Sunday, June 12, 2011

Time for a new adventure

My life's gone through some changes in the last couple years. After spending a year and a half not really living anywhere but on the Chinatown bus between NYC and Boston, I said goodbye to my friends and adopted city and made the move to Boston to be with my sweetheart.

Nine months later my sweetheart and I came to the heartbreaking conclusion that although we have the makings of a lifelong friendship, we differ in some fundamental ways. Without one or both of us changing some of the core components of who we are - which neither of us could ask of the other - we weren't going to be able to have the happy, healthy, lifelong relationship that we both so desperately wanted.

So I had to move on. I found my own place, an adorable little apartment in a lovely location. I dove into making it my own, furnishing it, fussing over little details. Between the apartment and work, which was insanely busy at the time, I was able to bury myself in busy-ness over the winter months as I set about emotionally healing and moving on with my life.

At some point during these months I got in touch with an old friend from my year at the ETH - yay for social networking sites! I had always been sad to have lost touch with all my friends there, so it was exciting to be able to catch up. He suggested I should really come back to visit Zürich, as I hadn't been back since I left 12 years ago. I kind of laughed it off, thinking, yeah, it would be nice, but... but what? Why not? So I tucked it into my head to mull over.

Then, in doing some research for an upcoming conference symposium I was helping to organize, I came across a very closely related conference taking place in April... in Dubrovnik.

That's it. The travel wheels started churning, which is always a dangerous thing. I've always wanted to go back to Dubrovnik after seeing it for just a few hours in November 1999. It's crazy expensive to get there from here. But from Zürich... entirely possible.

And so it began.

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