Moving to a City for a Few Months...Several Thousand Miles Away

I started this blog in January for two reasons. The first is hopefully obvious by this point, especially since I've mentioned it a few times: I want to chronicle my thoughts on life as they happen to me out in the suburbs of Virginia. This is a creative outlet for me. For the second reason, well, it's because I'm going on a trip and I felt like it would be a fun way to update friends and family on any of the fun things I do while abroad. In a few days, assuming the weather hold up (go home, snow), I'll be flying for about 24 hours to make it to Lusaka, Zambia.


If you don't know where Zambia is, look at this handy map. :)

I'm really excited for this trip. I'll be in Zambia for about three months, which should be enough time to get a feel for the city and have some crazy things happen. It will also give me sufficient time to get out of the city and do some sightseeing, perhaps to Victoria Falls or the Kariba Dam (oddly, the two places I REALLY want to go in Zambia are both on the border with Zimbabwe).

This trip also will be good for me personally. Sometimes I wonder if I'd enjoy living abroad or if I like the comforts of the United States too much to really want to give that up. Every time I try to figure it out, I realize I won't really know until I try it. But it's not easy to just pick up and move overseas, so having a short timeframe--just three months--seemed like a good way to do it. If I like it, I'll find a way back abroad. If I don't like it, well, no harm no foul. I come back to the US and stay here and just do short trips here and there as appropriate.

How does one prepare for a trip like this? Honestly, I'm not sure. It's Friday, but I'm not even packed yet. My suitcase is still in the closet, but even if it was out, nothing would be in it. I haven't done laundry in three weeks and am running out of clothes. I guess that'll be a needed preparatory task. I'm also trying to meet up with all my friends before I leave. I know it's only three months, but that actually is a long time especially when it's in the spring and people will be coming out of hibernation and beginning to engage more frequently with one another again. I'm a little sad I'll be missing it, but I'll be back by the summer to partake in at least the latter 2/3 of the outdoor time this year.

So that's where things stand. If all goes well, I'm in Zambia by mid-week and having experiences I can't get here in Virginia. I'm sure things will happen that will be fodder for future posts. I'm super excited yet very nervous too. It won't be stories from a DC suburb, but it will still be stories of a suburbanite figuring out life!!!

This post's video is below. I'm a Verizon guy, but AT&T employs some marketing geniuses for this series of commercials. This one in particular is definitely one of my favorites.

Breakup Song Lyrics and Un-Dating a Person I Was Never Really Dating in the First Place

I'm a huge fan of iHeartRadio because the playlists I start always end up playing music I like and then showing me new songs that I also really like but never knew about. I know, that's the whole point of the app, but it actually works! I was listening to my Miranda Lambert station and a song by Brantley Gilbert came on (pure country station...woot!). Now, I've heard his songs on the radio before, but usually just the fluff happy songs. Well, this was not one of those songs.

Thanks to my friend C (not naming names, although it's not like I'm complaining about her), I've been paying attention to song lyrics recently. The song that really got me was Brantley Gilbert's You Promised, which is one of the best(?) breakup songs I've heard in a long time. And in true obsessive fashion, I've been listening to it and his other sentimental songs nonstop on YouTube. Not only are the lyrics really touching, but I also love that it's practically acoustic--guitar and piano only. There's something about country singers stripping their songs and singing about very emotional subjects that just gets to me.

But then it hit me: I don't know why I identify with breakup songs so much. It's not like I go through breakups often. Instead, I came to the realization the other day that it's very hard to break up with someone who you're not dating but who you sometimes think you might want to date and do date-like things with on an occasional basis. Over the last few years, I've gone on a few dates here and there but nothing that was ever too serious. Hence, no real breakups. My typical M.O. is something like this:

1. Meet someone
2. Become friends with said person
3. Become really good friends with said person and do things that casual outsiders could consider dates, except that they're not
4. Wonder what it would be like to date said person
5. Decide it would be fun and a good idea to date said person while recognizing that I'm probably firmly in the friend zone because we've known each other for so long and did so many things together as just friends
6. Concoct endless plans to determine if said person is someone I should pursue anyway
7. Secretly "break up" with said person in my head after realizing that it'd be too awkward to use any of the plans from step #6
8. Go back to being just friends with said person and pretending steps #4-7 never happened.

So perhaps I do break up with people (see step #7), just not in an easily identifiable way that makes my love of country breakup songs justifiable. Until I get out of this odd cycle, I'll continue to break up with people I was never dating and who didn't know I was trying to find ways of asking them out in my head. And continue to listen to sentimental acoustic-y songs.

Now for the video that makes me happy: I stumbled across this post's video a few months back. I like looking at the foreign talent shows (the Idol, X Factor, and Voice series) to see what amazing people they discover in their audition rounds but about whom we probably will never hear in the US. Angel Tupai is one such person, from X Factor Australia. Jessie J sounds amazing on this song, but holy cow, Angel does wonders with it. Imagine being in that audience and having her come out and just sing so beautifully after what was probably a string of just average singers.

Dinner For One, Exploring My Cooking Ability

It's a Sunday night and there's no work tomorrow (yay President's Day!), so I did the most logical thing I could think of and cooked myself a dinner that had me nursing multiple different cooking devices. I tend to avoid this type of cooking, mostly because I'm really bad at timing it all correctly. I vividly remember one time when I accidentally finished making my main meal 20 minutes before my side dish, so I essentially had to eat them completely separately, which ruined the whole point of my intended meal. My Achilles heel is usually in the amount of time it takes to warm up the oven or boil the water. Anyway, that one experience meant that I tend to not make complicated meals except when I'm feeling particularly adventurous. And today, I felt adventurous.

