the long way home

In Away We Go, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play an expectant couple who travels around the country looking for a place to raise their new family. It’s one of Zach’s favorite movies and I’ve been fond of it both of the two times we watched it together (Alexi Murdoch soundtrack and Dave Eggers screenplay notwithstanding). It hovers around themes I am myself unceasingly obsessed with: home, what it is to have it, and how to know that you’ve found it; also worth noting is the revisiting of your past to help inform the present. Burt and Verona go to Phoenix, Tuscon, Madison, Miami, and Montreal, each time with family or friends on the receiving end, and they eventually (as I spoil the ending) choose to return to Verona’s childhood home somewhere in the southern United States along the Mississippi, or just some place in the south, where the people who made it home are no longer there but the spirit is, and they sit on the porch talking about their child and about themselves and about themselves as parents. Then the movie ends.

We left New York almost three months ago, and up until now we’ve been sleeping in beds (or sleeping bags, or airplane chairs, or tents, or folded-down car seats), in all senses temporary ones, that come with no sense of home or permanence, and each morning I’d wake up with that fleeting, confusing moment of not remembering where I was. I began to see the summer as our own Away We Go tour of North America (or, more accurately, the west coast), and every place we visited, every person (or couple, or family, or group of people) we’d greet good morning, inevitably asked of us the question: Could this be permanent? Could this be home?

Granted, we weren’t in the market for a new home, because this summer would ultimately terminate in the southern hemisphere, where we’d carve a home out of New Zealand, if just for a few months. But no stop along the way was to be a new discovery—we were essentially revisiting places we’d been before, spending time with people we’d already known well, and, not-altogether-rarely, that question would come up: “Are you moving here?” “Well, no, we’re going to New Zealand.” “Yeah, but after that?” “We’re planning on attending graduate school.” “Yes, but after that.” “Maybe.” Maybe. 

This exchange was not necessarily between us and those people we’d seen and love, but, more pressingly, it occurred internally between me and myself. I am drawn to the idea of adventure, of travel, of exploration, but dearer and more compelling to me is the desire to grow roots, and to grow them deeply. This foundational tendency forms the urgency of why I had to leave when I did—a few more years in New York and maybe I wouldn’t want to.

But, whether I admitted it or not, this summer was always going to be a sort of homecoming. We’d be seeing my family. His family. Our best friends. Our college town. All the elements that, if pulled together in a single city, would form too strong a gravitational pull to ever consider going anywhere else. Luckily (luckily?) these epicenters were distributed throughout the west coast, and though each possessed magnets of varying strength (though all erring on the side of very, very strong), I knew we had an escape route in the form of a one-way ticket, a visa, and a plan. Bulletproof, on one hand. Completely flimsy on the other. Citing the latter, my connection to all of our stops would ultimately intensify, some emanating from where they left off, others branching out further afield. But, in every case, stronger and more difficult to leave behind. I was a mess of tears driven by exhaustion and sadness (maybe a bit of a wedding alcohol) when I said goodbye to my sister on July 4th, waving from the passenger seat of Zach’s car as we drove from Seattle to Portland. That was our first departure of the season, and it didn’t get any easier.

Seattle, Portland, San Luis Obispo, Mission Viejo, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Santa Cruz. We gifted Zach’s mostly-dormant-for-the-last-three-years mid-nineties Honda Accord with a few thousand miles more than she was ready for, and that view from the passenger seat—and role of copilot—is one I’ve grown to care for, especially as it came attached to the contradictory feelings of anticipation in arriving at our next stop coupled with the knots in our throats at leaving the last one. 

We’ve since traded that car for a Subaru Legacy, the right side of the streets for the left, and while the motions may be similar, the roads we’re on are different roads entirely. Here, we move between somewhere beautiful onward to somewhere beautiful, places that don’t mean much to me outside of the memories we make together and the memories they remind me of, with nothing pulling us to remain there, no guilt at leaving and no overwhelming excitement at arriving. We’re left with one another and with ourselves, and the effect is the confusing and tumultuous beginning of a year where our responsibilities lie not in jobs or commitments to other people, but in growth, both personally and together. It's been quiet. Especially compared with the seemingly neverending supply of company, loud and laughing mealtimes, and plans for jam-packed days. It's been so quiet the silence is still ringing, and with the hemispherical change I almost see the cold weather as a metaphorical one (it's hard not to), but I'm contorting my way back into fitting within this new old way of days. 

