alexis in the city

Could my ten-year-old self have been right?

I remember the exact moment. I was about ten. I was riding bikes with my mom down the palm tree-lined street in our unnecessarily ritzy neighborhood in Florida. I say “unnecessary” because even a ten-year-old knows all Florida is is sand and heat and humidity and the eternal quest for air conditioning or water. But I surprisingly don’t remember those things. All I remember about this moment is telling my mom what I wanted to do with my life:

I wanted to be a TV newscaster.

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outsourcing the “nesting” instinct

the holidays have gotten me thinking about it: i am not a nester. my apartment itself isn’t really “decorated” at any time of year. i don’t have an eye for design at all except to choose lots of green accents, and keep things as minimalist as possible when living in 400 square feet ~ nothing on top of shelves, no trinkets or decorations or candles. (i do collect art from the countries i travel, but some of it isn’t even up, and the pieces that are, are haphazardly placed.) perhaps because of this, i’ve never decorated for the holidays - any of them, really.  i go “home” every christmas where my mom exquisitely displays all my childhood nostalgia - how could i ever venture to compete with that? i don’t have my own family and the amount of time and effort to arrange something for two people who really don’t care either way, seems pointless. this combined with my aforementioned lack of design skills and space, and desire for minimalism, is the perfect storm for some really half-assed decor, even if i tried.

so i never have. not so much as a christmas tree. the interesting thing is, i LOVE the holidays. i love family tradition: decorating the tree, making sugar cookies, eating swedish meatballs with lingonberries on christmas eve and swedish sausage on christmas morning. i love looking at all the crazy christmas crafts we did as kids, and reading all our favorite books like “the little drummer boy” and “the grinch” and watching “little women” (which has somehow become a holiday tradition). i love santa lucia and candlelight services and singing carols around the piano. but these are all things i do with my family, and nothing i would try to replicate on my own, which is probably why i don’t see the point of decorating. like all my other traditions, i rely on my parents for that.

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happy SF-iversary to me

i’ve lived in san francisco three years today. that’s almost the longest i’ve lived anywhere, ever, but it’s definitely the longest i’ve lived anywhere i remember. my record for longest ever was los angeles, from when i was born till i was about four, but that doesn’t really count since i don’t remember it. my longest in recollection was fairfax, virginia where we lived from first through third grade.

three years may not seem like a long time to a lot of people, but in military brat terms, it’s EONS. what really surprises me is not that it’s been three years, but HOW FAST it’s flown by. no wonder people get stuck in the same city their whole lives. for this reason, i always have the fear not too far from the front of my mind that i’m going to wake up one day and have been here for ten years, foregoing a lot of the other things i wanted to do and places i wanted to live. this fear, though, is a common theme in my life, coupled - i’ve decided - with my upbringing and my hard-charging, never-settle personality. i believe i should do and have whatever i want, and i’m determined to make that happen!

this theme brings me a great feeling of restlessness about once a year. usually i’d switch jobs, but now that i have my own businesses and am self-employed, i constantly do that. last year i abated it with a three-month trek through asia. this year, i distracted myself by thinking about a move to thailand. the truth is, right now i have no idea what the future holds, how long we’ll stay here, and where we’ll go next. we love our life here, but the plan has always been that this would be a stepping stone to other things. what are those other things? i have some abstract ideas, but no real concrete plans. the alexis of three years ago would’ve been obsessive and freaked out about that. the alexis of today is still a little obsessive about it - but slightly less so. san francisco is helping to teach me to be present in the path that i’m on, every day, and not always looking forward. for someone like me, this is not an inconsequential lesson to learn.

if i make it to my fourth SF-iversary, i’m throwing a huge party, and ya’ll are invited.

can you clone a beagle for ME? and make it well-behaved

scientists in south korea have cloned a beagle puppy - and not just one. the team started with 344 embryos in 20 dogs, and ended up with 11 pregnancies. of those, five puppies are alive now. and here’s the crazy part - they’re not just any cloned puppies. no, no. that’s already been done. they’re transgenic and being used as models for human disease. their DNA has been injected with sea anemone protein which - in a kind of eerie way - makes them glow under UV light. from the article, i didn’t completely understand what makes that important, other than they’ve been engineered with a type of genetic material that isn’t naturally in their make-up.

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my 18 year old self

as most of you know, Ryan and I started “dating” when we were 18. I put “dating” in quotes, well, b/c we were 18 - and shortly after our first date, Ryan headed off to the Navy, and I headed off to college. What followed until we got married was anything but dating, and more like obsessive email and letter writing, interspersed with a few random visits here and there. beside the fact that we were 18, this was not a great way to start a relationship - and definitely not easy! - i could write volumes on that topic, but  i digress.

this past weekend, ryan and i celebrated the 7th “anti-versary” of our first date. anyone who knows us knows we’re a little … well, “unconventional” is a nice way to put it. some people would probably say we have a weird relationship and that’s pretty accurate too. this is especially true when it comes to the “traditional” pillars of a relationship. we HATE valentine’s day and we don’t really celebrate our anniversary, opting instead to observe our “anti-versary.”

it’s a lot less complicated than it sounds: our first date was on a Friday the 13th. so each year when Friday the 13th rolls around, we celebrate in some way, some more glam than others. This year - since we’re trying to move, and in SF you have to have like 10 grand in the bank to do that - we went to a neighborhood bar, then watched the (really crappy) movie (”someone like you”) that we went to on our first date.

We also talked about our 18-year-old selves.  all-in-all, i think my 18-year-old self would be proud of me. I always hear about these people who, when they were young,  had these grandiose dreams and then life happened and they didn’t get to do what they wanted to. i’m really fortunate to not have had this problem yet! Sure, i think if i’d told my 18-year-old self EXACTLY what I was doing - namely that I was self-employed and starting another company! - i probably would have been a bit surprised. entrepreneurship kind of snuck up on me, it wasn’t necessarily something i set out to do years ago! but i think overall my former self would be happy with the decisions I’ve made so far.

you never know how life is going to turn out, but i feel like a lot of people sell out their younger, more ambitious selves for the status quo. i don’t think i’ve done this so far and - while i AM still young - i feel like the decisions i’m making now will help ensure that my future is anything but status quo. i think 18-year-old me would be satisfied with that :-).