Jim Crow south so pervasive, the relationships so interesting, I couldn't put it down.

[+] The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins: For something completely different, a YA novel about a dystopic future America where teenagers are forced to fight to the death for a reality show. I didn't want to read this at first because the concept is so horrifying, but it came so highly recommended I gave it a chance. Very gripping (as you'd expect). I'm looking forward to the others in the series.

One coffee-making device to change your life:

[+] My Unbreakable French Press broke, of course, so I went on Amazon but all the best rated alternatives were really expensive, and all the cheap ones didn't seem so great. Except for (cue choirs of angels) The AeroPress. Rather than steeping for several minutes like a normal French press, this has you push the coffee through right away, and creates a pressure chamber, so it's sort of a mix between coffee and espresso. Anyway, all the technical details mean the coffee isn't at all bitter and tastes UH-mazing. People on the internet seriously go nuts for this thing, and they're not lying. I *love* going out for coffee, and I don't even want to anymore because this is better. Blah blah effusive-cakes. It's also wicked easy to clean.

Two Tumblrs that could make your day:

[+] Slaughterhouse 90210: pop culture pictures + quotes from literature. TWO WAYS TO BE GLORIOUSLY NERDY AT ONCE. Mad Men + Sylvia Plath! Freaks & Geeks + Tom Robbins! David Sedaris + Arrested Development! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles + Anais Nin! Happy Days + The Great Gatsby! Ugh, it's basically the best thing on the internet.

[+] Clients From Hell: Yes, yes, another 'the humans I work with are stupid/awful' site, but this one's about graphic and web design, so it's particularly funny to me, which is of course all that matters.

An anti-recommendation, seriously, beware, beware: When annakovsky was here, we went to the World of Coke, Atlanta's very own Coca-Cola museum. At first you feel like you're in a DeLillo novel because you're in a "museum" for COKE, but then you get to the tasting room, which you've been looking forward to the whole time, ready to taste the dozens of flavors of Coke products from around the world. DO NOT DO THIS. IT IS HORRIFYING. WHY DO THEY MAKE THINGS THAT TASTE THAT WAY?

A culinary experience to exceed all others:

[+] Oh, and last but greatest: go to your local Target. Find cookies called Tim Tams, in Pepperidge Farm packaging. Take them home, make a cup of tea, and do a Tim Tam slam. YOUR LIFE IS NOW CHANGED. You're welcome.

Guys, it's taking every ounce of self control in my body not to flame this girl on Facebook: I knew her in middle school and it turns out she grew up uberconservative and I'm usually lolwtf at the things she says -- handwringing over the flu shot and the fact that schools ask for students' race on forms -- but she just posted this link with the comment "Tragic." YES IT'S SO TRAGIC that more women are buying houses and getting PhDs and reading books and earning a living. Also SHE IS IN graduate school AND the workforce wtf wtf wtf.

Speaking of conservative politics, I just found out that the new governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell is my cousin. (Yours too, ke_rose_ne.) My middle name's even McDonnell. Weird! Too bad we're on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. My dad's beside himself with excitement though, after realizing Why That Guy Looks So Much Like Uncle Jack.

I just got home from a cupcake contest party and I'm going to explooooode. I didn't win, but I did get nominated in all the categories -- and I got to eat a bajillion cupcakes, so I'll take it. Before that, we went to my boyfriend's mom's art show, and yesterday we went on a 4 mile bike ride and out to dinner with friends and on Friday I made apple cake and we got Thai food and walked around Georgia Tech and went to Shabbat dinner and then a game night, and this week I also voted and went to a microfinance lecture and Spanish class and a networking event and a craft night and made banana bread and mac and cheese. Phew! Also last month cheapmetaphor came and visited and it was awesome (picnics in the park! Forever 21!), and this week annakovsky is coming to town! What more could I ever possibly need?

day 07 | whatever tickles your fancy


My brain is completely fried from this week of posting and now they want me to come up with my own topic? I actually wasn't even going to post today, and make it up tomorrow, but well, here I am

( with the most ridiculous post ever. ) Also I told you this post was ridiculous.

Today was throw-open-the-windows gorgeous; sunshine and no humidity, french toast and an afternoon nap. A+ Sunday, A+.

