And Then ...

It’s December 31, 2010. The last day of the year in which I turned 30 years old and spent my summer cycling across North America.

A lot of my friends have lamented turning 30. And it had me wondering: when did getting another year of life become a bad thing? Even if it's the aging process that we specifically dread, I could bet that anyone who dies young would gladly trade wrinkles and grey hairs for extra years.

There’s a feeling I had on the roads between Astoria, Oregon, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was a sensation in which the days were undefined, separate, distinct. I didn’t think in weeks or months, but solely in “new days”. Our routes took us out of blurred hotel parking lots and into unfamiliar territory. There was no doubling back to a point of origin. Every length of road and approaching bend was a blank canvas, drawing itself ahead of us in rays of color and light.

That was exciting.

There was no empty feeling that sometimes lingers on Sunday evenings as another weekend winds down. It was not a cycle of inconsequential, sluggish Monday mornings, followed by a week mirrored in monotonous routines. There was no TGIF.

That was refreshing.

Time had no symmetry on the road.

That was nice.

How do I get that feeling back?

That's the million-dollar question.

I received an email from my friend Monique recently. It read: "Do you still enjoy your days instead of rushing through them? I know that was an important key on your cycling tour."

"I'm trying," I wrote back, to which she responded with a sad emoticon.

"That's life," I replied. I paused and stared at my fingers resting on the keypad and then I typed: "It's hard to hold onto."

Some of my fellow cyclists from the America By Bicycle "Across America North" tour mentioned gloomy notions of returning to our separate realities. But while our extended vacation from the normal day-to-day was a fully-supported cycling utopia of sorts, I try not to let myself view the experience entirely euphorically. The elements were not always pleasant. My body developed a variety of chronic ailments. The hotel beds were not always comfortable, and since I was sharing triple-room accommodations with two other cyclists, I was on a creaky rollaway every third night. It was the hardest, most physically demanding and muscularly excruciating thing I’ve ever done in my life.

And it was the best.

Now that it’s over, I feel myself lingering on good memories, like watching soft breezes roll fields of wheat in glistening waves or listening to a lone hawk cry majestically as I reached a mountain summit. But I have to purposely recall the difficult moments, like the sudden hailstorm in Rapid City or the sweltering heat on the day we rode into Sioux Falls or the torrential downpours the morning we cycled into Minnesota. Or the way my leg muscles burned on mountain ascents in Oregon, Wyoming, South Dakota, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. I don’t want to unrealistically romanticize the overall experience because the beautiful moments strengthened me spiritually and the hard times strengthened me mentally. Both have equal value.

And since it’s been over, it has been a whirlwind trying to re-settle into my "real life." I returned to New York City in the best physical shape of my life, yet the emotional disorientation left me feeling unsure of myself. We had been prepped by the ABB staff to anticipate some mild depression associated with the readjustment of endorphins when we suddenly stopped cycling 60-100 miles a day. However, I was caught off guard by the amount of anxiety I felt in returning home. It was even slightly overwhelming to look into a closet and have to think about what to wear instead of just throwing on padded lycra shorts and a jersey.

I’ve been at work for several months now, and it has been harder to transition back into a role as a proficient executive assistant than it was it become a capable cyclist. Returning to the office, I was rusty. And it showed. Lots of little mistakes and more than just a few big ones. It's not that I could no longer see the value in my role at the company, I just see so much more beyond that now.

When I arrived 20 minutes late to the office one morning, rushing along the congested streets and into one of Manhattan's high rises, I glanced nervously at my watch. It was 9:20am. I suddenly felt a lump rising in my throat and felt my eyes misting over.

On the road, 9:20 meant that I had been cycling for three hours, watching a golden sunrise paint the horizon in dramatic layers of yellow and orange. Sunrises lasted longer on the road.

Here, in the “real world,” 9:20am meant that I had raced out of my apartment without eating breakfast, scrambled with a disgruntled mass of commuters through the subway tunnels and city streets like a ping pong ball, and was feverishly checking voicemail and skimming emails for anything that might have required attention 20 minutes ago. There was no sunrise.

Yet my cycling tour had been a “real world”, too. A very real one that was beginning to feel more and more like a fantasy every day. Returning to my New Yorker life, I felt buried in a mass of metal and concrete in my beloved city. While standing at the copier machine, I often glanced out of our office’s sprawling windows and looked for flags lining the Hudson River so that I could gauge the wind direction and speed. I snuck peeks at my fellow cyclists' tour blogs and online photo albums in between assignments, reminiscing about the summer in between phone calls and emails. Whenever I was a passenger in a car, it took awhile to stop staring at the edge of the road, assessing how I would navigate the potholes and debris on the shoulder if I were on a bicycle. I yearned for the click of cranksets and the hum of spinning tires. I missed the unfamiliar road. I missed the thrill of the unknown. I missed my roadmates. And sometimes I wondered, “Did I really do it?”

I still look at Maddy, idling in the hallway closet for the winter, and it's incredible to realize that I crossed North America on those two wheels. When I first got home, the achievement seemed to cast a lackluster across the other areas of my life that had previously held more significance.

New Jersey Mark alleviated some of the commuter stress in a place where I had once delighted in the New Yorker cliché of pounding the pavement in stilettos, dark glasses shading my eyes from the sunrays bouncing off the steel towers of Midtown, a Starbucks latte in one hand and a designer handbag slung over my shoulder. He drove into the city one day and brought me a used cruiser. An old, rusty, clanking bicycle that I absolutely adore. Within 24 hours of receiving it, I was cycling over the Brooklyn Bridge and into the streets of Manhattan, transforming my morning and evening commutes into my favorite parts of the day.

I could have created an entire blog featuring cycling commuters. There were men in three-piece suits, women in wool skirts and knee-high boots. Baskets, baby seats, brief cases, messenger bags and bells. I even saw a man in a pinstripe ensemble, toting a woman in a blazer and pencil skirt. She was standing behind him on rear axle pegs with her Louis Vuitton purse hanging across her back. The novelty of my transformed commute lasted until mid-November when the winter temperatures made it inconvenient and uncomfortable to cycle 4.5 miles in office attire.

However, my love affair with the city was firmly rekindled as the winter months approached - thanks largely in part to the cruiser from New Jersey Mark. That and the fact that simply living here increases the likelihood that old friends will be in the city at some point - and often sooner rather than later - just because it’s New York. In the last three months alone, in addition to New Jersey Mark, I've seen Toronto Mark, Joe, Canada Jeff, Andrew, Sandy, Leo, Margot and Gary - some of them more than once. And not all of them live in the northeast - or in the country for that matter.

For all the things I love about New York - all the things that brought me here on a whim and that I hope will keep me here for many years to come - there is one aspect of the energetic, fast-paced city that drove me to find an adventure like cycling across North America. Or - really - it was the final straw in a driving force that was propelled by the passage of 30 years that have gone by in a wink.

Time.

I don’t want it all to be over so quickly. I don't want it to pass insignificantly.