the summer of one-way flights

The view from the passenger seat is one of my favorite views. We've been everywhere lately, Portland and back to Seattle and then back to Portland for a night before a pit stop in Eugene en route to a week in Yosemite, then Orange County via San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles to Orange County and back again. San Diego is next, another weekend in Los Angeles, then up north to Santa Cruz. I've forgotten how these summer days melt together. Since the season started I've felt like the entire world cracked wide open.

on a jet plane

Toward the end of our time in New York, amidst the quickened, canon-fire pace of which things seemed to move, there was nary a time for contemplation, meditation, nor reflection. Then, as though momentum stopped obeying the laws of physics, it all came to a halt while I sat in an assigned window seat and watched the Rocky Mountains pass under me. I desperately tried to write down the billowing number of thoughts that entered my mind as there, for the first time, I had no distractions to command my attention elsewhere. As I went from one device to another upon battery death, my at one point partially coherent stream of thoughts began to get jumbled and ultimately failed to reach a conclusion. After touching down, obtaining my two checked bags and one cardboard moving box (a previously unknown form of checked “bag”), greeting my father, and embarking on the car ride home, my considerations of the last three years, of New York, of what that time meant to Marielle and me, slowly shifted to the back of my mind, pushed out by the breaking waves and rugged coast of Highway 1. 

It wasn’t until I had a moment alone again to open back up my computer, recharge my phone, and compare sporadic notes that I came to realize the written output of my brilliant thinking resulted in little coherence and less legibility. In efforts to reconstruct the mile-high moment’s fervor, I tried and failed multiple times to rewrite my thoughts, ultimately amounting to nothing more than frustration. But as I had struggled to formulate any written substance, I was forced to grapple at least mentally with what I thought to be salient marques of the past three years. Once in LA and visiting friends, some questions were asked that I had come to earnestly ask myself since. And so it came in attempts to answer these questions both personally and publicly that some coherence grew out of the spoken word rather than the written. Given the temporality of all things uttered, it seemed only right to return once more to these black keys illuminated in white light and make something more permanent. 

So now I sit, writing in an attempt to hint at what all of New York meant over the last three years and instead only talking about my previous failures to do so. Perhaps it is because much of New York was simply that: a series of necessary failures. Attempts were made often with results fluctuating between different degrees of failure while at times reaching notions of success—all to be considered, learned from, and then begun again. Failure however—though forming an often undesired hardness to small moments of ease as I simply waited for it to all go wrong—meant for us that we were not settling for the simple things, for the given and granted things, but pushing ourselves into situations and scenarios that took great effort. Often this resulted in some form of failure, yes, but never were we resigned to it. New York became a place of great struggle, but with it great joy. It was three years of high emotional swings where, regardless of which side, its vibrancy stayed consistently rich. Each moment of heartache, sadness, and failure was experienced fully and would be paired by equally joyous, fulfilling, and (even if minor) triumphant ones.

New York was the first city I lived in, the first city I came to know well, and ultimately developed some affinity for. It was the place in which Marielle and I came to know one other most intimately and concerns of our own failure faded away. It was where, after noticing recently developed character faults, I could return to a better version of myself not by fleeing from their varied manifestations but by facing them—all the while with her next to me. It was where I met some truly dear people and became closer to friends I hardly knew before—all the while thinking I had left my closest friends behind. It was a place where family relationships were rekindled with those previously distant—all the while thinking I had left my closest family behind. It was home. At least for a while, while we waited for what came next or perhaps what is right now. 

goodbye, quickly

As these things typically go, I’d dreaded our last week in New York inevitably being one of immeasurable sadness. Amid big changes I tend to panic slightly at the bigness of it all, and at the momentary paralysis of feeling stripped of control, of confidence in my own choices, and of the logic (“logic”) that led to them in the first place. But there was hardly any time to dwell—between securing a tenant to take over our apartment, wrapping things up at work, saying goodbye to friends, to coworkers, to our favorite walks, and navigating the madness in our decision to leave packing to the last day, I blinked and when I woke up it was the early hours of Sunday morning, and I was in a van headed toward Kennedy Airport.

I wrote this when I was up in the air, 36,000 feet higher, Los Angeles–bound, my first spare moment in a long, long time. I’d been wondering at the casualness with which I handled all the last-glance instances. I tried, of course, to over-sentimentalize everything in the familiar way I always tend to (this is my last subway ride! my last walk along Waverly! last Duane Reade errand!). But the truth is I began those farewells the moment I knew we had that New Zealand visa in hand, operating in finalities and an extra sentimental care in my interactions, intentional or not. And the larger truth is I was ready for this leaving almost since the day I arrived. New York was never going to be forever. And maybe that knowing was enough to keep me alert and suspect to the incredible highs and lows (and consequently a high concentration of exclaiming/complaining) that came with my life in New York.

