the good ol' days.

unless you live under a rock, you know that the office ended forever on thursday.  it was my all time favorite tv show for sure, and like many other fans i really felt like i had a bond with the show.  so i delayed watching the finale for a few days, thinking that if i didn't watch it live on thursday then it wouldn't really end, at least not for me.  but yesterday was the day that i finally said goodbye.

i could sit here and write about my thoughts on the finale almost all day, but i know no one would want to read that.  in the last six minutes of the show, the characters gave their last interviews of the 'documentary.'  it was touching, heartwarming, and super sad.  but there was perhaps the line that struck me as a person more than anything else, thanks to the wisdom of andy bernard:

"i wish there was a way to know you are in the good ol' days before you've left them."  

i sobbed for a second and kicked my husband's leg on the couch.  we have had this discussion many, many times i feel like.  it's hard to have that level of awareness to know that you are experiencing a moment that will forever be important to you.  and i'm not talking about big ones, like the birth of a baby or marrying your love.  i mean the little things.

for me, it's the time i spent back in prague.  the day philip and i ditched class and spent the day walking through the city, and we bought loose-leaf tea and walked back to my apartment to drink it and talk.  it's the day that my two best friends and i took a plane, a bus and a train to meet our three best guy friends in venice, and we walked down the middle of the street with our giant backpacking bags to our hostel, which was actually a b&b super far out of the city.  it's the time we threw a party to say goodbye to our friend j's last newport cigarette, because that was all he smoked and you couldn't buy them in prague, and his supply from home was gone. 

i can honestly say that i think i have that gift, thanks to my deep-rooted penchant for nostalgia [to a fault sometimes].  the last time our whole crew had dinner before our last night bar-hopping, i had to excuse myself from the table, and parked it on the curb outside the restaurant to cry.  i knew that the upcoming goodbye with people who i felt knew me best would be one of the most difficult things i'd ever have to do.  i knew what was coming and what i had experienced in the past few months, and i even knew that what i would see in the coming months in prague wouldn't be as perfect.

PI and i discuss this because where i have that ability almost too soon, before the goodbyes even come, his is delayed.  very delayed.  it wasn't until seven months later that he finally was hit with the fact that we will never go to those same places with those same people, that it would never be the same.

photo from my good ol' days, with my bestest crew, rome 2006.

but andy's words were just perfect.  and they speak to the tendency of people to look ahead to the future and to back to the past with rose-colored glasses, rather than enjoying what they have at that moment. 

after i heard andy's thoughts and sobbed a little more, more poignancy came.  the last words of the show, again, seemed to speak to me, especially together with what andy had admitted.  pam had the honor of ending the show with:

"there's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. isn't that kind of the point?"

as my girlfriend W put it, those words need to be framed on the wall of everyone's home.  as a reminder to live in the present, to admire the beauty of mundane moments.  because it's there, if you look hard enough.

to hear andy + pam's words for yourself and catch the last few minutes of the office, check out hulu.  and grab a box of tissues.

til next time...

golden age thinking.

this afternoon i fixed myself a martini and sat down to finish the book i was reading, the great gatsby.  i actually never read it in middle school or high school like most people, and felt the time was high for me to read it. 

i have an endless curiosity of the lost generation, of hemingway and gertrude stein, of paris in the jazz age and during the war.  as a lover of literature and writers in general, i dragged PI to the famous literary cafes and the shakespeare & company bookstore, and devoured midnight in paris three times in the theaters [of course it doesn't hurt that we both love woody allen].

anyway - i found gatsby to be an amazingly beautiful novel.  i fell in love with a few lines of fitzgerald's and wanted to share them, of course..

'let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.'

 and the last lines of the novel were absolutely haunting:

'gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year receeds before us.  it eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and one fine morning --

and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

given gatsby's great obsession with the past, they were of course very fitting.  but sometimes i feel like i have that same nostalgia, that same wish to recreate that which has already happened.  i find it all the time in working on my book, in reading my old journals from my time in prague, in conversations i have with PI.  i want to go back to the time when my life was in it's golden age, when i lived far away, making friends with new people on 'the continent' and i never wanted it to end. 

on that note... a little woody allen dialogue on nostalgia.

 til next time...

:)

gettin sentimental.

i had to take PI to the airport tonight for another business trip.  we are kind of getting used to these little trips, and it's a little less weird now when i drop him off at the airport.

but when i got home tonight, i was getting changed for bed in our room, and i was thinking how much i miss him already.  he's only been gone a few hours, but i miss him being around so much.  i looked over at his side of the bed, which is pretty messy.  and i thought how lucky i am to have his mess around.

see, we did the long distance thing.  and i don't mean we lived a hour away from each other - for almost half of the first year we were together, we lived on different continents.  he was in LA, and i was in prague.  not exactly easy to handle.  and there were times when i didn't know if it would work, if i would ever see him again.  and there were times when i didn't think i could handle the distance anymore, and didn't know what we would do once we were on the same continent, since we would still live in different states.

needless to say, we worked it out.  he graduated and moved to denver so i could finish school, then we moved together out east.  and here we are, almost seven years later.

it's not our anniversary, or his birthday, or anything else.  it's just a wednesday in march when i remembered what it was like to never have him around.  when text messages from him were something special, because it cost so much money to send international texts.  and it's funny, because even if i wanted to get annoyed about his messy side of the bed, i couldn't.  because the truth is it makes my heart so happy to see his stuff lying around on the floor of the apartment we share together.  nothing could make me happier. 

ok, i know that was kind of sappy... but all you couples out there who have struggled with distances, you know what i am talking about.  sure, it's difficult.  but it was also one of the best things to happen to our relationship, because we had months to get to know each other [you really have to be creative to come up with things to talk about] and to build up that trust, and i know our relationship is all the more strong for it.  sometimes we joke about if we would even be married now if we hadn't had months of time apart. 

but even after all this time, somehow i love my husband more now than i ever have before.

alright, that's enough from me for tonight!  go hug someone you love : ] 

falling in love... venice, october 2006

a quiet day's thoughts on prague.

it's been a quiet day around here.

i've been thinking a lot about my life back in prague... not sure why or how that was set off, but it's been on my mind all day.

i don't think i've ever really talked about my time in prague on my blog so far.  i'm not going to go into it all now, except to say that it was definitely the best and most influential year of my life.  while i was there, and when i came back, i was doing a lot of writing.  

in my first life, i wanted to be a writer.  writing has always been a strength and passion of mine, and for a long time i believed that i could make a life out of it.  after taking some time off of college and doing some serious soul-searching, i realized that wasn't necessarily true.  i still do love writing, but things have really changed since my freshman year of college, when i thought i could be hired on by some magazine to be a staff writer.  and that doesn't really matter all too much, a lot of things changed in my life to put me where i am now, and i'm glad those things happened because it helped me make sure that i graduated from college.  

but now i find myself, once again, wondering what comes next.  out here in boston i have the opportunity to choose my path, start a career if i want.  but i find myself one more thinking about my writing.  i'm not totally sure at this point if it is something worth going back to or not, but what i do know is that i would be upset with myself if i didn't at least try. 

so, what that means is that i am going to try to take a look at my writing again before i get on the job hunt.  i say 'writing' like that because i am hesitant to classify it as anything in particular: too young to be a memoir, and embellished here and there to be fiction, while other parts are verbatim non-fiction.

but whatever it is, i am planning on digging it out of my past and injecting some new life into it, before deciding if it needs to into a permanent dumpster. 

that's what is going on here, today, on a quiet and cold boston day.

view over the vltava river, august 2006 [taken by yours truly]