Tonight's dinner wouldn't win any awards or cooking competitions. I'm a huge fan of The Taste (the only cooking reality show I watch on TV) and I know that my palate is not well-developed. I'm an eat-to-live sort, not a live-to-eat. In essence, I eat only because my body tells me to, and not because I particularly enjoy the task. And since I don't particularly enjoy eating, why would I waste time cooking the meal?

I only have a few basic meals that are easy to cook and scale to cooking for one person--pasta, tacos, burgers, and chicken cutlets. Sometimes I cook extra to make lunches out of them, but I've also discovered that it's VERY easy to get tired of a meal by the time it becomes your dinner, then lunch, then another lunch all in a row. I don't have a good way around that, so I keep doing it and complain silently to myself with the hope that someday I'll come up with a better solution. Or stop cooking for one so much.

Yummy Dinner For One

Yet, every now and then, I just get that urge to go all-out. Tonight's dish was pasta and chicken. I told you it wasn't very refined, but I did spice and sauce it up a bit to give it a bit more flavor. Most surprisingly, at least to me, was that I timed the boiling of the water and the warming up of my George Foreman grill perfectly, so that all my chicken was finished grilling at the same time that my pasta finished cooking and my sauce was finished being warmed. I know, I'm a cooking genius. After cutting up some chicken and mixing it with the pasta, then throwing sauce all over it and adding in a little bit of spices (lemongrass seed and parsley), I siphoned off half the pasta to a future dinner or lunch. So really, I cooked for two, but this wasn't as egregious as most of my other cooking attempts over the years with multiple extra meals.

And that is how I cook for one. I wonder if my solo cooking would be more enjoyable if I took my cues from Hannah Hart of My Drunk Kitchen. If you've never heard of her, watch this video. All of her episodes are funny, but this is one of my favorites, mostly because of the brief struggle she has with the microwave/timer, a situation I encounter often (even after 18 months in my house):

18 Months To Meet Some of My Neighbors

Note: I tried posting this yesterday but had no luck. So here's the post, one day after I intended to have it up. 

I haven't purposefully not met my neighbors. In many ways, it just sort of happened because I'm one of the few people in the neighborhood without any children, and with long work schedules (both me and my neighbors), there are few times we'd naturally run into each other besides going to our cars at 6am. And for those of you who know me, I'm not the most chatty at 6 in the morning.

That is, until today. I went outside to clear my car of 14 inches of snow, and almost everyone else was outside too. I finally got to meet (well, say hello) to the new family down the street's father, as well as the guy whose car is always immaculately clean and makes me jealous. I was also encouraged when I saw people helping each other shovel when they were done clearing their cars. Nothing like a major snowstorm to bring people together.

Prior to today, I really only knew people from my attendance at an HOA meeting last summer. Every time I meet people in the neighborhood I think that they're nice people but don't know of any situations when our paths would cross again. I sometimes wonder what I could do to change that but come up empty. "I'm not intentionally antisocial," I tell myself, "someday I'll be fully integrated in the community." But honestly, I don't know what more I can do at this point. It's 18 months in, and I'm still just meeting my neighbors.

That's all I've got for today. The 14 inches of snow got me the day off work, allowing me to have a lazy day watching Winter Olympics coverage. I like the portmanteau naming of winter storms, and Snochi is definitely my favorite for this one. And for this week's video that makes me happy, ignore the annoying BBC guy that didn't think Moussambani belonged in the Olympics...seeing an Equatoguinean complete the race and win his heat IS the Olympic spirit.

My Eight Years on Facebook, a Trip Down Memory Lane

Mark Zuckerberg is a marketing genius. Facebook has so totally transformed our lives, and every time you think the platform will remain static, it comes out with something new and exciting. The summary videos for Facebook's 10-year anniversary was just that, and I absolutely loved it.

My First Facebook Profile Picture

I enjoy taking journeys down memory lane, because I feel that where you've been makes who you are. Plus, after eight years on Facebook, I was curious to see what I was doing online back in 2006. My most liked posts over the last eight years were about me eavesdropping in French, me buying a house, me going on a trip to Africa, and me pretending that Beyoncé singing Happy Birthday at a concert was directed at me. The part about the photos I've shared had some really nice things too. Overall, it was a great 62-second video.

The Facebook summary inspired me to go back and look at my 2,043 tweets on Twitter. I joined that site in June 2009 during my summer job at Georgetown but only used it sporadically until early 2010, when I began to use Twitter to distract me from my senior theses. In a cursory review of my tweets, I noticed that I talk about a few select things: the weather, basketball, big nationally-televised events, and my attempts to eavesdrop on people (whether it was the couple living above me or crazy people on the bus). I sort of want Twitter to do a summary video too, because I'm curious as to what they would come up with.

I've been trying to figure out what other social media sites I've used in the past so I could take a look at various aspects of my online life years ago. I know I had a Myspace and a Xanga, but unfortunately I can't remember my passwords for either and, in any case, my accounts on both have probably been deleted by this point. I know social media gets a bad rap from a little people who think we spend too much time on it, but I think it's a unique way to chronicle big--and small, as I discovered on Twitter--moments in our lives. The trips down memory lane are a lot of fun, and I'm glad Facebook reminded us of the good and intimate purposes of social media with its minute-long videos.

If these clips from Family Feud don't crack you up, you have no sense of humor: