The way it goes...

When I flew to Rome this time for a holiday, by my best approximation, it was going to be 2 weeks of bliss: the first spent catching up with my brother's girlfriend, Lani, in Cinque Terre and perhaps beyond, and the rest of the time catching up with my best friend Jen, in Rome.

Of course, the actual experience has been an exercise in the unanticipated. There it goes again, life, running roughshod over all the best laid plans, made in vain, foolishly assuming we hold the reins of this thing.

The morning after I arrived, following a brisk run with Jen (more on that later), I hastily packed the smallest bag of my adventuring life, and hopped on a train bound for Cinque Terre. I should perhaps clarify that I am one of the lightest packers I know. I can pack a month of clothing in my carry on, and have on many occasions. I pride myself on my efficiency at travel. You know what they say..."Pride cometh before the fall." They speak the truth.

I ended up in Cinque Terre (literally, 5 Villages) with no map, no guidebook, no resource save for my iPhone--which worked, much to my surprise-- a camera, and a couple of changes of clothes, and hygiene essentials. Efficient, but not very wise.

The first night was a breeze, sort of. I wandered around in RioMaggiore, the first of the 5 Villages. I easily found an inexpensive hostel, packed with single lady travelers, and had a nice spicy seafood soup, as I was feeling a bit run down. That night, I discovered that this charming hamlet where "there are no cars" was actually one of the loudest places I have ever been in my life.

I tossed and turned for hours in an uncomfortable bed, sensing illness seeping into my bones. My head was filling with mucous, and my throat was raw and angry. Meanwhile, the streets, filled with obnoxious tourists, loud Italians, and dogs apparently being tortured. I did not sleep, and when 5 AM rolled around, the street, after several hours of relative quiet, was filled with the noise of garbage collectors and mopeds. I shut the windows and managed a couple hours of sleep.

Upon waking, My head was swimming in sickness, and my body intensely achy and sore-- most likely from the 45 minute run I'd subjected my unconditioned body to the morning prior. And then began the hiking. And the sweating. I'd forgotten to bring socks, so I went sockless. I hadn't brought a towel, so I dried myself with a long-sleeved shirt. I felt less adult than I have in years.

If lack of preparation and shoddy improvisation is the mark of youth, would someone please bring Grammaw her walker- because I am ready for the luxuries of old age!

Don't misunderstand me, this place was Gorgeous, Beautiful, and Magnificent. But I was feverish and aching. And hiking. Oh, the endless hiking. In village number 4, after asking everyone around, I realized that due to a glut of late-summer European tourism (owing to a long, cold spring), there were zero rooms available for a single lady for the night. I was sick, miserable, blistered, and seemingly stranded. I couldn't reach Lani, and I was running out of options.

I found a kind waitress who offered to let me sleep at her apartment. I found a nap in the shade of a fig tree on a hillside terrace. I met a handsome Italian who led me to the ocean and swam with me. Did I mention that I was hopped up on decongestants? These various mercies were all that kept me going.

AT&T sent me a text message to let me know that I'd used "an unusual amount" of international data. Yeah, like $300 worth! Oops! My phone was retired, after I determined I would take a train to greener pastures--namely a hotel room where I could sleep. I was becoming panicked with exhaustion.

So I took a train to Bologna. And slept like a baby in quiet comfort. Next, Modena, where I attended a Philosophy festival, sampled balsamic vinegar, and visited a botanical garden. Eventually I found my way back to Rome, after the danger of transmitting some horrific illness to Jen's two young children had passed.

Since then, there have been some side trips to Florence, and daily solo excursions to art museums, parks, monuments, restaurants, unusual attractions, and just a general sense of awe and introspection. Jen is a busy busy mother of two, and so I am on my own every day for the entirety of the day. This has been one of the most personally interesting and lonesome trips of my life.

It is difficult for an American to shun structure in lieu of spontaneity, but that has been the route this trip has thrusted upon me. There is no plan. I have no guidebook. Every day is an adventure, and I am having an un-curated experience. I am trying to enjoy every moment, without anxiety or expectation. The challenge is to see things well, to enjoy being, and to be satisfied with things exactly as they are, in this moment. It's harder than you might imagine.

Just know that as I wander through each day here, I am thinking of everyone I love. Every last one. And I am feeling gratitude for living such a wonderful life, being blessed with such good friends, fortunate enough to belong to a loving family. Not everyone has the opportunity to fly to another country and wander. To feel secure enough in themselves and their place in the universe to not mind being lost- a stranger in a strange land…To not recognize this and give it some thought would be criminal. I am in the cradle of Western Civilization, relishing her ruins, and swaddled in a sense of well-being, I give thanks.

Fickle Inspiration (and a vacation-borne confession)

Dear crickets who remain in my readership--- unless of course someone is actually reading (which I absolutely do not assume)--- I'm back. No, I'm really back, not just the pretend back where I post something every 3 months and pretend to be a blogger.