And time is not more fleeting anywhere else than in the hustle and bustle of New York. The day after I dipped Maddy's front wheel into the Atlantic, I could feel the seconds hasten as soon as I caught my first glimpse of the city skyline. I hadn't seen its bold, jagged outline in nearly eight weeks, and I'm hesitant to admit that I was slightly intimidated by the sights and sounds that had only ever electrified and comforted me. I knew I would not - and could not - retain my renaissance of routine life here, but there is one thing I won't do ...

I will never again grumble about long days as if having a long day is a bad thing. Hard days, sure. Those are inevitable and shamelessly “admit-able”. But I'll never respond to inquiries on my emotional state with: "I had a long day."

Similarly to lamenting birthdays and aging, when have we ever really yearned for short days that fast-forward the moments of our lives in a blurred, speeding reel? Especially for those in nations of privilege - where so many illusions of entitlement exist - time is entitled to no one. To not take advantage of the opportunity to simply enjoy the time we have is the biggest waste of all, particularly if we are blessed enough to live relatively comfortable lives. Whether we recognize that fact or not, boredom is a choice. We - especially Americans - essentially must choose to be bored. And I choose not to be.

In high school, I spent a semester volunteering in a nursing home in Weaverville, North Carolina. I have a vivid memory of an old woman laying in her bed, staring at the ceiling, laboring to breathe. As vivid as the image is, it had been nearly forgotten until I was cycling alone and letting my mind wander on a road in Wyoming over a decade later. And suddenly, I imagined myself in her place, a prisoner in my aging body, perhaps recalling a lazy afternoon 40 or 50 years earlier in my life. And I swear that I nearly felt myself yearning for some generic, lazy, boring day as if I could no longer experience the comfort of it.

It was an epiphany.

I don't actually know if that old woman in my memory was harboring such regrets, but I know that I don't want to near the end of my life and realize that I did it all wrong. Some of it - sure. But not all of it.

Before I chose the manner in which I would honor my 30th birthday - and long before that Wyoming ephiphany - I only knew I wanted to start filling my life with things I wouldn’t normally do. Things that are a little nuts – like skydive or swim with sharks or move to New York City without an apartment or a job or, say, try to cross North America as a novice cyclist with minimal training.

Even then, I prepared as much as I could in the year leading up to my 2010 transcontinental journey (as I had also done in the year leading up to my 2006 move to New York) because I choose to seek thrills as often - and as responsibly - as possible. Monique calls me a calculated risk taker. Let's face it, I'm not going to "live everyday as if it were my last".

But my desire for thrills was most clearly defined on day 23 of the tour when I was browsing a rack of greeting cards at the famous Wall Drug in South Dakota. From that day forward, the words of Neale Donald Walsch etched themselves into the fabric of my journey and the very essence of my existence: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

That sentence essentially summed up exactly what I had gone out there to do. Thrills - even the relatively responsible ones - don’t frequently reside where it’s comfortable.

The conclusion of my cycling journey - and even the self-reflection and personal insight I discovered along the way - did not bring all trials and suffering to a final resolution. There are still anxieties. Discomforts. Cranky mornings. Rough days. Sleepless nights. Worries. Dilemmas. Obstacles. Heartache.

The pattern of my life will not likely circle back in agreeable symmetry the way it often does in movies and novels. Unlike a great story, it's not the ending that is the most important in a great life, but rather it's the fact that we existed at all.

This isn’t “Eat Pray Love”. I didn’t sail off into an Indonesian sunset with Terrence in a happily-ever-after moment - though he did propose along a rocky shoreline in Portsmouth about five hours later (I said yes). SPOILER ALERT: It didn't work out.

And at the end of my cross-country cycling tour, America By Bicycle's mantra proved right. The worst day on my bicycle was better than my best day in the office. It made me more aware of what's valuable and what is not.

At the risk of sounding like a self-help guide to finding inspiration and motivation: seek pleasure when appropriate, relax and reflect when you can, try not to fear failure, recognize mistakes as soon as possible, and appreciate the days you are granted regardless of circumstance. Ninety-nine percent of the time, bad times could always be worse.

Find something that lengthens your days. That makes you savor time. That lets you feel moments. Even if it's something small and only lasts for a moment. Take that moment to recognize that you exist - even when battling frigid winds on Eleventh Avenue during the weekday commute to the recesses of Chelsea or facing a barrage of unending emails in a sterile cubicle.

And sometimes when I’m in the crowded subway, trying to turn my face as far from a stranger’s armpit as possible, or I’m arguing with Terrence about trivial couple’s woes, or I’m tackling a mountain of paperwork on my desk or standing on a 60-person checkout line at Trader Joe’s, an image from my cross-country journey or a funny moment with my roadmates will sometimes emerge in the chaos. And I smile.

Blogging and Biking

Long before I began Blog-By-Bike ... or at least in the few years prior (long is a relative term) ... I often lamented that some of my best writing is forever lost in the streets of New York City. I would be strolling in Manhattan or clinging to a pole in the subway and the perfect assortment and order of words would drift through my head. Despite silently repeating my self-acclaimed profound thoughts over and over, they were often lost before I could get pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. I began carrying a miniature notebook in my purse just for that reason, and Helen now carries one on her bike. I will be, too, this summer in the hopes that less of my best writing will be forever lost with the ghost of my pedal strokes across North America.

In my first blog - dedicated to my journey of becoming a New Yorker - I wrote my opening post on July 1, 2006, when I was a month away from my big move to New York City. I had no apartment. No job. No corporate connections. I still felt like it was ok to order pizza from Dominos and had no knowledge of bodegas or that a hero is both Derek Jeter and a sandwich. No substantial comprehension of the subway. No Duane Reade card. I  All I had was the hope that comes with knowing what you want. While some wondered why, I instead wondered the scarier question of why not?

In a book I read recently, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now, there is an entire chapter dedicated to what Gordon Livingston, M.D. considers to be life's two most important questions: "Why?" and "Why not?"

"If people are reluctant to answer 'Why?' questions in their lives, they also tend to have trouble with 'Why not?' The latter implies risk," Livingston writes. "Steeped in habit and fearful of change, most of us are to some degree risk-averse. Particularly in activities that may involve rejection, we tend to act as if our sense of ourselves is fragile and must be protected. One would think that these fears would improve with age and experience; the opposite is usually the case."

Livingston goes on to say, "When presented with new things, the operative question may be 'Why not?' but people frequently defend themselves from disappointment by asking 'Why?' This can lead to the creative of endless excuses for not taking [chances]." Though he is specifically referring to intimate relationships in this chapter, one can apply this valuable insight to a variety of scenarios in life.

