25 & Trying

The Big 100!

Today marks my 100th post here at 25 and Trying. I can barely believe it! Clearly this is an irony given the recent hiatus I took from blogging, but it’s a great way to re-welcome blogging back into my life.

100 posts ago, I was blogging at a different address on the same blog – I hadn’t yet committed to a domain. It was nerve-wracking, and I was not sure that I was ready to actually put MONEY into my writing. Now, I can confidently say that I’m happy I’ve done it. I’ve been inspired by many other bloggers around me (check out the blogroll for just a few of my many favorites!) and by good friends I’ve met along the way.

I’ve done some guest blogs, and gotten to know some people on Brazen, all of whom have shaped my writing and my blog along the way. Most importantly, I’ve taken a risk for myself – which hasn’t been done in a long time. I’ve tried writing about some new things (including books, news, and random thoughts that fly into my head), and some haven’t always been the greatest.

But, I’ve kept trying. I even sat here this morning trying to think of some amazingly profound topic for my 100th post. C’est la vie. Brains and creativity fail you when faced with deadlines such as this. I thought about making a list of my favorite posts, but I am more interested in hearing what YOUR favorite posts were. I thought about making up some really great story about how blogging changed my life – but I guess I’m of the belief that change is gradual. 100 posts in, I am changing – not quite changed.

Instead, I just want to say thanks to everyone who has been reading – or read once – or contemplated reading at one point or another. Thanks for being my audience, and for giving me the space to put things out there, and to work out my own things in public view. Still 25, and still trying.

The Blogging Vacation

When I first began blogging, I read about a million posts by different bloggers on Brazen – all discussing how blogging is hard to maintain, that it is a conscious effort, and that it is one that creeps up on you when you have a million other things on the brain.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have taken a 2 month blogging vacation (well, more like a month and a half.)

The vacation was inevitable – working on my campaign, figuring out my life, and trying a myriad of other things that have led me to the burn-out stage. I started blogging once or twice a week, and eventually I realized that I just needed to put the brakes on for awhile.

Occasionally, Brunno would make a comment to me about how he’s noticed my lack of blogging. But other than that, it has been pretty clear to those around me JUST how much work has overtaken things.

Now, that time needs to come to an end. Work hasn’t gotten less busy or less infuriating – it is, in fact, a constant struggle. But I have let it get too far in.

Blogging vacation did a number of things for me that I should most definitely be thankful for:

• Gave me a chance to miss it
• Allowed me to really figure out the things that are important for me to read – and write – about
• Recognize what type of role I want blogging to play in my life

It is really hard to stay focused when work feels like the walls are closing in. I have been struggling a lot with that piece of my life, and with finding a balance.

I can confidently say, however, that I have finally figured out an exit plan. In 91 days I will be off on a new adventure.

Interested?

Welcome me back from my blogging vacation, and we will enjoy this crazy ride together.

When Pushing Yourself = Disaster

Determination/Dedication

I am notoriously hard on myself. About everything. Ever. It is really ridiculous when I think about it objectively, but I just can’t seem to stop. 25 years of entrenched behavior has turned me a bit critical of myself at all times. Lately, I have struggled with two very big things that have been pulling at me: motivation and understanding.

I signed up for the Brooklyn Half Marathon next weekend to run with my friend Michelle. It is her first half marathon which is quite an exciting achievement and we plan to celebrate together. I’m, needless to say, not very prepared. After the stress of the Earth Day campaign and the lack of free time I’ve had overall, it has been hard to motivate myself to get back into a routine. My routine had been so exhausting that dragging myself back outside with my running shoes on has been a feat (no pun intended.)

Yesterday, B and I had a bit of a tiff about me being so hard on myself. I was explaining to him how if I don’t exercise, I berate myself for not doing so. If I exercise and tire quickly, I berate myself even more (even though logically, that is progress compared to doing nothing at all.) I know it may all sound like internal girl whining — and that is a FAIR assessment folks — but really, it is rough on me.

I have always been a perfectionist. From reading to math (oh wait, I was terrible at math. but I still stressed about it so it counts) and everything in between, I have always pushed myself. It can get so irritating that it even irritates me! With running, and exercise in general, I have SUCH a love/hate relationship. Once I get into the routine, I love it. Fall out of the routine? It is like an addict forcing themselves to return to sobriety….again.

Bottom line: I am nervous about this race. I am also frustrated with myself, because exercising helps my mood, the mood levels in my brain, all that good stuff. I know the reasons why I should, but it’s not always easy to be rational when it comes to fears that come from deep within.

Knowing the answer and making it happen are definitely not one and the same.

The End of the Campaign Trail

Fighting for Climate on The National Mall

Well Hello! Remember me?