Because... I'm not really a blogger. I am a person who loves to write. And if a few select friends, family, and my 5th grade teacher Mrs. Pace are to to trusted, I have a nice talent for turns of phrase which has grown a bit rough, rusty and displaced over the past 13 months and could use a little exercise.

What happened? I could attribute my drop off in chronicling the minutiae of my life to so many things. Beginning with my "big girl job" working for the city wherein your trusty protagonist spent untold hours working as a public servant, paying into a retirement fund and enjoying the spoils of health and dental insurance. In short- I liked it, then I resented it, and ultimately I hated it.

It's not, of course, that I hate work, but rather that I hate the sort of senseless government sanctioned work I was doing- all the hours wasted in pointless meetings, all the restrictions imposed by federal funding, the pointless hoops I was required to jump through in order to grease the wheels of the little program I was running. But primarily the sense of loss of self that I began to experience on a daily basis, doling out my life in well-measured lumps of hours to little effect, and worse than that- little pay.

My job was in many ways pointless, and I performed it to the best of my abilities, but it made me feel smaller and less purposeful than I have made a habit of feeling in my life. When I quit last month, the sensation of lightness I experienced was startling. The sense of a yoke being lifted from my burdensome, beastly back.

And then there was the quiet end to my long term relationship with Chip; dear, wonderful Chip whom I love and adore and am so intensely grateful for. He is such a spectacular human being, and an extraordinary friend. Anyone who knows him must agree. I felt bashful for a long time, because while our demise was mutual, it was primarily my doing, and in retrospect I still feel ashamed that I let him work so hard for so long to make something work that I knew wasn't right for us both.

Shortly thereafter, I met someone who is kind and keen and generous and supportive, whom I eventually moved in with, and am still with today, almost 14 months after we first met. And this has been perhaps the larger reason for my long silence here.

It is very difficult to maintain close contact with all of the family I care for when I feel as though I am keeping a secret. And this relationship has been, in many ways, a secret. Not to my friends, or my coworkers or employers, but to some of my family. This is not the way I would have ever chosen for things to be.

You see, from the time that I was a teenager, I questioned my attractions & relationships, to their core. What I was drawn to and what I acted upon were two entirely separate worlds, and last year I forced myself, finally, to be honest about who I am. Chip and I parted on amicable, generously understanding terms, and when I met Michelle, I felt in many ways like a rudderless ship coming home to port, setting down an anchor, and making myself at home. Finally, my heart found a sort of peace I had not known before.

I cannot help the fact that I love and have sought the companionship of another woman. I find myself distressed by the notion that people like me have made a "choice" in this direction or the other.

Believe me, if there was ever a choice to be made, I'm pretty sure we would all choose the easy, simple route, where there is no need to make uncomfortable confessions to family, or to risk being judged by the outside world. Where one can simply marry and have a family of their own and enjoy the simple rights and privileges of the majority.

I sense that I could have done just that- chosen to deny my innermost feelings, married and had children and always swallowed the lingering sense of dissatisfaction that lived in my heart. But how would that be fair to anyone? I believe in honesty, and in happiness, and in the life-affirming paths that these virtues lead to.

Which is why I find myself here today, on a breezy afternoon in Rome- where I am vacationing by myself- suddenly inclined to set the record straight once and for all.

I'll not maintain my silence, and I hope not to be judged by those I love most in this world.

And I promise to write more about more interesting things than the complicated layers of a private life that have kept me from expressing myself freely in this absurdly public forum.

Dear family, I miss you all, and am thinking of you today from the cradle of Western Civilization.

Giddy-Up!

It has been brought to my attention that this is my longest gap thus far in the blogosphere (I invite you all to collectively throw up in your mouth a little at the mention of that highly ugly word).

No excuses. I've been busy, nothing new there. Life has been changing at a breakneck pace over here, and it has been difficult to sit down and put it all in a nice little box for your reading pleasure/edification.

O' these past months have seen some miles put down on ye olde treads of my life, between the Gelato Tour of Rome and all of the assorted Big Changes that have been going on in life.

Upon my return from Rome, I felt ill at ease about my business partnership, about my stress levels, and about the constantly meager sum in my bank account, despite my near constant work week. I created a new mantra: "More leisure. Less stress. More money." and repeated it under my breath for months, as I made some serious moves toward affecting change in my life.

I have a big-girl job now, working for the City of Austin as the coordinator for an initiative called Commute Solutions. It's part time, not grueling, and I have incredible benefits. Nothing not to love about all that. I still work one shift a week at the spa (that 4 days a month earns me almost as much as the city job!) and do freelance design for various clients that still, inexplicably, are coming my way.