I'm a planner. I'm organized. I make lists. I use Microsoft Excel outside of the office to systematize an assortment of elements in my personal life. I did not go to a four-year university with the intention of becoming a "glorified secretary", but I think I'm now a decent corporate-NYC executive assistant because organization and planning come naturally to me. I enjoy paying my credit card bill in full each month. In fact, I kinda get off on not being in debt. I have a diversified portfolio of mutual funds (modest in value though it may be), I contribute the maximum for company-match to my 401(k), and I had an IRA before I graduated from college. I wear sunscreen daily from May to September. I have a vitamin regimen that involves supplement intake three times a day. I've never been bungee jumping, and I'm reserving sky diving for my 70th or 80th birthday - when I won't be quite as disappointed if my parachute fails to open.

On the surface, I do not live an incredibly risky life. But I've never let risk stand in the way of something I want. Maybe it's because I had incorporated Livingston's declaration of the final and controlling paradox even before I read his definition on page 54: Only by embracing our mortality can we be happy in the time we have. It closely resembles my own personal vendetta with "time" -- fueled by my secret fear that I won't get to do everything I hope to do before I die -- that we must be grateful to be given the years of which others are denied so that the few they might have been granted were not lived in vain.

While reading Livingston's chapter on why and why not, I wondered why we are often more protective of our sense of self than we are of the time we have. We treat our feelings as if they are more fragile - when in fact "time", which is far more delicate than our ego - is finite and incredibly, relatively limited. Is science not indirectly teaching us that our lives are nothing more than a blink of the cosmic eye in the vast, immeasurable universe?

Just as I fended the "Why?" questions that proceeded my move to New York City in 2006 - often with a shrug and a smile - I have also faced the raised eyebrows and wide eyes that have followed my announcement to cycle across North America in 2010.

I'll continue to approach most things in life with a "Why not?" attitude, but this summer - in this blog - with each pedal stroke and each published post, I'll be specifically answering the "Why not?" question of cycling 3,629 miles in 50 days. I suspect that it will have many answers. Those answers may not convince anyone else otherwise of my "Why not?" mantra, but it will be my own personal record for reflection. I'll stop as often as I can to jot my thoughts in my little notebook, and I hope most of them make it to publication on my blog. Even if some of my thoughts are forever lost in the space and time between Oregon and New Hampshire, I know that the basic message to myself will not be.

June 7, 1976 - August 3, 2003

Written in 2007:

There are two dates that strike a nerve with me every year: June 7 is the day Rickey was born; August 3 is the day he died.

Rickey and I had a conversation sometime in 2001 or 2002, where we mused over the fact that not only do you pass your birthday every year, but every year you also pass your deathday.

It wasn't a groundbreaking revelation, of course. And though I have wondered about it - like I am sure everyone has - I'm not generally one of morbid nature, where I regularly mull over what date I will die or what day of the week it will be. Rickey and I just didn't realize - as if you ever could - back when we had that conversation regarding the earnest curiosity and wonder of the one inevitability faced by all, that his death year would be so soon.

It was 2003, and it was a Sunday.

Life without Rickey has been what I had realized it would eventually be. On some level, I realized it that day in August when I learned he was gone. That day and over the subsequent weeks and months, I could not mentally grasp the idea of not being able to see him, touch him or talk to him ever again. But I also could not comprehend a world where months and years would go by in which he did not exist, and I would be in that world, and I would be ok.

I would eventually be ok, and that is what pissed me off so much after he died. I would imagine a time when I hadn't seen him or talked to him in years. I knew a time would come when I would be able to remember him without crying. And I hated knowing that this would become my world. And as I had imagined it back then, it is the world I live in now. I have not seen him or talked to him in years. And though I have accepted this in order to exist sanely in this new world, it still doesn't feel natural to live a life in which he has no fundamental influence.

The most common parts of my life were suddenly unfamiliar, even from just brushing my teeth or my hair to simply driving down the street. Everything seemed magnified, more deliberate, and required more effort as if immense pain hones all of your senses and blurs the big picture at the same time ... because I distinctly remember patches of moments from those weeks immediately following his death, but my general recollection of those weeks overall is hazy ... and dark. Like I remember opening my eyes once - a few days after the funeral - not knowing how long I had been asleep, and seeing the evening shadows cast across my room. Then, it seems like only moments later that my mother was coming in to ask if I would eat a little breakfast.

Maybe I will live to be a very old woman in this world without Rickey, and I hate the idea of his life becoming more distant. Decades may pass in which I will have existed in this unnatural place, where every time something new or exciting happens, I will have that instantaneous urge to tell Rickey about it before I realize I can't. That's the part that makes me simultaneously appreciate and loathe being in this place where I knew I would eventually be - where I am actually ok and Rickey is a memory.

The strength eventually came to get out of bed every morning and put one foot in front of the other - without my mother's sympathetic embrace. And I learned to accept that the darkness would always linger because just like our eyes adjust to actual darkness, your heart eventually adjusts to the metaphorical. And time began to help me remember that I love this life despite the circumstances. I would eventually know that there were still good times to be had, and I truly believe that as long as I live, so does he.

Today Rickey would have been 31. And I want to write about what life was like with Rickey.

When I spoke on behalf of Rickey at the Memorial Tree Planting Ceremony for students at our university who had passed away during that academic year, I had wished that I had some words of wisdom to vindicate the meaning of life and to soften the tragic blow of an untimely death such as his. But at that time in my life as a recent college graduate entering a "real world" that suddenly felt like a fifth dimension, I was still trying to simply understand that if I dialed his cell, he was not going to answer it.

So, instead I decided that day to share some of my favorite memories, and I balled all the way through it. I could not look at any spot on that campus and not see a memory of Rickey. Some days it was comforting and other days, it could be quite maddening. As college sweethearts, we were probably among the goofiest of couples, with a lot of characteristics that might seem unlikely of a college basketball player and a sorority chapter president. We were both big dorks. There were a lot of silly memories from which I could chose.

Next to a tree in front of Brown Cafeteria is where Rickey was chasing me and I tripped over my own two feet and twisted my ankle; we had only known each other for a few days, and I had been teasing him in a botched attempt to be sexy and flirty. And if you walk about midway up the stairs from Brown Cafeteria to Buchanan Hall, Rickey and I once sat there and looked for four-leaf clovers. Under the Alumni Tower, there is a little square plaque in the bricks, and we would race to see who could step on it first. When it snowed, a few accomplices once joined us in stealing lunch trays from Dodson Cafeteria and went sledding on the hill behind Helder Hall. There was a huge snowball fight that same night in the lobby of Leatherwood Hall, which is just adjacent to that hill.

Our first kiss was also in Leatherwood. When I kissed him the first time, he leaned his head back with his eyes closed and a little grin on his face. He took a deep breath and paused. Then, he looked back down at me and said, "Kiss me again." After having chased me for seven months, he acted as if that one little kiss was the ultimate grand prize. And it was kind of romantic even though we were hiding in the first floor unisex bathroom (in the main lobby) from the twins, Jonas and Jarvis. They were his college basketball teammates, who later transferred to Georgia, and were well-known throughout campus for their pranks. The twins and other friends were involved in whatever silly cat-and-mouse-ish diversion we'd come up with that night, and when we finally came out of hiding, the twins kept asking Rickey why he had such a goofy look on his face.