It’s hard to leave something you love, but perhaps harder to leave something you loved and hated in near-automatic intervals, and in the end I’m not sure which prevailed. It’s probably this uncertainty that kills me quickest—wondering what little things I could have done so it tips in one direction over the other—and the question is a big one that lingers.

In any case, what I did leave behind was not quite the Sunday morning strolls or the Friday night smoke and lights or the summertime ice cream cones. It was, certainly, the significant and instrumental people, friends both new and old, who colored my days there. Their good cheer and we’re-all-in-this-together attitudes were why I surrounded myself with them in the first place, and what I’ll miss most.

the everything man in walter benjamin

To describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar; his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist; he was greatly attracted not by religion but by the theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible; he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotations; he was the first German to translate Proust (together with Franz Hessel) and St.-John Perse, and before that he had translated Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, but he was no translator; he reviewed books and wrote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic; he wrote a book about the German baroque and left behind a huge unfinished study of the French nineteenth century, but he was no historian, literary or otherwise; I shall try to show that he thought poetically, but he was neither poet nor philosopher.

—Hannah Arendt, my number one gal,
from the introduction to Illuminations, originally from the article "Reflections," The New Yorker, October 1968.

breaking the news / coming to terms

It’s funny to hear yourself say it out loud: We’re leaving New York. Probably New Zealand. No, not for a new job. We’ll travel for a while, get our bearings, apply to graduate school. Not yet, but later in the fall of 2016. We'll fly out of San Francisco. August 20th. The past week has been a whirlwind of telling bosses, friends, and family of our plans to leave New York and move abroad, and the anxiety it gave me was more unexpected than I was ready for. Having it all out in the open was a split second of catharsis until that catharsis gave way to anxiety and a bit of sheer terror, and there were moments I’d catch Zach’s eye and ask him if he’s afraid, or if we’re doing the right thing, or if we’ve made a big mistake. He’s a pillar of resolute strength in the face of all my wavering back and forth, and because of him for better or worse I’m increasingly assured things will turn out okay. I don’t know if this is the cementing of courage or stupidity, and I never mind the two blending together, but I've concerned myself with chasing calmness, and that's still yet to materialize.

why new zealand?

My first Real International Trip With Friends was in the summer of 2009. A group of us six took advantage of the cheap Qantas fares from California to Auckland after our second year of architecture school, and rented a campervan that we would drive throughout the North and South Island in a span of two (three for some) weeks. I didn't know what to expect and we had nothing planned outside of a roughly drawn route and a booked van-for-three-people that we'd hope to stuff six into. And in the end and on paper maybe we didn't "do" much. We hiked, wandered, photographed, drank Tui beers, ate grilled cheeses, and told stories around the makeshift back-seat dining table. Much quieter and more laid back than any trips that would come after, and exactly what New Zealand deserved. It was such a special place. The general gladness I had there was a state of contentment that I would long for in the years that followed, and it's commonly happened lately that I'd be engaged in some mundane activity (writing a work email, vacuuming, commuting, or other) and suddenly be gripped by a flash of an inkling of a memory from those two weeks. 

(the photos above are from the collective batch of photos we all took that trip, likely taken by Karen because she's awesome)

I'd wondered about going back, but prior to a few months ago those thoughts were limited to just wonderings. I don't know quite when it happened—as I've mentioned, we planned on spending the next year in Japan teaching English—but we've been mulling over our options, confronting straight-on what kinds of changes we want to make and why we want to make them, and though we came up with several possibilities that varied across the realistic-versus-desirable line graph, New Zealand ended up making the most sense. In compiling a list of reasons why, we find ourselves victim to constant editing and rethinking, but for now, these are the driving factors:

