It's all dancing.

On a cloudy New York day, I am quite content on cafe wi-fi making plans for the next couple of months- corresponding via emails with the people who make up my life here:

Julia, a friend of a friend whose apartment I'll be subletting for February and March

Molly, who I am staying with in this interim, who works for a bicycle advocacy group and doesn't know how to drive

Sam and George, who I play basketball and work out with, and with whom I'm planning a ski trip up to Vermont

Rosely, my Portuguese teacher starting next week, a three month program offered through the UN

Jennie and Alexis, the owners of Blue Marble Ice Cream

Michael, my Project manager and adviser with Champion Learning

Ryan, a friend in Baltimore, who I'll be staying with during a Wilderness First Responder Recert course at the end of the month

and Ava, lovely Ava, with whom I have quite quickly fallen into some sort of love affair/mutual obsession/relationship. She is a modern dancer and NYU grad student, Manhattan native, and she's just so DARN sweet! In this crazy time in my life, I was feeling quite useless and hopeless, and then of a sudden I found this girl who believed that I could be happy in this city, and that SHE could be happy with ME, and that has made all the difference. Certainly, "dependence" upon another person for one's personal happiness is something to be tisk-tisked... but at this time and place, I am more than happy to accept this new love and allow it to give me happiness, motivation, and inspiration to build and try to be happy here. I am now functioning on a three-month timeline- I'll be here through march- after which I still don't have plans. But now that I am building some sort of plan, I have experienced this flurry of excitement in plan-making and engagement, illustrated by these mini-biographies. It's great. I feel alive.

We did a lot of talking about life and "path" and "career" and "should" over thanksgiving, and I am not casting any of that aside. Far from it. I am looking to those long term goals in proper time perspective, and in the meantime finding a way to do something meaningful in the shorter-term that can make me HAPPY. Because all of that talk with you guys and Nana and Pops made me heartbreakingly unhappy for like a month. It still does, thinking about it now. But with Ava, and as I put together plans for the short term, I am reminded of why life is beautiful, and why it's worth living. It's for the fun stuff: for the love and the skiing and the things to be learned. It's for dreaming about future trips, and places to go and languages to speak. It's about playing a hard game of rec center basketball and loosing by one and cursing about it in the locker room afterward. It's about warm tea, nice strong coffee, and letting gravity pull you in arcs as you shift from one edge to another. It's all dancing.