Cullowhee is in the middle of no where so we had to be creative in entertaining ourselves. We had water gun fights. We played pranks. The men’s basketball team once got in trouble for playing hide-n-seek in the basement of Hunter Library during study hall. Another time, some of his teammates caught us playing follow-the-leader around Reid Gym. After being witness to this game, they never let Rickey live it down. However, one of the things that his teammates never knew was that he once let me - after moderate coaxing - put makeup on him. With one look in the mirror at his blue-ish green eyelids, rosy cheeks and cherry red lips, he demanded that I immediately take it off.

We took a chessboard on every road trip, whether it was to the waterfalls just beyond Cashiers (NC) or to the beach at Tybee Island (SC). We had our own rule for playing Scrabble. The rule was that you couldn’t make real words, but the word had to sound like it was real. We had a dictionary handy just to make sure that certain words we came up with didn’t actually exist. One time I created the word “W-A-R-P-T-H” and Rickey disqualified it because he said it was just Captain Kirk with a lisp.

We sat on the bricks outside of Dodson Cafeteria. We ate our lunches on the balcony of the University Center. We once ran out of gasoline in front of Scott Hall. We took long walks and sat on many of the benches sprinkled throughout the grounds, and there are so many memories all over that university that sometimes the random conversations we once had sort of echoed in my mind from different corners of campus.

Our favorite movie was "Stir of Echoes" because we liked to laugh at the part where Kevin Bacon tells his wife that the water is softening up the dirt. We used to rewind that part over and over. If one watches that movie and has the same corny sense of humor that Rickey and I share, then it is apparent why we think it is so funny.

In front of friends and even acquaintances, we would randomly act as if we could communicate with each other using this high-pitched alien language from the movie "Galaxy Quest." We would try to finish each other’s sentences in random ways that didn’t make any sense at all, and we loved to purposely use erratic vocabulary completely out of context or just plain wrong. For example, he once referred to a tasty hamburger as being so comatosed.

Rickey’s mom was always telling us how crazy we were, but there aren’t only memories that just make me laugh. I remember sitting on the hood of my car overlooking the view of campus from the Cullowhee Airport and talking for hours. He was one of very few people who would listen to me talk for lengthy periods about astronomy. We debated political and social topics. We talked about our families. We talked about our dreams. We talked about life.

Rickey and I dated for over three years, but we fought a losing battle to the long distance (after he left school) and an addiction to prescription pain medication that started after a basketball injury in his senior year and would ultimately take his life. We had a trying fourth year in which we struggled to salvage our relationship, and my biggest regret is that we spent a majority of that last year arguing and saying things to each other that we didn’t really mean. I know that we never meant any of the things we said because we always called each other back within a day - or even an hour - to apologize.

There are certain people that you love in such a way that you feel like you can say certain things to them – no matter how hurtful – but you would not tolerate it coming from anyone else. I guess that is why no matter how hard things got, we wouldn’t let our bridges burn. In some ways, you feel like you can say anything without doing permanent damage, which you never realize is more wrong than when you can no longer say you're sorry.

Despite all of this, I also realize that I am so lucky because I had some great years with Rickey. Rickey loved me more in four years than some people ever love anyone in a lifetime, and it seemed like everyone knew it. He threw it out in the open and hid it from no one. During the seven months it took him to get me to go out with him, he used so many random, public tactics to get my attention - these tactics often involved the recruitment and participation of his teammates, friends or even fellow students he barely knew. He once picked flowers off of the university lawn and dropped to his knees at my feet in front of a packed student quad. I don't know if he felt no shame in rejection or if he was just so sure he would eventually get me. After awhile, I knew that he would, too ... but he had made the chase so flattering that it was almost too much fun to give in to being "caught."

One of the last two memories that I wanted to share at the Memorial Tree Planting Ceremony was right around the time that we had first met. I was walking past Simply T’s on my way to class, and Rickey was strolling from Brown Cafeteria. He had on some baggy jeans and a dark green sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his wave cap. He walked along, bobbing his head to the beat of the music in his headphones, and in passing, we stopped momentarily and I asked him what he was listening to. I had expected him to mention someone like Pastor Troy or his favorite rapper, Tupac, but when he pulled the headphone away from his left ear, I heard the boys of 'N Sync singing “Bye, bye, bye …”

Rickey looked at people the way he looked at music, with an open-mind, acceptance and appreciation.

The other memory was when he wanted to try my roommate’s cereal. He had never had Waffle Crisp before, so he poured himself a bowl, added the milk and took a spoonful. He immediately got this wide-eyed, astonished look on his face and exclaimed, “I have been looking for a cereal like this my whole life!”

Rickey enjoyed the little things even more than the big things, from the taste of cereal to lying in the grass by the creek or creating special ways to say that he cared. I know, because not only did he notice when the little things happened, which is a knack that few people have, but he also went out of his way to do the little things for those he loved.

After sharing these memories at the Memorial Tree Planting Ceremony in 2004, Rickey's father thanked me for introducing him to a side of his son that he had never known. Rickey took with him a side of me that others may never know, but I suppose the only thing that matters for us in the end is that we once existed.

Letters to Our Younger Selves

Ellyn Spragins and I first connected when she commented on a blog post in which I had included a copy of a letter to my younger self that I had written in 2008. It was inspired by a contest in Marie Claire magazine that was based on Ellyn's books. I never actually entered the contest, but two years later, my letter led to a personal invitation from Ellyn to host one of the inaugural "Letters to My Younger Self" Parties. After I agreed, she sent the invitations, party kit, a free copy of her latest book to reference at the party, which had a personalized inscription from Ellyn, and swag for the gift bags (which included products from Neutrogena, Trish McEvoy and Suze Orman for my friends). Virtually all I had to do was be a host. And since I organized a potluck picnic, I spent less than $100 on pens, gift bags, champagne, orange juice and disposable cups, plates and eating utensils.

In a note to the party hosts on March 6, 2010, Ellyn mentioned that there would be nearly 50 LTMYS Parties taking place across the United States during the week of April 30-May 2 - an initiative that she is developing into a product associated with her books. Among us, she noted, were dear family members, treasured friends, neighbors, readers, attendees and organizers of her speeches and Letters to My Younger Self Seminars - women spanning age ranges from their twenties to their sixties.

And so it came to be that seven of my 20- and 30-something girlfriends gathered in Central Park on Sunday, May 2, for our own LTMYS Party - a picnic brunch with discreetly-contained mimosas (hey, Mayor Bloomberg said it was ok) and delicious snacks (most notably, lemon-artichoke pesto and sliced baguettes from Zabars). We shared our potluck snacks, drank premium orange juice spiked with cheap champagne (except me since my bicycle training rides are getting longer), enjoyed small talk and laughter, and then listened while three friends read aloud from Ellyn's book - letters by Diane Von Furstenberg, Bobbie Brown and Barbara Walters. Finally, under the cool shade of a large tree at the north end of Sheep Meadow, we began our own letters. Except me again. I just continued eating since I had already written a letter to my younger self and posted it on my blog ... hence the reason I am holding a laptop in our group photo.

