Introducing a New Purpose

Originally I created this blog for the purpose of sharing my travels and experiences during my junior semester abroad with family and friends back home. Since then, I’ve toyed with the idea of starting the blog back up again a number of times. Certainly there have been plenty of adventures.

Two summers ago, I spent a month in an Alaskan coastal village supposedly participating in an archaeology project that totally fell through. I actually wrote a few blog posts during that time, but they never got posted and I eventually erased them from my computer. Despite having its good days and overall being a positive experience, it was a very frustrating time that I think is best expressed in my face in this picture that the lovely photographer Deborah Mercy caught me in unexpectedly:

I survived my senior year at Bryn Mawr, and after passing all my classes, somehow writing two theses, suffering innumerable panic attacks, and generally being miserable for a year, I “got my paper and I was free.”

Then began a whirlwind of events. I took a class in medical interpretation, getting my certificate two weeks after graduating from Bryn Mawr. I splurged and flew west to visit my dear friend Rosie at her home in British Columbia. I spent the summer working for a catering company, which wasn’t much fun but gave me the financial wherewithal to purchase a 2005 Honda Civic, now known as Carl or Carlitos.

The freedom that personal transportation permits is a fantastic thing. I spent a lot of time on the road this fall, travelling to Philadelphia to visit friends from school; to the Boston area to stay with my grandmother; to upstate New York to go hiking with my cousin Alice; to rural Quebec to spend Canadian Thanksgiving with Rosie and her family at their cottage on Kent Lake; and between my home in Vermont and my Uncle Ken’s home in Maine, where I worked for him on snail species descriptions for his Virginia Land Snail Atlas.

My grandparents offered to take me on a trip to Peru with them in October, which was fantastic in that it meant being in South America again (something I’ve missed terribly since I was last in Bolivia), and seeing places I’ve always wanted to see. It was a learning experience in that I was given the responsibility of guide/interpreter extraordinaire, which is sometimes stressful. The three of us in Machu Picchu:

All the while, I was keeping up a job search that seemed more and more futile with each application that went unanswered – of which there were far too many. When my friends Lena and Sarah (for more on Sarah, see earlier blog posts – she was my travel companion in the Middle East) invited me to live in the tiny extra room (dubbed “the Julie Andrews room” – because who wouldn’t want to live under the same roof as Julie Andrews?) in their South Philadelphia house, I decided to take the risk, unemployed as I was, and have been living here since Thanksgiving. December was consumed by the maddening combination of inertia and desperate activity, as I alternated between feverishly searching for and applying to jobs and spending long, horrible days anxiously waiting around for responses. Knowing that I was far from the only unemployed college graduate was both a vague comfort and something that constantly terrified me. And then, just when I was coming to the conclusion that employment was apparently impossible, I was offered a job as a medical interpreter! I signed my contract on New Year’s Eve, started out 2013 officially employed, and had my first day of work this week.

With the need to find employment settled, I have been able to spend the past few weeks in a much more relaxed mind-set. I want to get to know Philadelphia – not just Center City, which I’ve visited and explored during the last 4 years as a college student in the wealthy suburbs, but the nitty-gritty and the beautiful of the neighborhood I live in, and other neighborhoods in South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia, and North Philadelphia. I want to seek out new activities, meet people who didn’t go to Bryn Mawr. And I want to visit places outside of the Philadelphia area – other parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Maryland, places I can get to more easily now with a car. Maybe I’ll even be able to venture farther away, and travel south to Appalachia, where I’ve never been.

Ultimately, adventure doesn’t just happen across oceans and in other continents. I don’t have to be in Spain or Jordan or somewhere equally “exotic” to have experiences worth describing. So now I’d like to use this blog as a medium to talk about new adventures, with the hope that having a space in which to write about them will encourage me to go out and make them happen.

Get your adventure faces on, people!