Snow, Stone, and Sky

How long do you have to live in a place before it feels like home? LA is said to take a few years, so despite how at ease I feel in my early-established haunts, perhaps there are deeper roots to sink before it's home.

Regardless of how long LA might take, though, I have another data point to compare it to. Lake Tahoe became home in three short months.

I learned this at the end of the long Friday drive I began after dropping Chelsea off with her friend. US-395 was familiar territory after two southern jaunts last fall, but neither trip saw the Sierra Nevadas quite so majestic with snow. On the prior treks, the range had seemed far off, especially so every time I tried to take a picture. Furthermore, the previous drives had grown dark after about half the drive, depriving me of the most dramatic scenery along the way. No surprise, then, that as I drove up Friday afternoon, I pulled off the road time and time again to snap a quick picture (or 80, as my Instagram followers probably bemoaned) and take a minute or two for myself, breathing the crisp air and following the blanketed ridges off into the distance.

Perhaps it was that ride that distracted me from even asking the question of whether Tahoe would be a homecoming. I had been excited before the trip, having planned a return as soon as possible after my move, but it hadn't been the weightiest decision. Do you want to go to a cool place? Yes I do. Also, I felt an element of reassurance. Through the years, Erik and I have bonded over our distance from the place that formed our friend group, but I failed to make it out to Tahoe for years until that long stay last fall. Once I got to LA, I felt it important to get to Tahoe quickly to assure him and myself that the bond was cemented. After all, even among a pantheon of friends that humble me regularly, Erik's generosity and support last year stand out, especially because he would shrug that off and say "Meh, I liked having you here."

For that reason, I didn't think about the homecoming aspect until I crested a hill and saw the lake. As soon as possible, I pulled to the side of the road, leaned against my car, and stared at sunset over the water, letting tears fall. At that first sight, my heart leapt. I felt embraced by the setting and, in that embrace, I realized how much healing had happened in those three months. Every moment I find myself smiling at my life now, every time I poke my head into the former dark places within and find them reshaped in radiance, I can trace it to that place and the progress I made there.




Is it as simple as recognizing one's fortune? Realizing the sheer arrogance of claiming frustration with one's life when one can say one's friend would have them as a houseguest in Lake Tahoe? Um, yeah, probably. I have had both internal and external voices telling me recently that my life is nothing to sneeze at and I think I finally get that. Apologies to the voices that have been saying it for years.

I also feel, though, that Tahoe represents the marriage of two of the most important things that make a home for me (and really most people, of course), friends that make you grow and a place that charges you up. Tahoe’s ample beauty alone isn’t enough to bring me back as much as I can afford (though it’s pretty close), but tell me I can go to one of the most beautiful places I have ever been and have deep friendships there when I arrive? Well, damn, let me set up half a dozen low-fare alerts now (juuuust kidding, they’re already set up).

The weekend was short, but rich. After my emotional moment with the lakeside, I made my way north to Incline Village, the sign for which gave me another jolt of feeling. I parked outside the complex, trundled my spinner along the familiar walkway, and climbed the stairs to the apartment I so often came home to (from what, walks to the coffee shop?) for three months. To my delight, the dogs missed my footsteps on the stairs, but began barking when I swung the door open. I’ll admit, I had hoped there would be some recognition, especially after Erik said Lucy sniffed around my room for a while after I drove back east. Though welcoming leaps are normal for Lucy, she seemed particularly excited, while Bailey, ever the chill one, wagged enthusiastically and, as Kelly pointed out, smiled.

I hugged Erik and Kelly and shared with them how hard my arrival had hit me. Meanwhile, my eyes raced around the apartment, taking in the restorative surroundings with a new mindset. In what became a tone for the weekend, I got to appreciate the beauty of the apartment, the town, my friends, and the wider setting without concurrently feeling the deep channels of anxiety and doubt about my future.

The night took us to Alibi, where we got food truck pizza (out of an actual brick oven on the back of the truck), played some Exploding Kittens, and ultimately dove into a deep but friendly discussion of politics helped along by a particularly fine IPA. When we got home, Erik and I tried and struggled to watch some Deadwood, but the drive and the drinks caught up and I found my old bed.

Saturday, we took the dogs and their FAVORITE drone to the lake, where we spent the day enjoying gorgeous weather and stunning scenery. As with the drive, snow in the mountains altered and heightened the familiar views, as pictures can convey better than I can.
















After tossing around some Incline Village options for dinner, we called an audible and planned a night out in Reno. After some showering and changing, we piled into two cars and caravanned over Mount Rose. Apparently, during the ride, Lucy gazed out the back window of Erik’s car, keeping tabs on me in case I decided to leave again.

The night began with incredible sushi, ended with an Uber through a McDonald’s drive-thru, and made stops at the Simpsons Arcade Game, an asshole firefighter, and an ex-parrot friend along the way. Hearkening back to the Reno nights of last fall, we definitely got after it, necessitating the next morning’s tradition of a greasy breakfast and fetching of a car.