 

Adrienne

Bianca

Casandra

Keisha

Kelly

Liz

Mayra

And me ...

 Dear Younger Self,

You won’t have what you thought you'd have by your late-20s. But you’ll be happy. You’ll have a 350-square foot apartment in Manhattan. A MetroCard. A job as an executive assistant surrounded by amazing women. You’ll have great friends, New York, phone calls from mom, dirty martinis (with gin), Lox cream cheese and bagels.

You’ll realize something new about yourself often. You won't seek to constantly reinvent yourself, yet you might not ever really know everything about you because different parts of you will change – sometimes frequently. This should probably bother you, but it won’t.

You’ll wish you were wittier, and you’ll be a sucker for a sense of humor. You won’t fall in love easily, you won’t get attached easily, and you’ll have to be both of those things if you’re going to get jealous easily; you’ll be able to thank a military-brat upbringing for that. You will be nominated for the "Most Friendly" Senior Superlative at your second high school, and you’ll be a "relatively nice" New Yorker 10 years later. But you’ll have a dark side, and you generally won’t trust those who don't. You’ll like to step back and absorb certain moments so that you can remember the details; you’ll do that most often when your friends are laughing.

You’ll crave cliché “Sex and the City” moments because it’s how you once pictured your life – minus, of course, the Manolo Blahniks, Upper East Side brownstones, and voluminous consumption of Magnolia Bakery cupcakes without gaining a pound. Your narrative thoughts and meaningful conversations won’t be set to background music, but you’ll have the fantasy in syndication and the real thing right outside your window. You won’t worry that your life is becoming a cliché because there will be a reason that you are not the first to live life the way you’ll choose to live it. And you’ll want to be Melanie Griffith at the end of Working Girl when she calls her best friend and says, "Guess where I am right now."

Good and bad things will happen. And you'll have regrets. A few will stay with you always. So embrace varying levels of disappointment so that you’ll recognize rapturous joy. Floss your teeth regularly. Take chances. Don't settle for what’s easy; seek what’s worth it. Take random walks in this city. Look for sights you can't believe, listen for sounds that tug at your heart strings, savor the feelings that take your breath away. Eat more fruits and vegetables; drink more water. Allow yourself to be swept off your feet regularly. Save money and spend wisely. Live like Anthony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black so that you can wake up one morning and say, "I don't want anything more."

When you write this letter, you still won’t know who you are exactly, but you’ll realize it and be ok with it. And you’ll see that the only thing that matters for any of us in the end is that we once existed. So laugh more, love more, live more. Simply because you can.

Love Always,
Your 28-Year Old Self 

P.S. And when you're 30, you'll cycle across North America [2010 revision].

UPDATES:

• Tory Johnson's May 5th interview with Ellyn Spragins on ABC (You might see someone else you know - albeit briefly!)
• Ellyn's blog post: Letters To My Younger Self Parties!
• More photos from the other inaugural LTMYS Parties are available on Ellyn's website.

It's All in My Head

Dear Ellen,

I had a dream that I was a guest on your show.

I was one of your home viewers, who had written to you about my struggle to deal with my former boyfriend's death. Now I am an audience member that you are planning to surprise. You invite me onstage to sit in your red chair and you say, "How would you like to see Rickey one last time?"

My jaw drops. My hands rise to cover my mouth. My eyes well with tears. You point behind me, "I bet you'd love to see that guy right there."

I look over my shoulder as the blue and purple lights flash behind the marble-swirled bricks of the studio walls. And then the walls part. And there he is. 6' 4". Slender. Hat turned back, baggy jeans and a large hooded sweatshirt. Flashing his big, wind-up smile. I run, sobbing, across the stage and into his arms. He whispers in my ear, "I've missed you."

Ever wonder what it would look like to see a broken heart healed?

That's what I saw in my dream, on your stage.

Ellen, I know you can't do what I saw in my dream, but you can make me laugh every day. And you do. Thank you.

Katie 

With Rickey in April 2001

Century Training - Week 4; Day 4

Week: 4

Day: 4

Ride: Off-Day

Scheduled Mileage: 0

Actual Mileage: 0

Random Topic of the Off-Day:

I recently participated in Gaily's project on kickstarter.com.

Her goal: To get people all over the world to create a postcard and send it to a complete stranger, and receive another one from another complete stranger.

Due to the huge success of the project, and with the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti, she decided to donate all funds raised over $100 via kickstarter.com to AmericaCares.

You can see the postcard I sent here [once its uploaded to her blog] and the postcard I received here.

My favorite postcards so far include:
To Gloria in Steamwood from Hidemi in Brooklyn
To Christopher in Rochester Mills from Ashley in New Paltz
To Lydia in Bath, United Kingdom from [unidentified]

Everyone else's postcards made me wish I had taken more time to be more creative, but two jobs and century training for this summer's tour have admittedly left me little time for much else outside of maintaining this blog. You can check out more personalize postcards at Send a Postcard, Get a Postcard.

Fields of Gold

I have lived 11,000 days.

I began seeing years that Rickey never would when I turned 28 years old. It's difficult to comprehend that I am now older than he will ever be. That I am experiencing ages that he has not already lived first. That he was once three years older than me, and now, I am nearly three years older than he was when he died in 2003.

I often wonder if he will always feel older than me even as I continue to age ... or if my memory of him will begin to feel younger - the way teenagers seem so much smaller now than when I was 17. Since I will never see the wrinkles form in Rickey's face or hear the decades change his voice, will I one day view him as a 20-something kid ... while I look in the mirror and no longer recognize the old woman staring back? If I am granted the gift of time, what will it feel like to get older in a world in which he exists in some parallel universe where he never ages?

Walt, an old college friend, visited New York City last weekend. We were exploring a beautiful, snow-covered Central Park, strolling along pathways and trails and people-watching on various fields and quads. It was the perfect weather for enjoying snow. The temperature was cool and comfortable, but not warm enough to melt the 15-20 inches of fluffy, white layers that blanketed the park. The Great Lawn was riddled with snowmen, snow-women with anatomically correct acorns, and entire snow-families with little snow-dogs. There was even a remarkable likeness of the Marshmellow Man from Ghostbusters. The creativity was staggering.

I am reminded by the plaques on benches in Central Park that I am not the first - or even one of the few - to have experienced heart-wrenching loss. My favorite plaque, on a bench adjacent The Great Lawn, reads: Dad ... we will always remember you here. Playing tag and flying kites ... Hannah, Lucy and Henry.

Almost every hill was occupied by dozens of sledders or grated with crisscrossing sled tracks, the ephemeral hints of good times that had already been had. And when I see sleds, I am always reminded of Rickey. Of how, ten years ago, he spent the better part of an hour trying to sled down a hill at Western Carolina University standing on a lunch tray. His coveted prize? A kiss. A first kiss from me in that first winter of the new millennium.

