I'm looking at the left hand column of this blog and seeing how in 2005 I wrote a whopping 320+ posts that year. The blog was a nice way for me to indulge literary narcissism, trying to draw anyone on the net into the what I wanted them to think I was thinking about at 11:35 AM on October 21, 2005. Maybe someone read between the lines and guess at what I was thinking about. Maybe. Now I'm looking back at why I started this blog, it was fad-ish perhaps? All my friends were doing it? I hadn't discovered Facebook yet? I was trying to track my own thoughts?
Since I was maybe 11 I was predisposed to writing in diaries but I would divulge everything in them. I had 11 or so rainbow-colored (by my own hand) composition books filled with doodles and pre-adolescent narratives. Eventually to make room for high school yearbooks, I destroyed them ... maybe or they're somewhere in my closet. Now I look at where I am to where I was five months ago when I was living the D.C. dream: luxury loft downtown, a luxury German sports coupe in an underground garage below, six-figure earnings, and a career with seeming limitless potential. I was on the verge. Of what? I was also a weekend warrior, I spent an uncalculated amount on motel rooms, plane tickets, and gas during the winter season traveling to New England to ice climb. I even booked a trip to the north to climb frozen waterfalls the night after a man I was dating flew from the other side of the country to see me. Now, the luxury loft is rented to a very nice fellow bureaucrat, the bimmer is parked in a neighborhood where it's sale price is easily more than half the value of the homes around it, my Italian wool suits are crammed into a closet and the only things neatly organized in labeled boxes and bags are my climbing gear and DVD's. Some of my clothes are in heaps in the unfurnished room I occupied from when I was 13 to 24.
As the last month rolled in my overseas assignment, I was booking trips. A week in Ouray, Colorado, a weekend in Looking Glass, NC at the end of March, two weeks in the Alaska range, five days in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. Possibly a weekend in the Cascades. When I actually came home, I planned another week in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I stayed in Washington state for two weeks. I told people I was living out of the trunk of my car. Any given moment I had ropes, a harness, and climbing shoes in my trunk with shower stuff in my Adidas duffel and a garment bag hanging from the back seat with a few dry-cleanables. I was never ever really unpacked. My various pieces of luggage were 'rolling,' the duffel went from ice trips to work trips to a mountaineering trip. My little black executive carry-on was stuffed with silk blouses, gold sandals, icebreaker t-shirts. Meanwhile my large expandable over-sized orange four-wheel roller sat stoically pushed against the closet and the ironing board, empty, waiting to be filled for another four month tour.