ALSO, GOODBYE, MEME! I can't believe we all got through this together.

HI GUYS ARE YOU SICK OF ME YET? I SURE AM!

day 06 | a quote

Oh man, I'm such quote fiend. I basically read the enormous Bartlett's Familiar Quotations cover to cover when I was in middle or high school. N-nerd alert. Here are some more recent suspects:

"Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing." -- Miranda July

"I was 22 or 23 when I made a decision not to be actively Hamlet-like and miserable in my daily life, and the decision helped a lot. Living vitally is not easier than living morbidly — it’s just better." -- Stephen Colbert

"Well do I remember the days when skipping a night of sleep felt like a form of victory against the tyranny of the boring everyday routine. Now it feels like taking out a twelfth mortgage on a house you don’t even want to live in anymore." -- Sean Nelson

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’" -- Kurt Vonnegut

day 05 | a youtube clip

Here's Walt Whitman being sold out for a Levi's ad, which would be troubling if it weren't so freaking awesome. (Vaguely NSFW.)



Also here's the Discovery Channel's "I Love The Whole World" (perhaps familiar to you because of XKCD) meeting the new Star Trek. Because what makes anyone love the whole world more than that movie?



Also, Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it):

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Also I know everyone's seen David After Dentist, but I've just recently realized how applicable it is during the daily hell of waking up. What's happening to me? Is this real life?


What are you all doing this weekend? All of my plans involve either food or poetry, which is the way I like it. And being outside: this morning we went to the park down the street, and sat outside in the sunshine -- at the end of September! What!

Ack, this merciless posting schedule!

day 04 | a site

Mint.com is financial nerdiness glee. Basically it works like this: you connect it to all your bank accounts/credit cards/theoretical retirement accounts, and it aggregates all the information in a swooshy, shiny, easy-to-read interface. It also categorizes your spending, so you can set monthly budgets for, say, coffee shops, and you can also see how your spending breaks down per month in a big pie chart (Marshall Ericksen would love it). Hooray financial nerdiness!

Or if you'd like something less nerdy and fiscally responsible, Poetry Foundation lets you find poems by category (fall! pop culture! race! the body! food* drink!) plus they have cool news items and articles and blog entries.

Also check out this designer's awesome redesigns of book covers to look like classic Penguin books: Harry Potter, Narnia and His Dark Materials.


Anyone want to lay odds on whether I'm going to let the onion straws I had at the bar be my dinner, and just skip right through to dessert?

day 01 | a song
day 02 | a picture
day 03 | a book
day 04 | a site
day 05 | a youtube clip
day 06 | a quote
day 07 | whatever tickles your fancy

Self-Help, Lorrie Moore.

This book! I just read it and it's so frigging good! I don't generally like short story collections, so it's such a delight to be won over so hardcore. Awesomely innovative use of form (second person! future tense! stories told in reverse!), and really heartwrenching and dryly funny at the same time. I now have to go read everything else she's ever written.

Other great recent reads: The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.


I'm so bummed, I was supposed to start a Spanish night class tomorrow night, and they just emailed to say it's canceled because of low enrollment. I guess I'll swap down to a lower level, but I'm worried I won't learn as much, and it's in a later timeslot so I won't get home 'til like 10. Boo! (On the upside, night classes at Emory are literally a TENTH of the cost of night classes at Harvard. Nerdiness within reach!)

So the other day I walked over to the bagel place down the block, because their bagels are a religious experience made of olive oil and ecstasy, but it was closed because apparently they're filming a movie there. Which IMDB tells me stars Katherine Heigl and Christina Hendricks! But putting aside my plans to become bff with the Mad Men cast, they've since totally gutted the place and renamed it. Which is concerning because (a) why use that location if they were going to change everything, and (b) when can I have my bagels again?

day 01 | a song
day 02 | a picture
day 03 | a book
day 04 | a site
day 05 | a youtube clip
day 06 | a quote
day 07 | whatever tickles your fancy


Hillside in San Salvador, El Salvador. July 12, 2009. Strange to find in a city with so many malls. (SO MANY MALLS.)

