punky IN the city. a preface. if you will.

This evening marks two weeks for me here on the East Coast.

I've been eating a lot of pastries. And snacks lately. Yeah, snacks. My cousin has seven year old twins and so there's a snack cabinet here. And it's filled with snacks. For days. So I've been eating all of them, along with the rest of my feelings. Otherwise you can find me sitting. In the shower. A movement that is often inspired by troubling times, if you feel me.

Cause a lot has happened in the past fourteen days. A lot has BEEN happening in my head the last sixty days. And while I've had every intention of sitting down and blogging about it, I've felt very overwhelmed. Sometimes you have so much to say, you don't know where to begin. So instead you grab yourself a go-gurt, a capri sun, and some cheese-cracker sandwiches and you turn on the Olympics. The blogging can wait.

Except it can't. And I don't want it to. Cause everything that is happening right now is huge. This first actual chapter of Punky and the City is crucial, right? It's been hard. I want to write this down. I want to tell you exactly how I'm feeling right now, the stories I've gathered thus far, the ever-evolving facts as they scatter every which way, so that somewhere down the line I can look back at this struggle and marvel at it. So I can tell the next crazy young woman who decides to up and move across the country with no savings to back her up that it's NO piece of cherry pie. That it is in fact really stinking foolish, dreadfully confusing and remarkably lonely. You'll probably cry a lot. And eat a lot. And shower a lot. And maybe even eat while crying in the shower, (but hopefully not, cause I just pictured that in my head and it was really, really sad looking. Ha! [I haven't gone that far myself]) Basically just be all kinds of dramatics. But rightfully so, cause it is hard. This up-and-moving and chasing-your-dreams-shit is incredibly intense. And you'll start to ask yourself how much you really want it after all.

You'll ask yourself a hundred times with no clear view of a precise answer, until you realize you're still here. You're still going.

And there's your answer. You're still here. You're still going.

So you do want this.

You want this even though it's rough to live in a climate where your entire world is circling high above your head and you can't describe a day beyond it. "up in the air" is no easy feeling. Neither is a pair of empty pockets to go along with it. Or this god forsaken humidity. (Seriously, NY?)

But then the tiny holes fill, where you often miss them. They fill in ways that only now you notice because the situation is pressing. And as you're forced to look up, there you see your world. And it's a good one, rich and filled with love. And heavy. Heavy so that it may bring your feet to eventually touch the ground. To bring you back down to the earth where you are reminded that choices such as these in life are worth it.

Worth it to be reminded of how much you really freaking love your Dad, cause he checks up on you three times a day and it's just the kind of steady support a young girl of the world needs. Worth it to realize how much you love your friends, the true ones, who go out of their way to make several phone calls to old friends, inquiring about couches they may have. Worth it to realize the value of your Twitter friends, cause in the middle of the night when you are feeling the most alone, you know you can send out a tweet and someone, somewhere, who you've possibly never even met, will hug your cry and tell you to stay strong. Worth it to be reminded of how much you miss the accessibility of a mother or a sister in the next room, the comfort of a familiar voice and how nice it is to hear it on the other end of a telephone. Worth it to be reminded that mostly, the only person you can count on is yourself--that you are, in fact, your own greatest fan. So when you have had a few glasses of champagne at a blogging conference, of course you should drunk text yourself saying, "I love u. U got this." Worth it to be reminded the next morning what laughing at yourself feels like when you read said text, and why laughing at yourself is necessary in every faucet of "moving forward". Worth it to be reminded that I'm young, and what's the worse that I can happen? I end up back in California? God, what a tragedy that would be.

I'm 25, broke, and totally wandering on the East Coast right now. I think once I'm done freaking the f out about it, I'll be able to say, "hey, I'm doin' alright. In fact, I'm doing pretty good."

My many apologies for the blogging hiatus. Many specifics to come in terms of the job and scheduled couches the next month and OH yes, BlogHER! Stay tuned :)