1. The visa process is simple. A lot of countries have immigration agreements for what's called a Working Holiday Visa, essentially a visa that allows citizens of a particular country to live and work in another country for some set amount of time. The breadth and extent of these agreements vary from country to country: New Zealand, for example, has this agreement with 42 countries. The United States, on the other hand, has it with three. We were lucky that New Zealand is one of those three, and we met all of the visa requirements (US citizen; 18 to 30 years old; minimum funds in the bank; stay up to one year). It was ridiculously easy to actually get; I applied for it through the New Zealand Immigration website and received approval and paperwork within three days. If you're interested we can certainly talk more about it (the US's other agreements are with Australia and Canada, and Ireland if you're just out of college).
2. Health + fresh air + open space. I had this thought during our lightning-fast 10-hour layover in Reykjavik last summer that it's absolutely true not all fresh air is created equally. I've been blessed enough throughout my life to live in somewhat-clean-air environments, but New York City is stifling, not least for its quality of air. We're used to staying in shape through long walks and hikes and swims and maybe weight training at the gym, but it's been difficult to do that here, given the cost of gym memberships, long office hours, and Manhattan life in general. This year could be seen then as a kind of detox.
3. The people are friendly. This may be a gross generalization left over from our time there, but the Kiwis we met made a huge impression on us in their kindness and low-key dispositions. Zach and I are both fairly quiet, deep down fairly small-town people, and there was something kindred in the communities we encountered. 
4. The Christchurch rebuilding effort. We're not entirely positive where we'll end up settling, but Christchurch was a special city to Zach (I'd already gone home when that leg of the campervan trip came around), and the 2011 earthquake was a blow. The rebuild effort has been going on ever since, creating with it a vibrant and altruistic city. It's certainly something we'd like to be a part of, and that interest extends to perhaps dedicating our time in New Zealand to those efforts.
5. Lord of the Rings. This is self explanatory

There are, of course, several other more vague and ambiguous reasons for making the leap. They are the kind we'll unpack over extra long cups of tea in the coming days when we say goodbye to New York and our friends here, as well as later this summer when we reunite with loved ones on the west coast.

onward to the next great adventure

I moved to New York under an already biased pretense, dooming it from the start and allowing the dissatisfaction to continue creeping in as the months rolled on. Zach shared in the frustration too, which certainly fluctuated and at times was nearly invisible during our happiest days here, but in the end it was always a question of when, not if, we’d leave. Eventually that question mark preoccupied its attention to a matter altogether more cumbersome—the circumstances of our leaving. Picking a date on the calendar seemed trivial compared to the bigger unknowns. Where would we go? What would we do? Do we line up jobs now? Just leave and see what happens? Los Angeles? Seattle? Farther away? Graduate school was always on the horizon, languages are better learned in immersion and I’ve always meant to learn at least fifty-seven more, and my architecture degree was always more a suggestion than a prescription. Could we take what we’ve learned in our two years and eight months of living in New York and move forward, forging a new endeavor that is productive, fulfilling, and worthwhile? I’m not sure. But I don’t think anyone can ever quite be completely sure.

In fairness, it took three different stints of declaring we’d be “leaving in six more months” (which, admittedly, thereby prevented us from signing long-term leases or committing to long-term roommates), but it wasn’t until last November that we took the proper steps to ensure it would really happen later in the next year, later in June, later in the summer of 2015. At the time, we thought we’d be heading to mainland Japan. Teaching English, to be vocationally specific. But as plans sometimes go, curveballs are thrown and new plans need to be considered (and maybe old ones reconsidered), so in January we set to the task of asking ourselves what exactly it was we wanted out of this next move. Graduate school? We hadn’t applied, and I was nowhere close to knowing what I want to study. Maybe a new city and new jobs, but that didn’t exactly feel right either (besides, I had the best job I could probably ever ask for in Princeton Architectural Press). We didn’t want to travel in the conventional sense because the idea of hopping around from place to place with a backpack never appealed, and I’m the type to look for roots everywhere even if I don’t intend to put them down. What did we want?

Unpressured time. Some space to breathe, a chance to take a step back and evaluate where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and, most importantly, the introspection to really understand the whats and whys of the things we want to accomplish with our lives. We’ve experienced a lot in our years here—indeed I’ve held, and left, my first real job, and eventually found myself in a position that would have made college-me incredibly proud, but more valuably, a position that made me happy; for Zach that meant the realities of practicing architecture; and for us both it was the exposure to the East Coast Architecture School circuit and its dealings, presentings, and opportunities. All that experience has given us the stuff of life—material, fodder, joys and confusions and despairs—that we desperately want to make sense of before we get lost in the whirlwind. It has been difficult, a few instances much more than others, and I wonder sometimes if this departure is a sort of giving up, if maybe our collective skin just wasn’t thick enough. But in truth I don’t entirely buy that either. In truth, we didn’t feel right doing things without intention, pursuing careers and raises and promotions without really believing that we ourselves were in the positions to contribute to making the world a better place. Were we doing that, in our New York architecture firms and New York architecture book publishing houses? Maybe. But it wasn’t clear. What we looked for was meaning, and, in a humanistic sense, we looked for a sign that what we were doing in our jobs stood some chance of increasing another person’s happiness or reducing their suffering.