This meme is already doing great things for me! Case in point, today's prompt got me to FINALLY upload the rest of my photos from this summer's Central America trip. Or, rather, upload a tiny fraction of the vault's worth of photos I apparently took.

( Here have some more pictures! Nicaragua, El Salvador & Guatemala. )

Yesterday in my whining about the rain I posted to say that all I wanted in the world was a sunny afternoon -- AND TODAY I GOT ONE. I'm afraid to plumb the depths of this power. Will I star in a YA novel about the girl who could make wishes come true by blogging about them? But ah, it was so glorious. I ate lunch in the front garden and walked to CVS and went and got a cupcake and accidentally bought a skirt and life feels much finer.

Also happy first day of fall! Normally at this time of year my Boston-winter-PTSD has me panicking about the incipient six months of misery and abuse, but now I don't have to worry about that, right? I'm trying this awesome new thing where I get excited about tights and boots and sweaters and crunchy leaves and crisp mornings and apple everything and pumpkin everything. It's gonna be a thing.

Okay, so if I do this meme I stole from mazily where I post every day for a week, will you guys actually comment to me, so I don't feel like I'm yapping into the void? I'm always inwardly complaining about how quiet lj is these days, so maybe I should put my money where my mouth is.

day 01 | a song
day 02 | a picture
day 03 | a book
day 04 | a site
day 05 | a youtube clip
day 06 | a quote
day 07 | whatever tickles your fancy


The Be Good Tanyas - The Littlest Bird - I think this might technically be kids' music, but it sure is good cheerful dancing around music. Which I need because:

It's been raining for approximately one katrillion days straight, with no end in sight. Part of our ceiling fell in at 3am the night before last, from all the water, and let me tell you what a joyous awakening that was. So now the whole study smells like mold and despair. God what I wouldn't give for a sunny afternoon. Or a sunny ten minutes.

ALSO YOU SHOULD DO THIS MEME TOO. We can all overpost together.

Oh my god, I just upgraded straight from my three-year-old version of Tiger (OSX 10.4) to Snow Leopard (10.6), with the $29 CD meant to make the jump from Leopard (10.5), rather than the $169 version Apple would have had me buy. I feel like a ninja! With a brand new computer! I have so much more hard drive space now! I'll be able to have more than one program open at once, and download new music! Also Facebook now works in Firefox, so I won't have to open a different browser every time I want to use it! And that, diary, is why it was the best day ever.

This weekend was the Decatur Book Festival, so me:poetry readings::pig:mud. I saw Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, Jeffrey McDaniel and Thomas Lux. I'd never heard of Jericho Brown -- he was a double bill with Natasha Trethewey -- but he was mindblowingly great. I walked out of there liking him more than her. Three of his poems: Prayer of the Backhanded, Rick, and Track 5: Summertime -- as performed by Janis Joplin.

( The rest of this post is a vapid exercise in talking about clothes. )

I made veggie tacos for dinner lat night, and I think I'm going to make bread salad later this week, but I have nothing planned for tonight, which is worrisome, since ravenous hunger approacheth.

Oh also I landed an enormous (...very relatively speaking) web design freelance gig. Money *and* coding! My two favorites! I've actually been doing tons of networking + preparing presentations + dressing up & giving them + making business cards + figuring out how to write my own contracts etc etc, and it's pretty thrilling that it's paying off a little.


In conclusion, I leave you with this:

This song and video are both so goooood. (The video's kinda NSFW.)



If you want to download the song: Girls, Lust for Life

Stolen from pene: ( A meme whose questions are surprisingly un-annoying! )

It's gotten warm out while I was doing this! All the cicadas in the trees have woken up. A guy just came out onto the porch with a sweet bright turquoise fixed gear with a gold crank and rear wheel.

Things I Would Enjoy Recommendations For:

• LJ friends whose posts are fetching and enjoyable


• good podcasts: I already get Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, This American Life, WNYC's Radio Lab, Slate's Culture Gabfest and The Bugle. But there is nothing in the world better than a podcast for making me get chores done without noticing.

In exchange I give you:



Also, at McSweeney's, Titles From The Baby-Sitters Club: The College Years Series.

Last night for dinner I made beef stroganoff and these chocolate chip cookies, which are just as amazing as advertised, and my new go-to recipe. Om nom nom.

