My interests have changed in recent months; my time here in front of this screen limited to short bursts of productivity, never self-reflection. But still I should update, shouldn’t I - because the posts up on here reflect a me that was. So here, a post written during a train ride in Spain, full of confusion and misdirection, a former journalist wondering what her future held, watching the farmers from the comfortable distance of speeding train and laptop. I re-post it years later, flip-flops caked with thick red Georgia clay, arms tanned from this past weekend doing something that the girl below could never have imagined.

Train from ALMERIA to SEVILLE, España, September 28, 2006

I got a letter, about two years ago. The envelope was thick; yellow, with horizontal grains. In the top right corner, there was a black embossed logo. Simple.

Classy.

The New York Times.

I had met Nancy Sharkey, the NYT recruiter, at Poynter a few weeks before. She sent me a letter to let me know that the New York Times was interested in tracking me. Interested in seeing how my career went. To paraphrase the ending of the letter, I was instructed to “make the most of my opportunities in journalism.”

Astonished, I emailed my classmates from the Poynter program.

Had anyone else gotten a letter?

If anyone had, they didn’t admit to it via the listserv.

There I was, in my one bedroom apartment in San Antonio, clutching the letter that every journalist wants to get someday. They were interested in me.

Immediately, my head filled with plans.

Yes, I would write Ms. Sharkey. Thank her for the interview. I’d send her my college thesis - the one we’d talked about for so long - and then, in six months, I’d follow up with recent clips, prima facie evidence of my suitability. I was 23, then - I couldn’t hope to work for the Times until I was at least 27 …

On and on.

My head made plans my body never followed through on.

I’m shamed to admit that it’s been two years, and I haven’t sent a thing.

Nor, in complete honesty, have I really done anything worth sending.

I’m on a train in Spain now, riding backwards yet again. The desert that stretches from Grenada to the Mediterreanean is mountainous, and arid - scattered with small towns and shrubs. The train clawed its way to Almerîa a few days ago so I could swim in azure waters. Now it claws its way back, backward over tracks slung between mountaintops.

I ride by small farms, crumbling houses made of stone, where one could wake up, look out the window, and see the day’s work ahead. Pick tomatoes. Weed corn. All those farmer-type things I’m too citified to even know how to describe.

How different it must feel to be able to stand firmly with toes dug deep into red dirt, and feel to your bones that this is who you are.

Unlike this journalist-cum-blogger, whose last byline was a year and half ago; who traded in her reporter’s badge for the mantle of corporate responsibility, only to find it too heavy to bear.

This is a true set of actions.

Target. Last week. Decide not to buy $10 bottle of Advil. I can get by without.

Today: 6am hits, the cramps. The cold. It’s three hours into a sleep cycle, but I’m awake. The day begins, 3 hours after the last ended.

It hurts, and pretty bad.

The house is empty, so sounds echo: my roommate pouring cereal, forgetting to give the dog water or food, not opening the door to let the dog outside, and finally, leaving for the day.

Prostaglandins are indiscriminate hormones; everything is cramping, and the results aren’t pretty. I lug the laptop into the bathroom with me. And google things.

I think about returning to Target: there is a laundry basket, on sale for $2, which I could use to store clothesnotkitchen. But by now it’s only 9am - maybe Target isn’t open, and maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t use up the gas in my car because no place I’ve been to has any more.

Texaco’s signs read “Out” - simply, and the line inside is short; a fat woman in a denim dress, buying lotto tickets, peanut butter crackers, getting change for a ten. I pay $2.35 for two packets of Advil, four pills, and think for a minute that it’s significant.

Morning air, the start of fall - finally crisp and clean, and when I return home I have a momentary act of kindness: I let the dog out.

He bounds outside paws! ears! tongue! large frame finally in motion after solitary hours curled on the bed. He offers me the ball, falling over himself, inbred googly eyes askance; alight. I tell him firmly, ‘No’ - not to be mean, but so that he doesn’t associate me with love or attention or other things which I would, in the future, so thoroughly deprive him of.

His disappointment is momentary; there are sticks to chew and fences to pee on, and a big, green kudzu mosquito birds chirping backyard to roam! roam! roam!

It’s a tiny piece of paper; a scrap from a time of Texas bills, transmogrified into packing material two years ago. A slip that snuck, across state lines, a tiny cling; now resting on the floor of my car.

I’ve moved too much, and in the last one, ended up apart from my things, in a pretty senseless act of nonanticipation. The girl who moved to D.C. to become a something became the girl who was severance-packaged two months later; who sent her things to Phoenix to store while she sorted things out, but ended back in Atlanta, where the damn things, the stuffs, had been just months prior.