The Western Carolina Men's Basketball coach would have been livid if he had known that one of his starting players had been trying to surf a snowy hill. That the hill had been dimly lit by the street lamps from the Helder Hall parking lot and sprinkled with baby trees and large rocks. And that his teammates, friends and I had looked on in amusement, laughing too hard to even think to stop him.

Walt and Rickey were both student-athletes. Though Walt played football, the two had known each other well during our days of purple and gold. As Walt and I trudged through the snow in Central Park ten years later and 700 miles away from our college stomping grounds, he shared the tales of Rickey's seven-month pursuit for the kiss that would eventually lead to a wonderful and rocky three-year college romance.

As I listened to Walt recount the stories, it was as if the snow around us melted away, unveiling a lush, green Central Park, and then the park itself slowly morphed into the beautiful, rolling hills of our Cullowhee campus. The memories were as crisp as if they were yesterday and as clear as if we were actually there - transported back in both space and time.

Walt laughed as he recalled a particular evening when the student-athletes were leaving study hall. Rickey had turned to him and asked, "What do you think of Katie? You think I have a chance?"

"You're Slick," he had replied, referencing Rickey's nickname, "You're the man."

Dre, one of Walt's teammates on the Western Carolina Football team, added, "Slick, if you get Katie ... dog, I'll give you my entire refund check."

Months later, after Rickey got me, I vaguely remember hearing him say to someone in passing on more than one occasion, "Where's my refund?"

I can't actually remember if it had been Dre to whom he had often laughingly posed the question. I had never known what that meant, and I had never asked. I can remember, on one particular occasion, peering over Rickey's customary headlock - our usual stance when we were hanging around casually with friends - his forearm draped across my collar bone, his hand lightly gripping my shoulder, his chin resting on top of my head. Someone passes by and waves and I barely notice a moment in time that would become one of the most replayed in my mind. I can hear Rickey's voice echoing in the memory, "Where's my refund?"

The face in the distance is hazy. Blurred more by the distance of time than actual space. I think the blurry figure says, "I gotchu."

Ten years later, returning to the present in New York, it felt unbearably bittersweet to choke back tears and swallow the resurfacing lumps in my throat as children shrieked with joy around us and families, friends and couples played merrily in the snow. Sometimes I can't remember Rickey's laugh and that makes him feel so far away.

Later that evening, Walt and I stopped for cocktails at a penthouse lounge in Midtown. More stories of Rickey came up, including another from the earlier days of our courtship. After eating dinner in Brown Cafeteria one evening, Rickey barged into Walt's dorm room in Benton Hall: "Walt, I messed up! I feel so stupid. I feel so lame."

"What happened?" Walt asked. "What did you do?"

Rickey was so distressed and seemed sincerely agonized that he had ruined any chances with me whatsoever as he grumbled: "I told Katie that I like her hair."

"So?" Walt replied. "She has nice hair."

"No," Rickey moaned. "I guess you had to be there, but I feel so stupid. So stupid!"

I laughed and laughed as Walt retold story after story over the flickering candle light of the Manhattan lounge. Some I had not heard before. As I listened to the things I had never known that Rickey had done or said, something inside began to hurt. The other lounge guests danced and chatted, completely oblivious to our private moment in the corner. The flashing lights of Times Square danced through the elongated windows and bounced off the sparkling walls. I could feel the tears stinging the corners of my eyes, trying to squeeze their way through the laughter. I'm always unprepared for those moments, when the stories bring Rickey painfully close, and I'm suddenly struck by how much I miss him.

Memories have a way of transcending time. Memories take you back and put you in the moment. Being able to relive those moments with an old friend - in the way that you can vividly share reciprocal recollections, share different angles and perspectives - makes the memory into a 3D hologram between you ... there is a comfort in that. The ability to bring the memory back to life through multiple accounts is what makes the transcendence lucid.

Yet it breaks your heart over and over to relive certain moments that you can no longer share with the people who were in them. In those moments, I am reminded that the stories are all I have left. Those few seconds always ache with soothing pleasure and simultaneous grief. I crave the high of remembering times gone by and, at the same time, scorn the low that comes with its finality. Nostalgia becomes an inescapable drug that soothes the surface while mutilating within.

There is comfort in being able to recall a memory with someone and knowing that they remember ... or in being able to tell them that you're sorry and having the reassurance that they know.

But when the memory involves someone who is no longer here, the memory becomes surreal, and it's pure anguish to re-realize that you cannot just call him up and say, "Hey, remember when ..." When you can't just let him know that you are thinking of him, when he'll never know that you are sorry, when over six years go by and he can't have any idea of how much you have been missing him ... that slices your soul.

It's the same deep ache that consumes me whenever I have the instantaneous, blissful urge to tell Rickey something immediately before I remember that I can't. After six years, six months and 27 days, that's the ache that I've begun to realize is never going to ease.

Realizations like that have a way of making time feel incredibly, excruciatingly, agonizingly finite.

I was batting back tears and trying in vain to swallow my emotions with my martini as Walt evoked a few more stories I had never heard. On another occasion, Walt had dragged a desk chair into the hallway of Benton, where Rickey was seated, receiving a quick line-up. Under the buzz of the clippers, he was visibly troubled by a rapidly approaching Valentine's Day: "I don't know what to do, Walt. I want to do something different."

Some of the other football players - within earshot through their open doors - began to make jokes, calling Rickey "Valentino", but he didn't care and continued to lament out loud: "Whatever I do, it's gonna be different."

"I think that was the year that Rickey took me to see Hannibal," I said, pulling myself out of another ten-year old apparition of Cullowhee, and rejoining Walt in the present in Manhattan. I was half-joking in an attempt to lighten the mood, half-serious because it was probably true.

"Well, that was definitely different," Walt replied, shaking his head and chuckling before the sincerity returned to his tone. "But he was so taken with you. It's very rare to see someone who is truly taken and doesn't care who knows it. Rick never tried to play it cool when it came to you. He was all in."

I never tire of the stories, even if I've heard some of them more than once or twice. Even if I hear them ten times, I'll never tire of sitting around and hearing them again and again. Of trying to feel close to Rickey and finding laughter. Even though it hurts.

"Do you ever wish we could go back and do it all again?" I asked.

"All the time," Walt said. "All the time."

Time.

It's a glorious yet burning constant. Rickey has been gone for 343 weeks. 2,403 days. 57,672 hours. 3,460,320 minutes. 207,619,200 seconds. Six autumns. Six winters. Five springs, and five summers. It has been six years, six months and 27 days since my last chance to tell him that I miss him. And I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, and I miss him.

The Many Worlds Interpretation on a 30-Year Old Mind

According to Hugh Everett, a physicist who formulated the Many Worlds Interpretation in 1957, anything that could have happened in our past actually did happen in some other universe ... so all of those alternate decisions and choices you could have made are still playing themselves out in other worlds ...

