The Month of May
It's been a (typically) busy week. Last Wednesday I flew to Atlanta to attend a day-and-a-half class for work. Friday night I flew to Phoenix, then Saturday morning Ladan and I drove to Bisbee, a small former mining town hidden in a canyon just a few miles north of the Mexico border. We spent the night there, then came back on Sunday. On the drive down there, we checked out the tiny town of Tombstone, home of the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral in 1881, and subject of the movie of the same name.
This morning, I fly back to San Jose (as usual, I'm loving the extremely rare free wireless that Sky Harbor provides). Tuesday night I'll hopefully be at AMD's Tech Tour in Sunnyvale, an event I always look forward to, although this year I'll need to skip my macroeconomics class in order to attend. Wednesday night I have microeconomics; Thursday night I fly back to Phoenix for the weekend. The following Monday, I fly from Phoenix to Huntsville, Alabama, to attend a 3-day class through Thursday. That night, I fly back to San Jose. The next day, Friday, Bharath comes up for the weekend. Two days after he leaves, I have my macroeconomics and then microeconomics final exams.
That takes me to May 23. In the first week of June, Ladan probably will have a work trip to Japan for a week. If she does, she may go about a week early - the last week of May - so that I can tag along and we can explore the country together.
So basically, I've got pretty much all my days planned right up through the first week of June. And somewhere in there, I need to find time to continue moving on The DC Project.
Although in some sense I am a homebody, and very much enjoy so-called downtime periodically, I'm not bothered by this continuing hectic schedule. I'm wracking up the frequent flyer miles, and essentially got two free one-way tickets to Phoenix because of my conveniently overlapping work trips.
But still, every time I leave here, I wonder at how much easier and just frankly better things would have been had I been able to get a job with Intel last year soon after Ladan moved here. All this time and money and frustration that has gone into living apart would have been saved. Although I love the Bay Area and it's weather, living in Phoenix wouldn't have been so bad. I can't argue with mid-60's at 4:30AM and 11PM. And although the area lacks any sort of real city life, it is relatively close to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., which is where most of our trips have been to.
It's both easy and tough to look forward to DC. Easy because we'll finally be back together after more than a year apart, easy because of not having to pay for two separate sets of expenses, easy because we'll be living in a city and working towards entering careers that we both feel excited about. But tough because, man, as I've said so many times, weather is just so damn important to my mood. Consider that I haven't woken up to uncomfortably cold temperatures even once since leaving San Francisco almost a year ago. And also tough because DC will be so damn expensive relative to where we are now. In that regard I'm caught in a Catch-22: I'm moving to DC so that I get escape the defense industry, but in order to live in DC, I need to stay in the defense industry in order to make enough money to live there. As a result, at this point I'm leaning toward staying in the same line of work as long as I can find a company that will pay for school.
Regarding the weather, though, I have to say that I absolutely loved the humidity of Atlanta. I hadn't felt real humidity in many months; Phoenix is of course bone-dry, and the Bay Area's pretty dry too. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Atlanta, and felt the air envelope me, I was in heaven. I'm one of the extremely rare freaks who really loves humidity. I tried to spend as much time as possible outside while I was there, just to soak in the moisture. And it's funny: whereas had I still been living in Maryland I would have felt how relatively different Atlanta was from the DC area, I instead simply noticed how East Coast mid-atlantic it felt. Compared to the West Coast, all I noticed was that I was clearly back in the East. Had I not known better, I might've even thought it was Maryland. And happily for me, I really liked it and didn't miss California at all.
This morning, I fly back to San Jose (as usual, I'm loving the extremely rare free wireless that Sky Harbor provides). Tuesday night I'll hopefully be at AMD's Tech Tour in Sunnyvale, an event I always look forward to, although this year I'll need to skip my macroeconomics class in order to attend. Wednesday night I have microeconomics; Thursday night I fly back to Phoenix for the weekend. The following Monday, I fly from Phoenix to Huntsville, Alabama, to attend a 3-day class through Thursday. That night, I fly back to San Jose. The next day, Friday, Bharath comes up for the weekend. Two days after he leaves, I have my macroeconomics and then microeconomics final exams.
That takes me to May 23. In the first week of June, Ladan probably will have a work trip to Japan for a week. If she does, she may go about a week early - the last week of May - so that I can tag along and we can explore the country together.
So basically, I've got pretty much all my days planned right up through the first week of June. And somewhere in there, I need to find time to continue moving on The DC Project.
Although in some sense I am a homebody, and very much enjoy so-called downtime periodically, I'm not bothered by this continuing hectic schedule. I'm wracking up the frequent flyer miles, and essentially got two free one-way tickets to Phoenix because of my conveniently overlapping work trips.
But still, every time I leave here, I wonder at how much easier and just frankly better things would have been had I been able to get a job with Intel last year soon after Ladan moved here. All this time and money and frustration that has gone into living apart would have been saved. Although I love the Bay Area and it's weather, living in Phoenix wouldn't have been so bad. I can't argue with mid-60's at 4:30AM and 11PM. And although the area lacks any sort of real city life, it is relatively close to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., which is where most of our trips have been to.
It's both easy and tough to look forward to DC. Easy because we'll finally be back together after more than a year apart, easy because of not having to pay for two separate sets of expenses, easy because we'll be living in a city and working towards entering careers that we both feel excited about. But tough because, man, as I've said so many times, weather is just so damn important to my mood. Consider that I haven't woken up to uncomfortably cold temperatures even once since leaving San Francisco almost a year ago. And also tough because DC will be so damn expensive relative to where we are now. In that regard I'm caught in a Catch-22: I'm moving to DC so that I get escape the defense industry, but in order to live in DC, I need to stay in the defense industry in order to make enough money to live there. As a result, at this point I'm leaning toward staying in the same line of work as long as I can find a company that will pay for school.
Regarding the weather, though, I have to say that I absolutely loved the humidity of Atlanta. I hadn't felt real humidity in many months; Phoenix is of course bone-dry, and the Bay Area's pretty dry too. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Atlanta, and felt the air envelope me, I was in heaven. I'm one of the extremely rare freaks who really loves humidity. I tried to spend as much time as possible outside while I was there, just to soak in the moisture. And it's funny: whereas had I still been living in Maryland I would have felt how relatively different Atlanta was from the DC area, I instead simply noticed how East Coast mid-atlantic it felt. Compared to the West Coast, all I noticed was that I was clearly back in the East. Had I not known better, I might've even thought it was Maryland. And happily for me, I really liked it and didn't miss California at all.
posted by GregP at 5:11 AM
2 Comments:
So what's the status of the DC move? Is it definitely happening? When?
Well, it's definitely happening insofar as I can make such an assertion without anything to really back it up so far.
Basically, the timeline we're working with is to be there by the end of the summer. The idea is that Ladan will hopefully get a job at a consulting firm in DC which a friend of hers currently works for, and as for me, as I mentioned in the post, right now it's looking like maybe I have to stick with a job similar to what I'm doing now, both in order to make enough money to live inside DC and also so that hopefully I can get my part-time grad school tuition paid for.
I need to start shopping around for jobs soon. I spent some time checking out consulting/think tank orgs, and sadly it seems they only take people who are already on the inside of the international relations community.
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