Notes from September

Although my posts around here appear consistent thanks to my activity elsewhere which ends up here, it is true that I've landed in a bit of a slump of writer's block. September has come and gone, and I'd like to recount some of the things that have been going on in the meantime.

September is a time of changes, and this year is no different. This year seemed to have a lack of a proper summer, with excessive heat, beach visits, and lots of social moments in the newly-freed time everyone is supposed to have at some point during the season. Then September came and threw the beginnings of fall at us, and without warning, the cozy routine of the past year seemed to disintegrate almost immediately. Most of my closest friends in Lisbon are leaving the city in pursuit of work or study, and there seem to be new opportunities around every corner.

The most visible change around here is that I stopped writing as much, and I'm still unsure of when I'll pick up the steam again despite my goals to write twice a week. I happened upon a bit of writer's block while becoming more creative in other areas, which has led to me designing more graphics, working on a podcast with Casey, making more videos, and other fun and creative projects that end up taking the wind out of my writing. I'm still around and still doing things, what's changed is that I'm more dynamic about it.

Singer, video maker, and all-around fabulous human being Meghan Tonjes created an idea and a hashtag #30daytodo starting in September as a way to focus on taking your life and shaking it up one thing at a time. With an average of 30 days each month, one small thing taken off a list becomes more manageable than the lofty resolutions we tend to set for ourselves and forget about as quickly as we set them. I didn't create a list of 30 things to do in September, but did take inspiration from the idea to do some cleaning house and figure out what my priorities are for how I want to live my life now and not just in the ambiguous future. Sort of like Pinterest, but for life habits and not creating a dream wedding. And in the same spirit, I have an actual cork board with some of those things pinned to it, because I'm nothing if not literal:

All of these changes combined to make me reevaluate my current living situation as well. The apartment I live in is fine, in the sense that on paper all of the conditions are great. I have a lot of space, very few roommates, an abundance of privacy. As with anything, cracks have appeared over the course of these months, and I now find the flights of stairs a tedious impediment to my desire to leave the house much of the time, the noise from the street is so loud and constant as to interrupt my creative endeavors, the ceilings too high to avoid echo, and so on. The little things that I chose to overlook because of the on paper conditions are now liabilities that were bound to pop up. Yet instead of moving house to another place in Lisbon and plodding along, September brought with it much bigger changes, and I'll be moving to Barcelona at the end of this month instead, taking a leap and seeing what comes of things.

It's time. It was time. I'll write a proper post about moving soon (I don't want to jinx the innumerable layers of bureaucracy I have to get through), but in the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for an October filled with more things I make, from videos to graphics, and beyond.

Getting Older, Projects, and Housekeeping

I know my insistence on using the Oxford comma must surely stick in the craw of some of the English majors I have the acquaintance of, depending on which side of the fence y'all (see what I did there?) sit on, but I don't care. I'm going to keep using it until you pry the literacy from my cold, dead brain.

We've come again to the time of the year where the number representing my years in existence clinks up irreversibly. When I was an undergraduate teenager, I felt that it would never happen, I would never reach a point in time where I was old enough to be considered an average functional adult in the midst of my cohort. Here we are, all these years later, and as the cliche goes, I'm perplexed that nothing really seems dramatically different in my mind. Physically, I can feel the difference, sure, but upstairs not so much. Being an adult isn't so much about feeling like an adult (spoiler alert: no one does), but the largely hidden responsibilities that come along with it. And no one tells you this until you're in the middle of figuring it out for yourself, willing the dishes to just clean themselves.

Despite being away from Lisbon (again!), progress is steady on what I am planning to unveil for my yearlong project for this site and social media. It will not be a grand departure from the past or a big break in style or offering from what I have largely been doing and that has been enjoyed by friends, family, and the occasional newcomer, but more of an evolution and a challenge to make my personal space something more fruitful. Unlike when this site officially became this site and not just a travelogue Blogger account, a redesign is not in store, as I prefer to make fine adjustments and tweaks as I both learn better how to code what I want and the necessities that the web demands change. I don't like big changes when they are unnecessary but get bored of things if they are stagnant; I have been increasingly described by colleagues as "coherent", and perhaps it's fitting. More on all of that later, though.

In the meantime, I'm off to enjoy the pleasant spring of Barcelona, pondering political questions of no import to my studies and pretending to be more of an Iberian cognoscente than I really am. The schedule I lined out toward the beginning of the year has been essentially obliterated, but I'm here as ever.