I hope you do. I have missed this blog in the last month. I have come to the end of my campaign, and literally cannot believe I survived. I have war wounds – physical and emotional – but I made it. I have never worked so hard or so long as I have in the past few months. It has really been a challenge in the most enormous sense of the word.

Our organization’s culminating event was a Climate Rally on The National Mall in Washington, DC. There, speakers, artists, environmentalists, children, adults, and people from all over decided that they didn’t want to live in a world without a climate bill.

Politics aside, it was a work situation like none other. Imagine a team of twenty-something’s led only by caffeine and occasional fried food, trying to make a situation work. There’s cat fighting, incest, and the occasional tequila shot at the office at an ungodly hour. I know that most people don’t ever experience this type of work environment. I know I hadn’t — and being in nonprofit doesn’t necessarily mean you will experience it at some point. I hadn’t expected it.

I guess now that the dust is settling slightly, I can take a look back at some lessons..

1) Your coworkers will become your family in a situation like this. You are bound to get in spats with some of them.

2) Happy hours and alcohol and random dinners out with break your budget entirely if you let it.

3) Exercise is few and far between

4) The only thing that got me through was pushing through. You gotta dig deep.

5) Relish your free time when it’s all over.

In work situations, we are always challenged – hopefully – and in a sense, we rise to the occasion a little bit everyday. When it gets impossible, there are others around us who will either help us or keep us down. I think I learned a lot about what it means to rely on people (and the sad reality that sometimes you can’t rely on anyone but yourself.) Sometimes, when I was feeling really stressed, it was the small moments of calm that really mattered. I was fortunate enough to have my husband on this campaign with me – which is something some people may be stressed by, but it was actually a real help.

There were times when he saw me at the point of explosion, and was there. There were also times that we both had little to no time to spend in a calm, and loving atmosphere with each other. But we tried.

Sitting at home eating something I actually had time to cook, a trip to the store to get a piece of chocolate, an extra Starbucks drink to get me through. It’s definitely the little things.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves ~ Guest Post

This time last year, I had a completely different life.  I lived in a basement studio apartment and commuted an hour each way to an office in downtown DC where I worked a typical 9-5 job (although not on a 9-5 schedule).  It used to be more of a 10-12 hour a day gig, but then the recession hit and they implemented a company-wide freeze on overtime, which was both a blessing and a curse.

I was living the dream.  I had leveraged a good education into a great job in one of the most exciting cities in the world.  My job was educational and intellectually stimulating.  I was devoted to my boss, an incredible woman who had worked her way to the top of a male-dominated field.  She was deeply and profoundly committed to an older kind of feminism; a glass-ceiling shattering, networked, institutional feminism.  I had a career.  I was poised to do anything.  And I walked away.

I got in the car and I drove across the country to a city I’d never seen before.  It wasn’t the first time I’d done that, but it still took my breath away.  Through South Dakota and Wyoming, I watched the mountains rise and fall before me and the plains stretch out towards the unknown horizon.  I never questioned what I’d done.

It wasn’t until months later, sitting in an empty house, the drizzling rain a near-constant companion in this lush, mossy place, that I blinked and realized I didn’t recognize myself.  Who was I?

Six months married (to the Army, how did that happen?!), husband deployed.  Alone.  Unemployed.  Seriously, who was I?

I was talking to my friend the other day about the stories we tell ourselves.  Like me, she married young – she at 23, me at 25.  Maybe that’s not young by some standards, but it feels painfully young to me.  Like me, she quit the kind of job we’re “supposed” to have to pursue a vague dream of miscellaneous freelancing and further education.  She has cats.  I have dogs and a cat.  Neither of us have children (whose presence, it seems, would give both of us an inherent purpose).

My friend and I share two stories, the stories we tell ourselves.  I never know which one I’m going to wake up with on any given day.  And I don’t know which one is true – perhaps because each is a piece of the puzzle, incomplete and completely inaccurate without context.

In the first story, we have failed.  We’ve abandoned a legacy that generations of educated, determined, and incredibly strong women have left for us.  We spend our days flailing around in the unknown and run back to the safety of school because the real world is just too scary.  And I, at least, am dependent on my husband.  Yikes.

Or we’re brave.  We recognized that the system, the model for happiness is broken, or at least is not a means to achieving our personal happiness.  We’ve taken the first steps towards building an alternative that works for us, where we can meet our needs joyfully and with freedom.  We’re pursuing higher education in fields that we find fascinating and meaningful, and we’re doing it at a financially sustainable pace.  We’re thinking outside the box, starting our own businesses, and working steadily towards meeting our goals.

I don’t know what this means for my friend and I.  I don’t know what the future holds for either of us.  But I do know that as much as where we come from shapes the stories we tell ourselves, so too do those stories pave a path.  Perhaps not so much for where we’ll end up, but for the people we feel we’re becoming as we go on our way.