Yeah. Ok. I got that dramatic interpretation of Hugh Everett's concept from ABC's "Flash Forward", but it's certainly a notion that has been pondered by thousands well before Everett published it. To wonder about how our lives would be different - in the past, right now or in the future - if we had made alternative decisions or done certain things differently. But it's also an idea that you have to let remain fleeting. "What ifs" have a way of consuming you with regret if you don't.

Inspired by a Marie Claire sweepstakes contest in 2008, I wrote a letter to my younger self, which - without realizing it at the time - revolved slightly around the Many Worlds Interpretation ... or a version of it that would later be dramatized for primetime television. I never submitted my letter to the magazine, but I shared it with family and friends, and now I share it again with you: 

Dear Younger Self,

You won’t have what you thought you'd have by your late-20s. But you’ll be happy. You’ll have a 350-square foot apartment in Manhattan. A MetroCard. A job as an executive assistant surrounded by amazing women. You’ll have great friends, New York, phone calls from mom, dirty martinis (with gin), Lox cream cheese and bagels.

You’ll realize something new about yourself often. You won't seek to constantly reinvent yourself, yet you might not ever really know everything about you because different parts of you will change – sometimes frequently. This should probably bother you, but it won’t.

You’ll wish you were wittier, and you’ll be a sucker for a sense of humor. You won’t fall in love easily, you won’t get attached easily, and you’ll have to be both of those things if you’re going to get jealous easily; you’ll be able to thank a military-brat upbringing for that. You will be nominated for the "Most Friendly" Senior Superlative at your second high school, and you’ll be a "relatively nice" New Yorker 10 years later. But you’ll have a dark side, and you generally won’t trust those who don't. You’ll like to step back and absorb certain moments so that you can remember the details; you’ll do that most often when your friends are laughing.

You’ll crave cliché “Sex and the City” moments because it’s how you once pictured your life – minus, of course, the Manolo Blahniks, Upper East Side brownstones, and voluminous consumption of Magnolia Bakery cupcakes without gaining a pound. Your narrative thoughts and meaningful conversations won’t be set to background music, but you’ll have the fantasy in syndication and the real thing right outside your window. You won’t worry that your life is becoming a cliché because there will be a reason that you are not the first to live life the way you’ll choose to live it. And you’ll want to be Melanie Griffith at the end of Working Girl when she calls her best friend and says, "Guess where I am right now."

Good and bad things will happen. And you'll have regrets. A few will stay with you always. So embrace varying levels of disappointment so that you’ll recognize rapturous joy. Floss your teeth regularly. Take chances. Don't settle for what’s easy; seek what’s worth it. Take random walks in this city. Look for sights you can't believe, listen for sounds that tug at your heart strings, savor the feelings that take your breath away. Eat more fruits and vegetables; drink more water. Allow yourself to be swept off your feet regularly. Save money and spend wisely. Live like Anthony Hopkins in Meet Joe Black so that you can wake up one morning and say, "I don't want anything more."

When you write this letter, you still won’t know who you are exactly, but you’ll realize it and be ok with it. And you’ll see that the only thing that matters for any of us in the end is that we once existed. So laugh more, love more, live more. Simply because you can.

Love Always,
Your 28-Year Old Self 

P.S. And when you're 30, you'll cycle across North America [2010 revision].

I've been 30 years old for one month now. And two years after writing the letter to my younger self, I have let go of the melodramatic need to figure out who I am and am, instead, enjoying the many complex parts that make me and change me every day. And if Hugh Everett is right, I hope that most of my regrets are playing out in alternative universes and most of my joys are right here in my reality.

The Katie Project

My boyfriend thinks I'm just like Julie Powell. That's what I get for encouraging him to watch a romantic comedy.

Between basketball practice, team meetings and publicity events associated with the bj-league in Japan, he is fairly isolated during his downtime - namely because he doesn't speak fluent Japanese. Because of this general seclusion from direct American contact, he is easily swayed to consume any media that is produced in English.

"It was a good movie," Terrence said - something I'm sure he'd be less eager to confess if I had physically dragged him into a theater to see Julie & Julia myself.

"And Meryl Streep was adorable," he admitted - an opinion he was less reluctant to divulge since he has a widely-known affinity for cuteness (Side note: Julie never actually called Julia Child "adorable"). If you ever want to make a 6'9" heterosexual male melt, just send him a link to any "cute kitten" video on YouTube. He also thinks tall, awkward women are more appealing that short, cute women - which was another factor that made this movie an easy sell.

And then he added, "And you are just like Julie."

"What about me is just like Julie?" I asked. "Give me adjectives."

"Just like she is," he replied. "You saw the movie. I'm not going to go crazy typing it all out, but you act like she does." [I suppose I should also clarify that this entire conversation took place via AOL Instant Messenger.]

"Neurotic?" I probed.

"Yes."

"Obsessive?"

"Yes."

"Redundant?"

"Yes."

I paused, realizing that I had not come up with one endearing adjective to describe Julie.

"Focused," he typed, "And female."

"Thanks for putting a positive spin on this," I typed back.

I'm not sure what kind of picture this paints for anyone who might be reading this blog without ever having met me - especially if one already has a mental perception of a 30-year old, half-Filipina, half-White woman, who is tall for anyone of Asian decent, with a long torso, short arms, long legs and small, exactly-the-same-size feet (an apparently abnormal trait), as determined by the pro bicycle fitter at R&A Cycles a few weeks ago. When I shared my measurements with a coworker at job #1, who is four inches shorter than me, we compared arms and mine were, indeed, even shorter than hers. I can't believe I never realized I have short arms before, but my disproportioned measurements actually make sense. I am exactly what happens when you mix average-size White genes with much smaller Asian genes: long torso, long legs, short arms, small hands, small feet.

I suppose there are some similarities between us, which may be few to mention - since I don't know the actual Julie Powell anymore than anyone can claim by simply judging a Hollywood dramatization of someone else's life. However, we both live in New York City. We both consider moving from one New York borough to another (a span of mere miles) like changing planets - or, at a minimum, I totally related to the relocation scene at the opening of Julie & Julia.

We both like to eat (though I can name essentially everything that I know how to cook, which someone once told me - as I proudly listed them off - is not actually a good thing). We both work in cubicles - at least until her writing began to turn a profit. We both blog. Anyone, who regularly posts their thoughts on the Internet - with the hope and assumption that someone out there is going to care - is comprised of some level of narcissism. We both use hobbies as a channel for self-exploration; case in point: the blogging we both do ends up being more about ourselves than the hobbies. She has a "Donation" button on her blog The Julie/Julia Project, an avenue for others to make charitable donations to a non-charitable, self-absorbed cause.

We both enjoy writing and attempt - more often than socially accepted in literary academic circles - to make run-on sentences charming. I check my blog everyday for new comments, which - not unlike Julie in her early blogger years - also serves as a daily reminder that my mother is likely one of my only regular readers. And I relish any opinion that anyone might make an effort to share, openly accepting the occasional backlash it may incur, as I'm sure Julie has had to learn, since - through blogging - we indirectly welcome the equal advantage and risk of having people tell us what they really think. The aptitude to be simultaneously vulnerable and thick-skinned is also a characteristic that Julie and I certainly must share.