So this is Atlanta. We live on a street full of trees, in a neighborhood full of coffee shops and bars and stores selling fancy hand soaps and dresses. The apartment is full of light! -- which is the most important thing -- and built-in bookshelves and a bed and a desk that are both as tall as I could wish for (which is very tall).

And the trees, the trees! I've been thinking about how this city in a way combines something good from everywhere I've lived: the New Hampshire trees I've been missing since I was 11, Florida's warm nights, Boston's walkability and things to eat and do. (I haven't figured out England yet. Pubs and Indian food?)

There's a cardinal that lives on the street and darts around outside the windows all day, and even in August there are trees covered in flowers like it's April. Sometimes in the morning I drive A to school and it's all long green streets in tree tunnels, winding under canopies of branches.

Three weeks in, the apartment's almost entirely livable, after more hours than I care to remember at Ikea and Target and Costco. We had a housewarming party! Lots of people came! I'm suddenly friends with all these Atlantans on Facebook. And busy all the time: beer on campus, Braves games, teaching people to play Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock in a bar, brunches, lunches, a billion resumes and networking emails, more movies than I've seen in the past six months, restaurant week dinners, meals and birthday parties with the boyfriend's family, baking and more baking. I've been trying to write this post for at least two weeks (and here I am posting it on a Friday afternoon, when no one will be around to read it!), but it keeps getting shuffled under my mountainous Remember the Milk to do list. (I know, I know, I'm about two steps away from becoming one of those awful people who talks about how hard it is to be unemployed.)


This week's been long and crazy; three job interviews, two on Wednesday alone. One to be Don Draper (or okay, maybe Pete Campbell) and the other to be Anne Hathaway's character in The Devil Wears Prada: dauntingly bigwig marketing gig, or lowly editor for a cool fashion company. I've had second interviews for both now, and this is after only just starting applying anywhere, which says really encouraging things about the states of both my resume and the job market. I'm trying to be zen about it: maybe I won't get offered either, and if so something else will come along and in the meantime I can keep up my frenetic unemployment. And I've been freelancing, too; a little web design, and I very abruptly got a freelance social networking consulting gig Tuesday night and spent all evening getting paid to use my GoogleFu. More of that, please.


I know in a little while this will all calm down and the reality of life will settle in, but I'm so stupidly, deliriously happy all the time. I wake up every day feeling so lucky to have landed on my feet like this. At night we go for long walks just because, trees full of flowers, night air warm with summer.

I cannot tell you how hilarious and fascinating and odd it is to go to events for the partners -- read wives, girlfriends and fiancees, plus a few intrepid guys -- of first year business school students. So many proposal stories! So much bitching about when the proposal is going to happen! So much blush and perfect blowouts and J Crew catalog outfits! I'm exaggerating a little; some of them are very nice, and it's cool to meet people. But I feel like I've stumbled into some crazy reality show I'd never watch. It's amazing. Have these people been existing in the world all along?

ALSO HEY CHECK THIS OUT:



YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, I JAILBROKE AN IPHONE TO RUN ON T-MOBILE. I've wanted an iPhone, as DJ Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach for like three years, so this is in the top ten most exciting things ever. At long last, all my burning adolescent Star Trek nerd yearnings for a PADD are realized. Also man, if jailbreaking doesn't make you feel badass.


And oh yeah, I moved to Atlanta: it is surprisingly wonderful. I have a long post to make about it, and another about Central America, and one of these days you'll actually get to see them, when I'm not busy sending resumes or unpacking or downloading episodes of Mad Men (holy crap this show is good) or going to family dinners and business school events and figuring out this life.

I´m about a million words behind on things to say. Like:

Suchitoto, El Salvador at dusk. Little town up in the mountains, full of cobblestone streets and whitewashed houses with stencils by the front doors of birds and anti-domestic violence messages. From a park at the far end of town you can look way way down at Lake Suchitlan, invisible birds in the trees calling to each other with long whistles. On the corner there's a garden full of relics from the war: a bombshell, machetes, signs about peace. We ate pupusas at picnic tables in the street: biscuity-corn flatbreads stuffed with refried beans and cheese and loroco flower buds and deliciousness. Dinner was 80 cents, the beer was a dollar. Afterwards we spent half an hour talking in Spanglish to a store owner called Rodolfo about his business, unemployment rates, Chavez, the Honduran coup, Obama. Then got ice cream, walked home through the square to our $11 hotel.


