Six-Month Performance review

 

March marks the sixth month of whatever's been going on since graduating— I left for DC on September 9, 2023. I have been rounding my time up to 9 months when I explain it to others but my math's been severely faulty I guess. Time is slow when I'm counting down the minutes to midnight on Tuesdays but the weeks seem to fly by. I was surprised to see it's just been half a year, but even that sounds a little crazy. 

My first night in, my legs were stuck in a right-angle from sitting for so long in a car. It was a little funny, admittedly, I was wistfully watching the eastern seaboard scroll past in endless rain and crying every odd-numbered hour. We went straight to a show my sister was playing, a small but well-attended gig celebrating the move of a beloved friend from the music scene. I was jealous. I was so upset by the end of the night I left early. My car kept getting lost so I stood outside and waited and the venue emptied out anyway, and everyone inside saw me crying profusely on the sidewalk. No one approached me, though everyone saw me and met me that night. I was just a little sister.

By October I was still dripping in insecurity. I think it made me hard to get to know. I feel bad for being that person to my siblings' friends. I started watching old movies every Tuesday at a small cinema nearby, began to fill out the forms for each PhD application, and run every morning. I had realized that I was too antsy to just be doing nothing in the mornings, so I got running shoes on a visit home and just started running. The National Mall is a nice, uninterrupted "track," and I was trying to complete Lana del Rey's entire discography in several 45-minute surveys of the land between Lincoln and the Capitol. Around this time I also enlisted a therapist, Dr. Britt, who I began seeing on a weekly basis. A trip to New York at the end of the month kept me sane, and the trees became brilliant as a last hurrah. 

In November I'd booked another NY trip swiftly, and after that I'd be going off to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. So I pumped out a pretty elementary draft of my statement of purpose and sent it to Sam, my postdoc advisor/mentor/confidante. His critique left me no choice but to scrap most of it, and ponder a total overhaul and rewrite over the next two weeks of travel. I was so stressed, it lingered behind so many good memories, but I was mostly able to enjoy myself? For a very brief weekend in NYC I was popping bottles, sleeping on the ground (lmfao), and cosplaying. After that, a week in Atlanta with my extremely wealthy great uncle and my second cousins through him. They were nice and funny and a little disconnected in a way that I'm afraid I sometimes come off. Anyway, I found the missing piece while working really hard at just jotting things down on the last week of November, sent that to Sam, and he totally approved! Not bad for an underachiever. I hadn't felt so rewarded in so long. Oh, and Kissinger died so it was like thousands of wins all at once...

December comes by and I am a week ahead of my deadlines, and Christmas is ahead of us. I wrap up easily, getting my last letter of recommendation in, and I turn them all in. At this point I'm just packing. Socially, I had just gotten marginally closer to my little sister's friends, though I still felt a little weird for that. My older sister's friends had caught a glimpse or two of my wit, when my shyness could no longer hold me back from a joke, and I think I had become less intimidated by them all. Christmas passes, I am in Oklahoma City for 5 days. We complete a puzzle, and I fly out to NYC. I spent like 4 days at Winnie's, which is honestly a long time to host anyone. Though I think with how different we can be in terms of living style, we are shockingly compatible in that way. We had fun every single day. I got served divorce papers over the phone (unironic crying emoji), but still walked in the morning and (spoiler) kept waking up and moving every day after that and now and tomorrow. On the last day I pretty much hung out with my cousin. She'd also undergone circumstances and had practically been pushed to download Hinge so we were honestly bitching about that pretty hard lmao. Loneliness kills!

It was January already when I was on the train back. Newark was deadly cold and my eyelids were so heavy that I slept blissfully on the entire 3.5 hour ride home. I celebrate my sister's birthday with her in the stargazing fields out in Maryland and the cracks in one of her friendships begins to show... I start hanging out with horses on a weekly basis and book yet another train out to New York City, when Winnie announces the date for her birthday party (the last weekend in January). The weeks prior, that friendship of my sister's that I just mentioned totally falls apart (kind of a great story, saving that for another post), and my little sister returns to DC from break. I quit running, with a persistent ache in my foot that makes me limp the entire month. In New York I relapse on substances* but end up having a great time and hit like 3 different parties and then go home. I was set on it being my last one for a while— a last hurrah for hedonism and clinging onto the past. I start texting back some people from my phone (sigh), and was delighted to see that lesbian Hinge is pretty nice to me! How funny. Everyone's crazy lonely, though. 

In February I hang out with a bunch of 'em, and (spoiler) we're keeping up quite nicely! I first meet Bryn, a neuroscience lab researcher who wants to start a poker group with me. Then Ayelet, a real ass cinephile who (as it turns out) has also been at all those movie Tuesdays, too? She works for the ADL and is so insanely well-read that I'm next hanging out with her only when I actually finish reading my last book. One of my favorite "Hinges" that I've just been texting is a friend called June who lives 25 miles out of DC (radius too big), who agreed hastily to be a penpal and serial voice memo friend since we couldn't just hang out IRL all the time. Then recently I made a friend outside of the cinema while waiting on a Lyft? I started talking about the movie (Tokyo Story) with her, and we had such a good exchange we traded contact info and started hanging out a bunch. Her name is functionally the same as Bryn— Brynn. At least the contact card is easy to differentiate... I guess. I am set on having them meet soon at Monday bingo night. It's been a pretty prolific moment for my social life. 

The first week of March I hung out with Brynn a lot since she's in Japan/Taiwan/Korea for the next 2 weeks vacationing with her best friends and our friendship's got really solid foundation under it! All smiles, we always have a ball while chatting. She reminds me of my friends Vasi (who is also 5'10) and Rita (Olympic gold witticisms/ collects coins), she feels like an old friend already. Today I met up with someone new, Rachael, and we talked at length about Texas and movies. It was funny, we have a good rapport too. We live-texted each other from different Oscar parties because we had shared predictions over lunch and essentially I was too idealistic about my picks but I loved Poor Things so that's alright. I also was pleasantly surprised to see my great friend and old suitemate River was in town on a full ride to DC (greatest inside joke between them and I) so we had to go to the lesbian bar situated here, as they're on a quest to go to every one in the US within their lifetime. It was like no time had passed, though in reality it'd actually been 9 months since I moved out and last saw them. Remainder of March is looking exciting with so many more visits ahead.

In mid-April I'm back in New York for a week. After that, undecided. I hope I can get confirmation on my future sometime before May, but it'll (at latest) all come out in May so that's something, too. God. 

*Panera charged lemonade