westhaven

Packing up my room here in Westhaven, pulling up lots of interesting finds from the past four years. I saved a ton of business cards from all the various conferences I've been to since moving to California. There are some good postcards, some interesting letters from interesting women from the past, and a little parade of old wedding invites, baby pictures, and christmas cards.

It makes me wistful, reviewing these artifacts. I don't want to change my past. Nor do I want to go back and repeat it. But I do wish — especially with baby pictures and the like — that I had more time to be there, to be a more active participant in all the wonderful happenings within my extended network.

I'll also miss the hell out of this house; more than anything Kellymundo and Ace.

I think before I started becoming a real entrepreneur I had an alternate track that would have put me here more to stay, and while I'm happy to be where I am and headed where I'm headed, I'm also just a little sad and curious about that other track.

Hopefully I'll have many happy returns to this little piece of Redwood Paradise. I'm sad to be leaving.

So, what's been going on? Clearly I'm not doing a great job of expressing myself in the written word, and aside from what you might intuit from Twitter there's been precious little to go on in terms of my life and times. If it's any consolation, I've been similarly vague and opaque in real life too; when conversation turns to me and myself these days I've been full of noncommittal generalities.

The truth is, a lot is happening, so much and so constantly that I'm not really keeping up with the processing. The spiritual backlog is growing, technical debt to the soul.

One big thing that's been happening is that I met a woman. When I've revealed that to my friends of late I say it with italics — "I met a woman" — and with a kind of level eye-look that tells them I'm serious. She's out in New York City, a Lawyer by trade, double Ivy, South Asian, whipsmart and gorgeous (natch) and loves to dance. Her name is Rina and she's inspired some quality prose and two weekend visits back East this spring thus far.

It's geographically improbable, but I'm uncharacteristically sanguine. We have passed beyond initial worries that spending 72 hours together might become unbearable — that we won't actually like one another upon close examination — and into the subsequent worry that oh hey we actually do, and so now what.

Did I mention she's moving to London? Oh, yeah, she's moving to London, but again I'm uncharacteristically optimistic. However, it is beginning to dawn on me that this may actually be kind of unpleasant. Time will tell. I play the long game.

Last night I tromped around in the woods with my roommate, us and her wolf-dog on a jump-roap leash, ranging on up and around Westhaven hill, cutting back through the creek bed by the Arts Center, and finally returning home to simmer up some steak bits with Larrupin' red sauce. An ideal evening in the Redwoods.

So it was with more than a little preemptive nostalgia that I had to break the news to Kells that I'd be probably moving out this summer. This decision came to me over the holidays, and I'd been digesting for a while, waiting for the right time to vocalize it. Much as I've loved my time here, and it's done some really good things for me, my future is pulling me back out into the world, and into the world I must go.

But no rush; I don't have a destination set yet, and I won't be clearing out until June or July. That'll make it four years in this place, the longest I've stayed anywhere since I was a teenage kid leaving the little Eugene house I grew up in for the big city. That was quite a while ago, but the idea of getting back out there has the same whiff of adventure.

I'll always have a little piece of my soul here in the HC, and hopefully will be back through to visit on a regular basis what with my company having an office and so many wonderful people around. Expect to be on the scene for 2010s Christmas party for sure.