I have a four country backlog to write about! Stay tuned for Nicaragua: So Goddamn Awesome, pictures of volcanoes and food, and other exciting tales. Tomorrow we bus up to Guatemala and Friday (Friday!) fly home (home?!) to Atlanta. I can't believe I've been traveling almost six weeks. I can't believe someday I won't be living out of a backpack. I can't believe it's all almost over.

Hallo, livejournal. I'm sitting on the bed in the middle of a little round cabin in Boquete, in the Panamanian highlands, watching it rain and rain and rain. Horses keep clopping by in the street. I want to stay here for about a million years.

It's about twenty degrees cooler here than in the rest of the country, which is such a relief after Panama City, which was a kind of hot and humid even Florida can't touch. (In less than a week, Central America has done the impossible and made me appreciate a cloudy day.) Panama City reminded me a lot of bits of Florida crossed with bits of New York, though way way louder than even New York -- people really like their horns, all night long.

I'm pleased to report that the Panama Canal is cooler than I even expected, in the way that locks and feats of maritime engineering are when they're right in your face, moving giant cargo ships. Not to mention the country around it.

And Boquete is breathtaking; it's tiny and walkable, surrounded by crazy hills that get wreathed in clouds, and the churchbells sound exactly like something from The Sound of Music. We're staying in the world's most charming cabin run by Germans who make your breakfast to order and serve it in -- where else? -- the breakfast dome. Which is all extra-awesome after the kinds of divey hotels we've been mostly staying in. (The one in Panama City where they had to come to your room with a remote to turn the air conditioning off and on; the one in Aguadulce, right next to the highway, with no blankets on the beds, only sheets.)

AARP apparently named this one of the world's best places to retire about ten years ago (... and I don't know what it says that my favorite place so far is retiree heaven), so there's a little expat community and the odd conglomeration of things that come with it (...French restaurants?), and it's odd to see a street full of Panamanians and then someone's suburban mom walking by. But thrillingly, we're going to stay here a week and take Spanish classes (because it turns out my Spanish suuuucks; everything keeps coming out French) and maybe do some volunteering and generally rock out before moving on to Costa Rica. (My childhood guilt-complex keeps flaring up; I feel like this is too fantastic, there's no way I can deserve it.) I keep going to bed early and waking up early and thrilling when I realize I'm still here.


Anyway, I've been throwing pictures up on Flickr (willy-nilly, Photoshop-free, since we only have a netbook):

Panama so far.

(Not pictured: sweaty chicken buses, dodgy hotels, the Interamericano highway where buses screech to a halt wherever anyone wants to get on, giant $2 plates of fried chicken and rice and beans, adventures in giant hair, adventures in remembering not to drink the water.)

I'm not doing as well at paper-journaling the trip as I'd grandiosely planned. I'm already days behind and boring myself when I try to catch up. Maybe telegraph-style is the way to go.

( P.S. Harry Potter and the Well-Stocked iPod. )

Guys, this is it. I'm at the airport, about to leave Boston, my home and native land, my sin, my soul, my only only only. Major sadfaces, and the fact that I spent this weekend acquiring: very little sleep, a nice sunburn, and 10,000 man-hours of stress-packing isn't helping. I miss annakovsky like a crazy person already.

(Mitigating the emosity: listening to a group of high schoolers going to Peru get lectured about the consequences if they get caught drinking. lulz. FYI: They will be sent home immediately.)

So tonight I'm going to be in Panama City! In all the stress of packing and sadness of leaving I kind of forgot to think about that. So we'll see how this all goes. Like Steve Zissou says, this is an adventure.

01. Hey, pro tip, maybe don't watch the Scrubs finale when you're moving away from somewhere forever. There's something in my eye. (For those playing the home game: I'm moving to Atlanta! With my boyfriend. But first we're going to Central America for 5 weeks or so! I leave Boston in less than two weeks! Kermit arms! The deets.)

