I went to my happy place

Spent a week working, beaching, relaxing, hanging out with friends and family and generally loving life as I know it on my happy place - hence the vacation from my regularly scheduled Sunday and Wednesday posts.

I'm all about momentum, and I've definitely been building mine over the past month or so... Manifesting, making moves, and motivating myself even more than usual, so I was remiss to miss posting, especially in light of the new traffic from my first Thought Catalog piece.  Still,  I have to admit it felt good to be on Island time these last 7 days.

And keeping hold of the concept of time as so totally relative has helped immensely as I've attempted my own version of muddling through the muck America seems caught up in at the moment - reading article upon article, swallowing heartbreaking news update after heartbreaking news update, engaging in complicated and heavily charged conversations.

Thankfully, I have hope, faith, and utter belief this is a season we're struggling through.  (Have I mentioned this book before? Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way by Shauna Niequist)

   

We read it in my book club before my book club went on its now-going-on-eight-month hiatus (it happens).  And Shauna Niequist, the author, introduced me/us to the concept of seasons to be lived through.  Like a winter over staying its welcome well into April, a season of life can feel horribly hard, and terribly dark, and daunting, and cold, and even scary.

But spring always comes.  And summer too - in all its sunbaked, fact of the matter glory.



So we won't necessarily enjoy it, and we will likely be uncomfortable, but we are citizens of the world, and we will weather this.

Shiny, sparkly things or How I Met My Credit Score

Unlike many friends of mine in high school, I didn't get to carry one of these puppies around on our mall trips:



Some mom's had one of these, a Macy's and Bloomie's card to loan to their little girls, but circa 1998 - 2002, my folks were busy paying off credit card debt my mom had racked up dressing the five of us kiddos in matching holiday garb for a decade and a half, so there was no plastic to spare.

Perhaps that is why Capital One convinced me I needed to opt for the pink sparkly design option on my first credit card.  I think I got one or two thousand dollars right out of the gate.  Like the credit gods knew I would be willing to play ball.

And oh how I played.... played with balance transfers and played with paying just slightly more than the minimum each month, played with credit line increases and 0% APRs for the first six months. Played so well those first few years, I earned myself an American Express Gold Card at age 21.

Which was actually hugely helpful in getting me in the practice of paying a / the / my whole bill each month - if only there were a way to start every young credit spender on Amex....

But then.... the dreaded recession reared its ugly head and revoked some of the perks I'd come to rely on - with my Amex specifically, which had allowed me to sign & travel and pay those charges back over time, until it didn't and I was suddenly called upon to pay back the $3k I spent on ACK in 2009 immediately if not ASAP.

So....lo...  I had to do some drastic penny pinching and transferring and pleading and the result was a real bad credit score.  A real. bad. credit. score.

But then!!!  As luck would have it, my penchant for shiny sparkly things paid off... as the year I moved to California I needed a car to take me there, and there was a savior, an angel, a fairy godmother at a credit union in non other than Bedford, MA, who brought me back in to the big leagues wrapping this balance and that one into the car loan, paying cards off a full and raising my credit score by a whopping 225 points in the span of the year and a half I called the west coast home.

Would that I'd had this site as a reference back in the day: http://brokemillennial.com

Penned by my pal (/neighbor/roomie/sisterfriend)'s little cuz it breaks it down for today's 20somethings and teaches them how to plan for the ebbs and be proactive with the flows.

Date a boy...

who travels: http://jamesrussell.org/blog/blog/date-a-boy-who-travels

I had forgotten this one.

But it's good.

And it's got a point.

I have been feeling very Sagittarian recently.

Count down is on to my week in ACK next month.

It's been 5 years since the last time I spent more than a night on the island.

'Tis the season to

You can take the girl off the Island

but you can't take the Island Girl out of the girl.

that works, right?  makes sense anyway?

wrapping up a week in Aruba, no doubt I was Nantucket Naugs literally squeezing in an hour at the beach this morning in spite of a 4am bedtime and our 10am departure for the airport.

give me a towel, a little purse with some gum, my wallet and lipgloss in it, and get me on that sand - I'm home.  pics to come... but I wanted to get this post up so it makes the May tally.

How ACK ruined me for and gave me new life

Five years ago in April of 2009 I got this gchat from one of my best guy friends from high school that just said "wanna move to nantucket this summer"

And I didn't really think before saying yes.  I'd grown up visiting my great grandparents on the Cape, but I'd never been to the islands off of Massachusetts, I didn't need to have seen it to know it was where I needed to be that Summer though, so I just went.  I picked up and moved to the middle of the Atlantic ocean.  Lived in a verified 3 bedroom house we called The Hourglass:

here it is in all it's 4th of July at sunset glory

Worked mornings as an agent and split my afternoons between time on Cisco, Surfside or Nobadeer beach and spent writing parts of my great American (teeny bopper) novel (estimated publishing date 2016).

Got over my college bf once and for all.  Drank way too much, and gained an annoying amount of weight.  Got a gig hosting an airband competition on Sunday nights.  Had half a hundred friends and family members visit for memorable weekends of whimsy. 

Had a time, really.  It was the summer we were 24 and 25 - there were no rules but our house rules, there was no rush, but there was always somewhere to be later that night...the Chicken Box for Donovan Frankenreiter, the Wauwinet for a tasting at Toppers, in town to pick up so and so or whoever it was that was getting in that night on the last ferry.

But anyway - I bring it up to point out the way it ruined me.  (The ways it gave me new life are obvious I think - I was so independent: picking flowers in a field to put in the wicker basket I'd brought from Elsworth to spruce up our living room, unavailable to be at my family and friends' beck and call for the first time in my life - Nantucket Naugs was the ultimate free spirit and throw your hands up at me sort of sisterfriend).  It ruined me because my two roomies and I lived in said 3 bedroom house sans furniture, sans a full set of utensils, sans cable, sans over head lighting, sans a full length mirror, sans so many things... But we lived soooo fully and had so much fun, and we were always in the moment, whether we were out on the porch in sleeping bags staring up at the stars or secretly off-roading in the jeep my roomie bought on a whim one afternoon.  And we wanted for nothing.  We thought we were going out ther in search of ourselves and of answers and of the things we would realize we should do next, but we wound up content just treading water.  We made it work in so many ways and with so little effort.

And ever since, I've just reveled in this knowledge of the ability I acquired amidst adapting to a minimalistic existence - the ability I have to float.  I need so little.

I deserve so much (we all do, bright lights that we are, good hearts that we have, generous spirits, talented selves), but I need so little...

Hence - how and why I was fine sleeping on the floor for my first 10 days in LA this January ;)

 

Nantucket Naugs vs. NY Naugs

Nantucket Naugs used to wait for the work day to end so the party could starty... New York Naugs waits for the work day to end so she can run along the Hudson River once it starts to get cool out after 6pm.

Nantucket Naugs scrambled to get tix from her Free Spirited Island friends to see Donavon Frankenreiter play the Chicken Box two Summers ago.

New York Naugs got ridiculously excited when she found out he was playing in Brooklyn tonight, and thought about rallying people to trek out there for the show which will of course be uber awesome, but she's most likely going to be on her second set of Romanian Deadlifts at the NYSC by the time D.F. starts his first set at the Bowl.

Sigh.