Jess Lundie has a fabulous blog where she writes about sustainability, life, and other wonderful stuff over at Openly Balanced. You can also get to know her on Twitter!

You Can’t Go Home Again

Monopoly House

Last night, I had a special evening. It was the first Passover Seder, and traditionally, it has just been my family and our family friends. This year, I invited my coworkers, and B invited his friend from Mozambique that also lives here. It was a very multicultural experience.

It got me thinking about how when we used to visit my parent’s old neighborhood  of Far Rockaway, New York (Queens, for those of you not in the know). Something that is a familiar backdrop becomes an unfamiliar storyline. My mother used to look out the car window at the streets where she grew up, and say “it’s true what they say – you can’t go home again.”

I felt a little like that last night. The house was there with all the usual suspects, the same food, but we are all so different. The people I brought reflected a new and different chapter, and for the first time I felt a little bit like a guest in my parent’s house (except for the part where before I left, I made sure to steal a deodorant from the closet because I knew they would have extra new ones.)

I brought people I work with – definitely different than those days of spending my week off of school lounging around and doing very little while enjoying my spring break. Remember things like spring break? I guess I was a bit nostalgic for the way in which life seems to get more exciting and more difficult as we age.

I also couldn’t help thinking about what it would mean a year from now. Where will I be a year from now, and how will my relationship with my parents be? Will following a different path cost me this little blanket of security, even if it has changed a lot over the years?

Jewish holidays focus a lot on the feeling of warmth, of food, and of tradition. As we age, our concepts of these change. They either become more a part of our life, or less. Some of my friends are still leading the same lives that they were in high school. They haven’t ventured far from that track – and I have to admit, it confuses me. I’m learning to respect it – as I see how difficult change is. But I think that a person deserves the right to both.

Tasting my mother’s soup and brisket is a part of who I am, but there’s also that part that has been forever changed from the child I grew up as. It’s the embrace of both that really makes a whole person, a whole – and new – me.

A Night of Networking and Conservation

Gorongosa Hippos

Last night, I went to an event at DC’s Environmental Film Festival to watch a film on my husband’s country of Mozambique. The film, entitled Africa’s Lost Eden focuses on the amazing story of Gorongosa National Park in the center of Mozambique.

Devastated by civil war in the mid 70′s through the early 90′s,the park became a battle ground – and the toll has been felt throughout the ecosystem. Hippos, Lions, Elephants, and many others were killed for food, or fell victim to a violent conflict.

The film explores one man’s ambition to fund the park’s restoration for the next 20 years – Greg Carr. A philanthropist and entrepreneur,  Carr has made his money mostly in the tech industry – getting behind big projects like Prodigy in the early 1990′s. Today, he has committed 20 years to Gorongosa, and is continuously seeking public-private partnerships to expand Gorongosa’s reconstruction effort.

We were lucky enough (the perks of being married to a Mozambican) to talk to Carr and some ministers from Mozambique, including the Minister of Tourism before the film was screened last night. Afterwards, a panel discussion allowed everyone to deconstruct the issues around environmentalism.

This national park has the power to transform Mozambique into a thriving tourist hub – it has the beauty, the safety, and the amazing story. It has everything. For the first time, I saw a large room of Americans really captivated by my husband’s home country, and I felt really proud.

It also made me think about networking. I felt totally overwhelmed, networking face-to-face with important people – people that actually HAD changed the world and not just blogged about it. It isn’t easy. I will admit, I am sometimes that girl that uses a cell phone as a crutch. Oh! Excuse me for a minute while I awkwardly play with my cell phone while Brunno talks to people. Sigh.

Either way, it also made me acutely aware that the way people do good things BETTER is by talking to each other. Best practices, stories of a feel-good nature — these things all enhance people’s ability to get involved and feel like they are making a difference. Conservation is no different.

Chris Matthews, the “Hardball” host in all his glory, moderated the panel after the movie – and he told Greg Carr that his mother should be proud of him. He “did well and then did good,” as opposed to what a lot of people tend to do with their lives.

I think I like that.

Are Countdowns Bad?

Confession time: I make countdowns. Sometimes they appear in my gchat status. Sometimes they appear on a notebook/white board/small despair.com calendar. Either way, I do find myself counting.

I have this debate a lot with the husband. He always says that countdowns are a way of not “living in the present” because we are always waiting for the next thing. We are trying to get to the end of the countdown – it’s like a race. Lately, I have been counting down to the big event at work. Years in the making, this event has dominated our meetings, our schedules, and our lives. We have been pushing towards one day, and after that, what happens?