02. I made these Chocolate Toffee Rum Cookies last night, as part of the Use Up All Baking Ingredients Initiative, and they might be some of the best I've ever made. And I've made a crapload of cookies. OM NOM NOM.

03. Sweet music for downloading! ( 11 fantastical songs. )

04. So I'm going to take the great leap back into blogging, at least while I'm traveling around (...this isn't blogging, this is LJing), except thinking up an awesome domain name is the HARDEST THING EVER. Ugh, any tips?

05. I just posted this and Google Chrome saw fit to delete the entire text of the entry in favor of "asfda", which I'd typed before I started writing any of it. WTF Chrome, each day I hate you a little more.

Guys, if you haven't seen this, your life is not complete. It's the whole cast of Star Trek: TNG on Family Guy. I don't even like Family Guy, and annakovsky doesn't like Star Trek, and we've still watched this about a million times.


( More lolarity from the same episode. )

This year I feel a hundred times more aware of the trees transitioning from flowers to leaves, that in-between stage. It's astonishing! Who authorized this! It goes so fast, though -- my favorite tree, the magnolia down the street, went all the way from buds to sidewalk schmutz in one week. I want to do nothing but take pictures all day, the leaves that obscene, unreal green.

While we're watching videos, let's watch Jacoby Ellsbury steal home plate a few hundred more times, okay? Okay. I'm going to the Sox game tomorrow with ke_rose_ne! Do you think he'd do that again if we asked nicely?

And cheapmetaphor is coming to visit in two! days! I'm so excited I may explode like that magnolia tree. We will do nothing but eat and drink delicious things in the sunshine and be wonderful.

So. Big things are afoot.

01. I'm moving to Atlanta in July. A-the-boyfriend is going to business school at Emory and as he goes, so goes my nation. The sucky part is how wrenchingly awful it's going to be to leave annakovsky, roommate extraordinaire, and my beloved Boston and ( all the things that come with both. )

On the other hand, I'm also, much to my surprise, really excited. After hating living in Florida for so many years, I never thought I'd be anywhere in the South again, let alone happy about it, but: We're going to be living in the Virginia Highlands, in a really cool, walkable neighborhood full of bars and sushi and cupcakes. There are trees everywhere, and it's going to be warm, almost all the time, and let me tell you what, my relief over not having to go through another New England winter is palpable and tear-inducing. And I really liked it when I was there in December; it definitely doesn't feel Floridian. Plus it's going to be so much cheaper to live there, everything from rent to beer to airfares. And I've been in Boston five years(!!) now; it's been feeling like time for something new, and everything's clicking together just right for this.

My biggest concern is about making friends and a life for myself so I have an identity beyond Girlfriend. But the plan is to devote myself to meeting a crapload of people the second I hit the ground, so hopefully that'll work out. ( In which I ramble on about this forever. )

PLUS, I've just discovered that Atlanta used to be named MARTHASVILLE. It's a sign!

I'm excited, guys. I've got that Jed Bartlett feeling on: What's next?

02. I'm going to Central America! For a month! In June! Partly to travel and partly to do some pro bono work for a company that's expanding in the region. Also to improve my crappy Spanish, and get something on my resume that'll be helpful in the future, since I really want to transition into international poverty and development work (read: microfinance) at some point.

Any travel recommendations or tips? I think we're going to be hitting Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama, but it's not set in stone yet. (I keep going back and forth on whether I should feel guilty for taking this time between jobs but oh man, I've been chained to a desk for five years straight through, and the idea of just being free for a couple of weeks = A+++ where the A is for Amazing.)


So between disassembling my life here (so much to pack! so much to sell!), getting things set up in Atlanta (so much to buy! prescriptions to transfer! library cards to get!), and planning this trip (vaccinations! malaria pills! packing lists!), there is SO MUCH CRAP to do in the next few months six weeks oh god. I'm going to make Remember the Milk explode.


Lame, I know, but I'd appreciate for the time being if you didn't mention this in comments outside this filter, since I'm trying to keep it from getting back to my parents until I'm ready. I can't possibly explain how awful it's going to be when they find out I'll be Living In Sin. Like, devastating, relationship-destroying awful. So, um, wish me luck with that.

But anyway anyway. Away we go.