Breaking Radio Silence

I have not contributed anything to this blog in a long time. Too long, in fact. But I've been doing stuff. Lots of stuff. There's been fretting stuff and logistical stuff. Rummaging stuff and sorting stuff. Just not so much art stuff.

What have I really been up to? Preparation. Finally, after hinting at big changes to come for quite some time now, I can finally reveal the news:

We're moving. Again.

Big deal, you must be saying. You've already moved twice since this blog's inception. This is not interesting!

True. All true. But for us, it is a big deal. Sure we're not strangers to relocating, but this time is a little different. This time we'll be moving far away from our families and the areas we've grown so familiar with. This time we're finally moving out of the Northeast Corridor. This time, we're headed West.

You know, I think if Amy and I could go back in our mutual past and do one thing differently, we would have spent some time traveling the United States after college in order to make a real decision as to where we wanted to live. Instead, we took the safest route and stayed right where we were at the time: New York City. After all, our stuff was there, and I had a job in a public relations firm. What quickly happened, however, was that we got stuck in New York. Like so much quicksand, every bit of struggle just sucked us in deeper. We could never seem to get ahead, and before we knew it we were incapable of comfortably making an exit, and so we put our heads down and continued doing what we were doing, all the while hoping something might come along.

Miraculously, a few years ago something did. We got the opportunity to move to Boston and we were finally able to begin breaking ties with New York City. Not completely, of course, as only fourteen months after leaving for Boston we once again found ourselves in the New York area. However, this go around, we managed to orbit the city from New Jersey, thus keeping us from being totally sucked in all over again. Of course, we were immediately and constantly reminded of why we wanted to leave in the first place, and so we began to hope anew.

As you can tell, we spent a lot of our time together waiting for something to happen to us. We knew we didn't want to live around the city anymore, but we didn't take any action to alter our course. But over the last year, that began to change. We began to talk. And that talk began to evolve into a plan. We made a short list of cities we'd potentially like to move to and started doing some research. We were determined to move, it was just a matter of where.

Coincidentally, as our plan coalesced, the possibility of new work for Amy came out of the city at the top of that short list. The possibility, over time, became a reality. And so we're moving to Seattle.

So what does this all mean?

For the blog? Well, you'll probably get to bear witness to my summer being consumed by all the things that come with moving. Hopefully there'll be some art stuff in here, but I'm sad to say that much of my work will be in boxes for much of the coming months. That being said, there's still a possibility that I'll be able to pull something together, but right now it looks like you'll actually have to read rather than look at the pictures.

For my work? In the short term, it'll mean less work getting done, but some semblance of normalcy once the dust clears. I have, after all, been partially hobbled with the knowledge that much of my situation of late was temporary. That type of thing makes me anxious and I'm less productive when I'm anxious.

But all that's in the short term. As regards the long term, the plan (if it proves viable) is that I'll be taking the time to do more personal work. I will try, once and for all, to find my voice and my passion. It's something I've struggled with for a while now, and it's Amy's biggest wish for me. The heart of that journey, when it finally begins, might just be my ultimate reward for rolling with all the moves as they've come by. I look forward to seeing how this new move plays out and where (aside from Seattle) it takes me.