Dreading a repeat of that intensely illogical and expensive chain of events, I’ve held off on fetching them. What if, again, I need to buy a plane ticket and see the world? What if, again, the job isn’t real and the rest disappears, and I’m stuck, again, with no choice but to send the things back to the desert?

And so the days seem emptier than they should.

Nights, insubstantial.

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 18, 2007

The unemployed know this - how the days can creep by, you, reading in pajamas, dim lights, a sudden idea and a flurry of keyboarding, until you decide to venture forth into the real world, which turns out to be just a hipster vegan coffeeshop, where bored girlfriends with cuffed jeans and thick black rectangular frames await their barista boyfriends, as if the hordes ordering no’reos were really a threat to their ironic relationships.

Coffee on an empty stomach has blurred my vision - I can’t actually see the letters on my screen, but I’ve practiced these motions enough that I assume I’m still doing it.

It was probably too much, too fast, to go from cloister to caffeine, but I had the strangest sense that I was drowning, or at least turning 11 again, when I’d lay around in lethargy reading all summer, squeezing lemon juice and chocolate syrup into Pepsi, proud of my rudimentary concoctions. Back then, I read a lot of Nancy Drew while my mom listened to Roy Orbison; I’d sit outside on the astro-turf patio in the Arizona heat, legs up on the permadirty Rubbermaid table, ignoring the hysterical barking of Dusty the too-smart border collie, whose irrational hatred of all things moving I attributed to a mistaken belief that we were signaling her until I learned she’d been beaned on the head with a frying pan during a break-in where teenagers had stolen a large peanut butter jar of pennies from the hall and my parent’s lamentable collection of early 90s CDs, which, to my recollection, featured Michael Bolton, Gloria Estefan, and Laura Branigan.

My mother didn’t tell me about Dusty until St. Patrick’s Day a year ago, when we sat atop the roof balcony of Six Feet Under in Atlanta, which I liked because I knew the grave of Margaret Mitchell was just beyond all the Confederate bones. We drank margaritas, and had something fried I remember as being crab cakes - though that must be a mistake, because my mother would never eat crab.

That was the summer I took off for Europe without any books, which was just as well, since I spent over 150 euros mailing back the ones I found; Toqueville, Heller, lesser and newer fiction writers whose stories I remember, even if their names eluded me. That was a summer built for reading - spent on trains and in parks in Germany, France, Scandinavia; buses in Spain and Morocco. But I was too poor, and they were too scarce; and so I scornfully turned pages that were turgid at best; beach books, as if sand dictated inferiority.

I had read all the books in Lagos, Portugal before I would consider the Fountainhead. It was an old copy; the pages loosened from the spine, and each who had read it had signed some sort of message in the back, which at first I took to be a clear sign of intellectual inferiority. (Jawdroppingly, breathtakingly, arrogant.)

But by then it was winter, and the backpackers had stopped coming through with new books for me to read, which I stealthily encouraged them to leave behind by creating a sharing library. The local FX channel only had so many episodes of The O.C. to run anyways, and so I retired to The Cave; a tri-level room I’d recently painted white. Cool tan tiles made the room too chilly at night, so I’d curl under thick Berber blankets with the fat Maltese dog Perla, who, although she was from Boston, did not have an accent. We’d amass plates and cups, Perla and I, as we tore through the book, leaving unhinged sections under the bunk bed with Incredible Hulk sheets as we finished them. Every now and then, the distracting flute of the knife sharpening man would catch our attention; and I’d peer through the gated window over the terra cotta tile rooftops, hoping to catch sight of him, riding his bike through town, looking for customers.

After many days, I was almost finished with the book, stirred with an internal passion for Rourke and his integrity that I could not share with the kindhearted, blinddrunk Canadians. So I stole away to a coffeeshop down the street; where a euro fifty purchased me a milk coffee, and I carefully poured in two sugars through the foam, and stirred without breaking.

I walked down the slippery tiled roads to the Potato Beach - well, that was the translation from Portuguese - where thick tan rocks sat like potatoes, immutable against the crash of the Atlantic.

Summer gone; grey skies, and a recent storm left the beach deserted and debris-strewn. In jeans and felt coat, I sat, with feet buried in the sand, and finished the last of the 800-some pages. I stood up, then, as I did today, to clear my head from the fiction I’d wrapped myself in. I looked out onto the sea, knowing if I kept swimming, eventually, I’d hit home.

I saw further than I can see today; today when the baby pink vegan coffeeshop is a blur to my left and for the most of my right peripheral; and the only thing I can really see clearly is the man in front of me, outdoors, eating a chocolate cupcake in the light breeze, talking to a woman and then offering her a bite with outstretched arms, all without a book in sight, and no sign of fiction anywhere.