If it feels like I’m at the end of the weekend sooner than expected, then I’ve captured the feeling I had at around 2pm Sunday when it dawned on me that the eight hours back weren’t going to drive themselves. We said our goodbyes and, as we had all weekend, discussed me flying in the future to give us more time to hang out.

As if to reinforce that decision, the drive back proved a slog even mountain majesties couldn’t quite overcome, particularly once I got back into town and played the parking game.







During that drive, though, I did think about how this first trip back felt. Familiar and refreshing, tried and true, like visiting a part of myself.

It felt like home.

Of All the Comrades That E'er I Had

What a difference a year makes!

When my friend Chelsea reached out to say she'd be in LA the weekend of St. Patrick's Day for a bachelorette, I didn't think about it much at first beyond being excited to see her. I had already planned on spending Friday night through Sunday up in Tahoe, so we tucked away St. Patrick's Day itself for a night out in LA, making it the second year in a row we would celebrate St. Paddy's by going out together.

As the day itself approached, I began to feel not only the weight of the year between our shared festivities, but also the import of that prior night back in March of 2015.

Chelsea and I met up on the 14th, the preceding Saturday night, in a great Roswell, GA pub called Mac McGee's. Her husband David, also a close friend, was traveling with his business school program, so we connected earlier in the day about possibly meeting up after Chelsea got some studying in.

Looking back, it's amazing that Chelsea and I even made it out at all. It was the third wind of my St. Patrick's day celebration, following a coworker's house party and a meet-up with my high school friends. Then, thanks to some glitch, we'd missed some of each other's texts planning on a place to meet. Finally, after landing on the time and place, Chelsea had to double back for her wallet.

Finally, though, we made it to Mac MacGee's and knocked back Jameson's shots and a Guinness or two in the second floor bar while live Irish trad music drifted up from the floor below. After staying a while, we decided we wanted to talk without shouting over a fiddle and went back to my apartment, where I imagine I had more whiskey waiting ('twas the season). We sipped our drinks and talked more, the type of deep, thought-provoking conversations Chelsea and I really like to have (either with Dave or on our own).

The conversation that night turned to work, unsurprisingly. Chelsea and I had met when our two companies merged and our beyond-work friendship also allowed for frank discussions about our teams, our office, and the company-at-large. By that point, I had told Chelsea of my plan to leave Towers during the coming summer and, being the lucky winner of that confidence, she had to hear a lot of nervous outbursts every time I sat through a planning meeting with more information than the rest of the room.

That night, I repeated my reluctance to leave my workload to be split among my already-busy teams filled with people about whose stress and success I deeply cared. I then said that even people on other teams would be affected and that she, Chelsea, who didn't overlap with me at all on assignments, might even be left holding some of the bag.

Chelsea's response was, and I'm paraphrasing, "Yes, it will affect me, and all of the people on your teams. But you can't let that keep you from doing what you need to do for yourself at this point." Her support and selflessness moved me. More accurately, it set something in motion within me.

Within a week, I told Towers I was leaving. Chelsea did not back away from the inevitability of affecting my team members, but by encouraging me to go for it anyway, she made me realize that the best way to leave and do right by my teams was to break the news early, even if they had to show me the door that day. Luckily, since a soul-searching artistic journey was not the same as going to a competitor, they let me stay through early July. I got everything I wanted without having to skulk around for months with my secret. I feel I owe that to Chelsea.

And it seems impossible not to see that moment as a match set to the fuse of the year that followed. My departure from Atlanta, my travels to Boston and New York, my trek across the country, months of blissful retreat in Tahoe, and all of the peace I found that let me return to the job, all of that stems from someone nudging me in the direction of my own authenticity and values.

Our night out in LA this year was just as fun. We met at one of my favorite bars in my neighborhood, walked to my new home in all its serendipitous glory, laughed over dinner at a diner, and finally Ubered out into Hollywood. We hit similar beats to the year before, replacing the cozy upper floor of Mac McGee's with the dark interior parlor room at Sassafras, then once again moving along when the live music made it too hard to hear each other. Our search for a quieter scene took us to Stout, where we talked about finding the balance in life and how prior lives of high highs and low lows compare to a steady increase in one's baseline contentment.

Chelsea and I are either different people with similar approaches or similar people with different approaches. It's hard to tell which sometimes. The differences are somewhat cosmetic: hobbies, interests, approaches to work. On the other hand, our childhoods share similarities that shaped how we react to and roll with the world, but that sometimes make reacting to and rolling with ourselves difficult. We both analyze things to the bone and both want to go where other people are as much as possible. Perhaps it's these alignments that help me learn about my own journey whenever I hear Chelsea talk about hers.