I suppose one of our likely-many differences (outside of stating my obvious lack of a dominant gene for red hair; then again, based on a few Google images, neither does she) is that she hates the subway more than I do (I still enjoy how my knowledge of it and familiarity with it make me feel like a New Yorker), and she drops the F-word in her previous and current blog more often than I would ever have the courage to use it to color my own writing - mostly because I know how much it will disappoint my parents, who will now be disappointed to learn how much I actually enjoy including it in my daily vernacular. The main advantage Julie has over me is that she began blogging random, inane thoughts before they became cliché.

No Can Without Will

I am sitting on the toilet in our bathroom, the only place in the apartment where my roommate and I can consistently "borrow" wireless Internet from our neighbors. After nearly two days, wallowing in my self-pity party, pouting at both jobs, and soliciting money with shameless plugs on Twitter [DONATE HERE], I am deciding here and now to drag myself out of the financial funk that I've been in all weekend. So what if I underestimated my cycling attire needs by nearly two grand or if I was off by another thousand for bicycle equipment? I've come a long way - and with a lot of love and support from family and friends - and that's too much to be proud of to focus on what's still lacking.

I cried once back in 2006, after surviving my second weekend with a second job at a casino in western North Carolina. Much like now, I had created a goal that required more than my single income could provide. It was the cry of frustration that often ensues when a single person enters into the exhausting world of dual employment. Even those of the heartiest character can have moments of weakness. The determining factor is what results from these moments.

Four years later, I didn't waste energy on tears this time. If I have learned anything about time, I've learned that it passes. It passes whether you throw a tantrum, wallow in self-pity or whine and complain. It doesn't wait for you to realize that you're wasting it. It doesn't allow a replay if you regret not taking a second to just be in the moment. The only thing you can control is what you do as it passes. Much like in 2006 - if not exactly - the sun still rises and sets, the moon continues through its phases, the seasons change. Whether I work my ass off at job #2 all weekend or spend it relaxing, another Monday morning at job #1 still comes. And I'd rather be a little bit closer to my goal each time it does.

Not too long ago, I played devil's advocate with a friend regarding a debate over disabled parking privileges. Imagine if you needed to use that permit, I had said to her, what would you give to not need it? What would you give to be able to just walk on your own from the last space at the very end of the lot?

I decided to take my own advice and appreciate the fact that I can. I can pleasantly answer phones, reply to emails, schedule meetings and manage endless piles of receipts to expense at job #1. I can smile and serve overpriced cocktails at job #2. I can gratefully work two jobs in an economy where many people are imagining what they'd give for just one. I can appreciate that I am in a position to finance frivolous dreams when there are others who just want to survive. Whenever I'm having a rough time, I eventually remember to try to search for some perspective.

If gratitude for what I do have and "glass half full" analogies just aren't cutting it or whenever I have a classic case of the "mean reds", Stiles Farmer's Market on West 52nd Street is my own version of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Just the sight of all the fresh produce one can buy for a dollar can cheer most of my mild emotional ruts.

And in Bikram yoga, the instructor often talks about bringing yourself into the room, being in the moment, and moving onto the next pose, even if we are too tired, simply because we can.

And when I am too sore and exhausted to push my bicycle over another hill this summer, I will. Because I will know that I can.

Celebrating My 10,958th

I received the following email today from City Wendy:
Hi Katie, Happy, happy belated birthday! I saw on twitter that you're starting your third decade and I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you're actually in your fourth decade! But don't worry -- it only gets better!! Hope you're doing well, Wendy

"By golly, you're right," I replied - because that's the kind of corny lingo I like to throw into conversations with friends. And because I'm an obsessive-compulsive, semi-perfectionist, I'll be revising any erroneous "third decade" references in previous blog posts. Standby for said corrections.

I closed out my third decade with an intimate evening among girlfriends at Brasserie 8 1/2 on Sunday, January 17 - my last night in my 20s. I had received a 50/50 offer from the Patina Restaurant Group, which you can also (currently) obtain by clicking here or here. The birthday gift certificate entitles the bearer to spend $50 and get up to $50 (alcohol excluded, of course) at a variety of Patina Group restaurants (some location exclusions apply). One hundred dollars-worth of food for $50? Yes, please. I made reservations for a party of six in Brasserie 8 1/2's lounge area and we ordered $100-worth of table shares from their Bar & Lounge Menu. At $25 for any combination of three table share items, we enjoyed a pretty nice spread. The Mac & Cheese and Goat Cheese Croquettes were strong favorites.

On Monday, January 18 - the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Observance - more widely-known as my birthday, I treated myself to sleep-in until 11:30am, went to the gym with my roommate Bianca, and then dragged her to Brooklyn for my second trip to R&A Cycles, where - with the assistance of an Al - I may have narrowed down my bicycle selection for a final purchase! After leaving the bicycle shop, with much of my burden of indecision lifted, we hiked (literally) to Grimaldi's, where my pre-determined birthday eating route was foiled by the two-hour line outside of the famous pizzeria. We settled for Water Street Restaurant & Lounge and were pleased with the overall selection, though I did continue to pout through the appetizer course about not having my favorite pizza. The day was redeemed, however, when a stop next door at Jacques Torres and Bianca's birthday-date-drop to the sales clerk, resulted in five free chocolates.

Throughout the course of my day, I also vowed that I would celebrate my birthday in days, moving forward and moderately inspired by something a recently-partially-paralyzed Orson Hodge said on last Sunday's episode of Desperate Housewives:
"Please roll me over! Please help me off the toilet! Please! Please! Please! That's the life I'm facing now; having to ask people for help, for everything. Do you know how hard that is? Every morning I wake up at five; you get up at 6:30. For an hour and a half, I lie there, staring at the bedroom door, fantasizing about how lovely it would be - how excruciatingly lovely it would be - to get up and make myself a cup of tea one last time. No 'please'. Just hot water and tea."

Later, I learned that I am not the first to embrace this philosophy of formally celebrating my birth and my existence by the day. It made it a lot easier to wake up at 5:40am for my weekday six o'clock gym session this morning. To get up and yawn through the fatigue and get going ... because I can.

The highlight of my birthday - while I regret that the highlight had to be significantly monetary in nature - was several donations from family and a close family friend - the latter being one who is practically family. Given the rate that I have been burning my metaphoric candle (a.k.a. my body) at both ends, their financial contributions toward my cycling tour were received with immeasurable gratitude and immense relief. I spent three-and-a-half days out of the office last week [job #1], trying to recover from a severe cold. And - given the fact that I had grossly overestimated how much I would make cocktail serving in the poor state of the economy [job #2] - I've been stressing over my need to scale down my evenings at the lounge to one night per week. Between two jobs, I am considerably behind in finalizing my bicycle purchase and heavily committing to the physical training and conditioning for my transcontinental ride.

So the best birthday gifts of all came with zeros this year ... or rather, on my 10,958th day - but I also know that those zeros were motivated by love.