Yeah, I’ve been hearing that a lot recently. What can I say? Sometimes things have to really bottom out before they rebuild - and I’m in that process.

I’m on the way up for a change.

ATLANTA, Georgia, April 2, 2008

What happens to a tiny SMART car when it’s run over 70 mph into a concrete wall? Watch and learn.

ATLANTA, Georgia, February 22, 2008

If you were going to make a list of websites that wasted your time, would CNN.com be one of them?

8aweek.com seems to think so. A newly-launched Firefox plugin, 8aweek.com keeps track of your internet usage, logging those midnight hours spent browsing those ‘restricted’ sites that eat up your time, like Facebook and MySpace. Fancy charts and graphs will chronicle your time - certainly a tantalizing prospect for analytics nerds like myself and other readers of TechCrunch and LifeHacker.

Faced with a rather crippling addiction to certain blogs, I installed the toolbar; hoping to quantify just how many hours were spent getting my Brit Brit fix.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the default restricted sites: Facebook, MySpace (point taken); ESPN (no worries there!); Flickr, YouTube, Digg (sure, but those are my tools); and … CNN, at the top of that alphabetical list!

Does CNN.com itself waste my time? Not so much as the content-partnerships it maintains with fluff purveyors as varied as CareerBuilder, This Old Home, Real Simple and, (sigh) Oprah.com.

I’d be happy to share my data, as embarrassing as it might be, in a weeks’ time. (Good thing I did my monthly binge reads of PopSugar.com, wwtdd.com and HeatEatReview.com earlier this week.)

If my browsing habits are as seriously warped as I’m guessing, I’ll be making use of 8aweek’s “block that site” mode.

More info on 8aweek.com:

• 8aweek.com/learn
• TechCrunch article
• LifeHacker article.

[via Amy Gahran tweet]

ATLANTA, Georgia, February 22, 2008

This utterly pointless video of my friend Carrington making chocolate milk at Gato Bizco Cafe [Yelp profile] in Atlanta was shot when I was testing out my new camera.

It still makes me smile.

ATLANTA, Georgia, February 12, 2008

Ok, so you’ve got your plans for V-Day down. Dinner reservations, check. Clean underwear, check. Flowers from the dumpster behind the florist that aren’t too wilted once you’ve trimmed the brown leaves off, check.

But once the night is successful, and you’ve lured the lady or gentleman in question back to your bachelor(ette) pad, how to continue the seduction?

If you’ve got $250, a van, and enough time to drive to New Hampshire and back, this lovely Secret Agent Fireplace/Bar/Record Player/8-track player can be yours.

Words cannot describe the awesomeness.

The bar pops out of the fireplace.

The record player and 8-track pops out of the fireplace.

It’s a fireplace!!!!!

If you’ve been searching for the perfect companion to your revolving-bed-that-pops-out-of-your-couch, look no further. The Secret Agent Fireplace/Bar/Record Player/8-track player is really all you need to make the magic happen.

Original post on Craigslist:

Electric fireplace, stereo, bar - $250 This Mid Century Art deco fireplace dates back to about 1900-1950’s. It is in very good condition, has a record player and also an 8track player. The bar has plenty of storage for bottles and glasses and spins around for easy access to either side. It just plugs right into the wall,The fireplace is for aumbiance only but adds great character to any room. I also have some old 8tracks that i will include with the purchase.This is a very rare piece from what I’ve found out about it and It will go VERY fast. If interested, or any questions please email me at xxxxxx@gmail.com. Thanks for looking

[Thanks LarryClow.com for the tip.]

(Oh, and in case you’re making v-day dinner in, here are some cooking tips from Coolio. Really.)

ATLANTA, Georgia, February 11, 2008

I stopped off at Rusan’s in Adventure Plaza (ok, Edgewood Retail Center) for some quick sushi before a wifi session. Sitting alone at the bar is always fun if you like watching the chefs go at it, and that treat was made even better when one of the gentleman carved an orange for me to eat.

He presented it shyly and didn’t much watch me eat it, which was darn cute.

After examining it, I realized he had made two lateral cuts to the orange, in effect creating an oblong cylinder of the center of the orange, which was hollowed out and chopped into serving pieces. The bottom slice of the orange was pushed up inside the hollowed oblong cylinder, creating a bowl, while the top slice was carved into a flower shape and skewered into place.

Nice, huh? I’d like to try it sometime.

Bottom slice, pushed into hollowed orange

Top slice, carved into a flower

Skewer, held in place by bottom slice