Of course, we don’t have the formula to find that straightaway. I had my hunches, hunches that I’d developed based on what was most important to me in architecture school, and I followed my nose to the places I sought employment. But I wonder now if it was right to seek that firstly and fore mostly in a job, which is what this entire stint in New York has represented—that is, being an employed, fully functioning, tax-paying adult. The answer is increasingly pointing to no, and at the same time it has become increasingly clear that the answer to this next step is to take a gap year. I’d taken to seeking advice from my greatest, smartest, most insightful friends (that is, consulting A Severe Mercy, The Little Prince, David Foster Wallace, C. S. Lewis, Milan Kundera, the Book of Life, Anthony Yue, Kierkegaard, Winnie the Pooh, Thich Nhat Hanh, and T. S. Eliot, all of whom were on varying levels of helpfulness) to get any closer to any kind of knowing.

That said, Zach and I are moving to New Zealand for about a year. Come this August 20th, we’re flying to Auckland, buying a car, and then driving around the country to find the place/s that makes sense (logistically, spiritually, happily) to call home. In that time, we’ll be applying to graduate schools here in the States (and perhaps north of the border and across the pond), working on personal projects, reading a lot, and, financially speaking, hoping to break as close to even as possible. The date draws very close, and we’ll be leaving New York well before that, so our heads are lately spinning with to-do lists, resignations, and telling loved ones of our plans over cups of coffee and telephone lines and, as you have just read, blog posts such as this one right here.

More soon.

farewell my lovely

In preparation for upcoming Los Angeles suntanning come summer time, I have taken up the last remaining of three Raymond Chandler novels sitting on our New York apartment bookshelf--now testing the laws of physicals as the gyp board behind it seems ever closer to claiming an apparently favored horizontal position. The two other novels were read back-to-back about a year ago and, either overwhelmed with the dark and dry humorous style of Mr. Chandler or simply coming to the conclusion that The Long Goodbye just couldn't be topped, I balked at the thought of reading the last remaining child of the triplets recently taken home all around the same time. Now, a year later and the aforementioned westward trip abound, I thought it would be perfect timing to revisit the noir crime novels set in LA staring the one and only, Philip Marlowe. Not to mention I just wanted a good, entertaining read. To my surprise, after setting low expectations, I have found myself again and again delighted by the witty banter, bleak and desperate descriptions often taking up half a page, and the somehow technicolored narration of a black and white world constantly becoming more grey. Sitting on the subway this evening on my way home I ran across a short passage that seemed to sum up (or force a bubbling up of) all of my emotions regarding Chandler's prose style and making clear why I loved delving into the world of 1930s crime, mischief, and romance each day along side my favorite P.I. So, without further ado, I'd like to share a bit of complete pleasure and joy and poetry amidst what others my only call pulp:

“I got on my feet and went over to the bowl and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

the hundred-day mark

This spring has been extra special because I knew it would be the last time I'd experience a New York spring, at least in the slow, everyday, near-torturous process of waiting for the first blooms to appear on the tree branches I walk beneath during my commute to work, and in the feeling of entitlement come the magic weeks of pinks and whites that follow. March and April have always been a somewhat transitional time, but before New York I'd only experienced that transition in human-imposed scheduling (mostly school quarters ending and beginning, spring breaks, my birthday)—this is the first place I've lived in that governs itself under the convention of four real seasons, and in this spring the weather turns, and it's hard not to feel glad when days get longer and warmer, winter skin thawing and defrosting under the sun as people walk the streets a little lighter and a little happier. A little bit of we-made-it, a little bit of we-deserve-it.

It's my last spring in New York. And when endings start to draw closer and become more real, an air of finality hijacks everything I do. Urgency in making sure I don't forget to do the things I love most. The one-last everythings. Forcing myself to love those things harder than I perhaps ever really did. Putting into words what those certain things feel like so I can come back to them later, later when all they have is my memory to stand on. When New York will represent, in the course of my life, an awkward but wonderful springtime when I first learned to walk, shaky legs and all, and not very well at that. It's easiest to do this in the spring, in the growing season, because today everything is new and everything is rebuilding and I race fast and far from the winter miseries that underlie how I really feel about the city. Maybe that's why this remembering is most important. 

It's our last spring in New York. In one hundred days we are going to board an airplane bound for New Zealand, and we're not sure when we'll return, nor where we'll return to. The whys and hows of this I'll probably unpack in the coming weeks, but for now I'm thinking about the season and the sun-day coming alive outside my window, the grass I will sit on and the great friend I'll have coffee with, and the city that has given me, at the very least, the beginnings of different seasonal shift.