It’s been in my natural human nature to just…start a new countdown. Isn’t that the neat, orderly way to do it? Moving from one list to another, from one countdown to another. The thing about countdowns is that they always come to an end, and we’re left to figure out how we feel about it.

In the case of work, it’s easy to become joyful about a large project ending or being completed. I think I’ll have mixed emotions. It’s going to be the end of something, but hopefully not the end of us doing something interesting. There’s always that fear that the end will be AS stressful as the beginning.

Living in the present has always come naturally to my husband. It seems to be a part of his culture, just the type of person he is. He really savors things – like the way he doesn’t miss something until it’s in front of him.  It’s a really hard quality to develop in life, at least for me. I come from a family of countdowners. We like to get things over with.

This includes but is not limited to: doctors/dentist appointments, trips (i.e. counting down TILL a trip happens), presentations, proposals, work deadlines, half marathons, tax season.

What I’ve been trying to implement in my own house is a healthy combination of our two paths. We can countdown to a certain point – as long as the counting isn’t taking away from the living.

In case you’re curious, the work countdown stands at 34.

Following a Path

Through The Heart of It All

“You’re all Kenyans in my eyes!”

~Sign in Central Park, NYC held by 8 year old girl.

Running a half marathon isn’t easy for me. Loving New York is easy for me. With this balance in mind, I took on my biggest challenge on Sunday – The New York City Half Marathon. An extremely popular event, the race brings 16,000 random people together to run 13.1 miles through Manhattan. It is the New York Road Runners Association’s most popular race – a more achievable distance than the full marathon – and you still get the feeling of doing something great in one of the most amazing cities on Earth.

The course takes you on one REALLY LONG outer loop of Central Park – 8 miles, give or take. The miles are long and arduous. There are really big hills and the scenery doesn’t change that much. It’s just people waiting to get to the 8^th mile. There, you exit the park onto Seventh Avenue, running down and through Times Square, and onto the West Side Highway, where the finish meets you at West Street and Chambers Street.

When I heard about the course, I was nervous. Central Park bores the crap out of me running-wise, and I was really afraid it would mentally be too tough. Also, I haven’t had as much time to prepare. I have been working out a lot, but haven’t gotten down as much mileage as before. Also, the stress at work has been eating at me a little bit – and I’ve been getting really sick of DC.

The thing about running is, for me, that it’s never fun until you get yourself out the door. Sometimes you have bad runs, and sometimes you have great ones – but you always get something from it. You get calories burned, or anger released, or some sort of time to yourself to think.

Running through New York for me is like the closest to full meditation that I come. I came back from the experience exhilarated and sad that I was not there still – but kind of empowered. I control where I live, where I go, and what I do. Running really makes you feel like you can go from one place to another – because you can.

I have been feeling unsure lately about the direction that my life is going in. I was even so chaotic that I thought I hadn’t quite been prepared for the race. I think that there are many negative thoughts that can creep in if we let them – it’s almost easier to think that we’re going to fail.

Running can be a life-changing thing, but only if you let it. Maybe it brought me back a little bit – back to the path that I’m on, and to the way I’m going to get through it all.

The City of Cold

Washington's View

All the Washingtonians are going to hate me for this one. And yes, I will admit UP FRONT that I think NYC is way better than DC. I would even place money there Nonetheless, urban sociologists (one of my many side careers) have to investigate their surroundings, and take impressions from what they can actually experience.

Two days ago, I was walking to go get my eyebrows waxed. All good stories start like that. I get them done once every three weeks at Bliss Spa in the W Hotel. Fancy Shmancy. In Washington, this location is right across the street from the Department of the Treasury and the White House. To get to it, you have to walk straight through the heart of Northwest Washington. From my office, you can take a route that passes both the World Bank and IMF, and a number of embassies. Yesterday was one of those days where you appreciated the weather more than if it were 85 degrees and sunny. It was awesome, and as I walked and changed the songs on my iPhone every two seconds, I started missing New York.

BOO HOO I know. But seriously, there is something about Washington that makes me feel shut out. The buildings give off the impression that the people within them aren’t ready to come out – ever – and interact with those around them. They can watch you, but you can’t even SEE them without government security clearance.

This city has always represented power in the eyes of many people worldwide, and is obviously a place where powerful decisions are made. You only need to walk past the White House to figure out that power is a really big part of what Washington is about. The lawns are manicured by a team of expert gardeners, and you can’t really get that close. Ever.

Since moving to DC, I have been less than thrilled about the city. It has been fine for its’ purpose of providing a different perspective outside of New York (which I definitely agree), but there’s no warmth for me. There’s no fire and it’s just a place where we live, work, eat, drink, and run.

Recently, I put an end date in my mind to my time here, and it made me think about why DC hasn’t connected with me. Is it really just the buildings that give off the vibe? Why is it that the physical space affects our perception of a place so much?