Eventually, we Ubered back home and fell asleep, only to wake up early and begin solving the problems of the world again, first in our pajamas, then over brunch at Home. Ultimately, I dropped Chelsea off for lunch with the bride-to-be. We parted with a hug and I found myself saying, "Thank you, I needed this." I have been processing the success of this move a lot, but I think part of that processing needed to happen with someone else. It was a pleasant thought as I turned my car northward to further echoes of my past year.

I intended to make this post about Chelsea's visit AND Tahoe, but as usual, the topics choose their own length. I will get to my Tahoe return in the next day or so. For now, it is fit to share my enthusiasm and gratitude for Chelsea's friendship and for the geographic fortune that results in such an unlikely tradition. I owe each person in my unthinkably broad network of friends and family some form of debt for placing me into the swift and easy current that now carries me along, but, in a very real way, Chelsea started it.

Thank you so much, Chels. Who knew, when we met one-on-one to discuss a post-merger exam policy, that we'd be friends at all, much less St. Patrick's Day partners-in-crime. The world is wonderfully precise sometimes.

And That Don't Look So Bad to Me...

This entry comes from the Phoenix Public Market Café, after scheduling a particularly early flight for my Monday and Tuesday stint onsite with a client. This is my second week out to Phoenix and, now that I've found this spot, I'm regretting the alarming progress we made Week One. What was supposed to take us through the end of April is now subject to a rolling decision on booking another week, so I may have to revisit the Café later, on my own time. Quelle horreur!


I've had another blog on my list for a while, because I've been thinking a lot about my happiness. I seem to have been in LA long enough that friends are starting to check in, and given the nature of the move, the general tone has been, "Is it everything you thought? Are you happy?"


Overwhelmingly, yes.


Almost daily, I find myself stepping back from the flow of life and feeling a deep contentment. Whether it's the rosy sunsets as I walk up Hollywood from the Vermont/Sunset metro or the Saturday afternoon pint of Racer 5 and Chernow's Washington at the sidewalk table of a neighborhood pub, I am finding that my time to myself is simply blissful. Despite the deep love I hold for the friends I kept and keep from DC and Atlanta, I always struggled through the times in between happy hours and Friday nights. Being alone was hard, and if I felt a disconnect with my personal surroundings, I had no distractions from it. Now, there almost seems to be an inversion. I am comfortable on my own at last, smiling to myself as I walk around my neighborhood.


The other half of the conversion is that I am coming to grips with the additional effort LA takes socially. Without any current standing engagements (be it trivia or simply an assumption of weekend hangs), I'm finding that seeing people means getting on their calendar. I wouldn't call it a problem; in fact, I'm excited to make the time because almost every friend I have in LA is someone I have spent years wanting more time with. Whether high school friends with whom I didn't realize I shared interests or college friends I only saw through the lens of theatre, every connection has room to grow and that's deeply exciting.


The happiness has manifested in some weird ways, however. For instance, I've had more bad dreams in the last month than I did in the decade prior. I should clarify that the dreams aren't horrifying, but rather anxious. A good example is working at a sandwich shop with former roommate Wade Tandy and being massively behind on the orders. At first, I found this troubling; after all, bad dreams seem inherently...oh, what's the word? Given some thought, though, I developed a positive theory of explanation, one I think will let me accept them for the time being. Having spent so many years living with daily frustrations, feeling deeply dissatisfied in one way or another, I surely created some semi-permanent wiring for stress and concern. Now that each day is blissed out to the extreme, I imagine my anxieties feel like a department on the verge of elimination, struggling for relevance by taking on my subconscious. I like the theory, particularly because there's yet another inversion in play. In my first two years out of college, when I was darkly depressed, every night brought dreams of adventure and success while waking up to my reality put a pit in my stomach before I even opened my eyes. Now, no matter how high-strung my dreams make me, I awake and acknowledge my reality with relief, especially on the days when I have a cozy cat sleeping between my feet.


So, to those who have yet to ask, yes, I'm happy. So very, very happy.


One final thought...On my flight here today, I had an aisle seat beside a mother and her eight-year-old daughter (my terrible age-gauging skills ensure she's really 13 or something). Halfway through the flight, I noticed the young girl's voice speaking at length. Knowing her mother was asleep, I looked up from Chernow to find the girl talking into a handheld device, closer to a gaming device than a phone. I initially thought she had gotten on the wifi to talk with someone through something like FaceTime, but as I listened, I realized that she was simply recording her thoughts, splitting her time between speaking into the camera and pointing it at her surroundings while describing the experience. She even turned it down our row to me and, as I quickly resumed my studious reading pose, I heard her say, "So, you can watch a movie or you can just read."


It's easy to wax nostalgic about a time where kids weren't raised with an instinctive knowledge of technology, but I am nevertheless so charmed that this girl used that technology to keep a record. I'm not sure if it was her first time flying or if she just had someone in mind with whom she wanted to share the trip, but she was my hero in that moment and, as she went on, I cracked a nearly-overworked smile again. I hope she caught it on video.