It's a world of laughter, a world of tears...

I have grown up constantly being warned by my mother and grandmother that they are omnipresent--if I ever were to do something untoward, they would find out through their mysterious powers. And while I still lived within a 100 mile radius of the matriarchs of my family, I often did not want to chance it.

My mother likes to tell a story from her teenage years: Not exactly being the wild and crazy type, my mother and her friends misused some shopping carts as vehicles in the local grocery store parking lot, far from the watchful eyes of my grandmother, only to return home to my grandmother's speech about how embarassed she was to know that her child was making such a scene. This story served its purpose; I spent my formative years in fear that they knew everything that I did. Eight hundred miles away now, I feel relatively secure that their powers don't extend quite this far.

Over Labor Day weekend, I attended a wedding of a high school friend in suburban Detroit. I knew no one at the wedding-- being the sole high school friend of the groom to attend--and I made a brief accquaintance with only a few others. Over this past weekend I opened the door to my friend's apartment to see the bride's cousin sitting at my friend's dinner table, a friend of a friend of my friend, apparently.

Not exactly my mother's ominpresence, but it does make me wonder that maybe eight hundred miles is not quite enough to escape her powers. It's a good thing I behaved at that wedding.

Rooftops

A year and a day

Maybe I do have an addiction. My withdrawal symptoms ebb and flow, but three hundred and sixty-six days since my last published blog post, I find myself starting fresh--a new template, a new title, and a new focus. Well, hopefully that new focus will come in time.

I've been living in Washington, D.C. for almost a year now, trying to sort out a new job, a new group of friends, a new-ish city, and the creeping feeling that adulthood may have unexpectedly arrived at my doorstep. And if writing in this space on occasion does not help with the sorting, at least it will give me the opportunity to share words not followed directly by a formal citation and to gather thoughts that are not billed in six minute increments.