I was awarded my job with the city the day that I dissolved the business partnership with Ryne. It struck me all at once that sometimes if you ask nicely enough, and with great persistance, the universe just says, "yes," and that's that.

Let me call this the first chapter of an unusually newsy update. I'm at work and feel guilty about updating my blog on taxpayer dollars. Oops.

Success might actually kill me

People! I am speaking, so to speak, to the 2 people who might actually not have given up on my blog. My poor, sad, neglected little blog. Is it any wonder I don't want children?

Things are a little bit insane in these parts. Delicious Landscapes (the company I formed in November with one of my fellow graduates of the Ball State Landscape Arch program) has taken off this spring, and is suddenly extremely busy. And it is hard to manage all this work.

I feel like I am wearing a million hats:

• client handler
• landscape designer
• foreman
• plant buyer
• accountant
• quality control engineer
• advertiser
• landscape cheerleader/tyrant

...and none of the hats fit exactly right.

I never wanted to do design/build, so it comes as some surprise that I am doing just that. I question this field daily, because it is our first year, and the work is so hard, hours so long, learning curve so steep, partnership so tricky.

But we're getting through. It's simply exhausting, and being a business owner I feel as though I never have any time off. So far, my bank account is not reflecting the hours I work, and that in and of itself is deeply frustrating. But perseverance is key in these things, of course I know that. I just seem to forget when it's 10PM on Saturday and all my friends are out and I am trying to finish a bid for a client that was supposed to be done Friday. Sigh.

I'm not complaining, either. I'm grateful for the work, for the challenge, for all of it. I have a wonderful life and it is important to me to remind myself of this at each and every turn.

This is a strange time, where I am contemplating graduate school (I know, I know...) in California, because my heart still wants to work in international development, and I can't seem to shake the urge no matter how hard I try.

Meanwhile, I am trying to determine whether the answer to this analogy:

my personality is to my current life as:

a cork is to a bottle

OR

a fish is to a bicycle

Chip and I are taking a "month off". What this means is that I am not living in our shared house, and we are not communicating. This is not out of contempt, but rather out of a mutual desire to figure things out and decide if this is where we both want to be, together.

I cannot accurately describe the stress of trying to run a business without the comfort and convenience of our home office at my disposal. It is, in fact, a logistical nightmare, and I can't begin to tell you how much I look forward to moving back into the house next week.

This has been one looooooooong few weeks.

So there, consider yourself updated. One can only hope that my next post is more on the waxing poetic side of things, florid and fruity.

Otherwise, I just want you all to know how much I love you, and life, and all its assorted trials and tribulations. Quite a ride, babies, quite a ride we're on.

Miss Remiss

Dear me, I've not posted in over a month...again. What will we do with me?

As I type, the giant kitchen window (leaking bone-chilling drafts, of course) reveals a spread of sopping wet, nasty snow. Blech.

I know I am supposed to be oohing and ahhing, making slush angels, drinking hot cocoa, snuggling, and generally merrymaking about this anomalous weather. Alas, I cannot.

Cold is not for me. Snow is great, if I'm sledding or on skis (and not where I live). But this wintry mix nonsense? Everyone who claims to enjoy it must have never lived in a miserable northern clime where winter is endless and crushes the joy out of everything for 5 months at a time.

Wait, is that hyperbolic? Surely I jest. No. I jest not.

Viva la jungle!

Which brings me to our next order of business: Carnival.

I was able to take almost an entire week off so that I could attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans this year. Suffice to say that despite a case of the sniffles, I am still reeling from the endless days and nights of false eyelashes, bustles, banquets of beauty, flocks of friends, miles of parades, endless glitter and glitz and glam, and of course love and squalor.

I know that when some people think of Mardi Gras, they think of Bourbon Street and boobs and beads.

I assure you that my Mardi Gras in no way resembles that stereotype. In fact, it is quite the opposite. My experience of this holy holiday in the Big Easy leaves me suffused in the warm glow of realization: my friends are the most inspiring, beautiful, creative, loving, and delightful people one could ask for.

It's good to be reminded of these things.

While day-to-day may pale by compare, I always know that within the folds of my life, there are nooks and crannies overflowing with the bounty of love, the livid colors of life, the inescapable lures of passion and possibility. Just a heartbeat away.

To see some visual evidence, I direct you to my facebook profile (click on pictures of me, and then let your fingers do the walking):

http://www.facebook.com/francescafury

31 and having FUN

So, even though my birthday is not until Wednesday, I feel as though it has already come and gone. You see, I had a little get together slumber party at my favorite paradise in Texas: King spa and Sauna. In case you haven't heard, this is a little prelude to heaven, right here on earth. But don't take my word for it, see for yourself:

http://www.dallaskingsauna.com/index2.php

It's a Jjim-jil-bang (say that 5 times fast!), a traditional Korean spa. What that means is that it is a split-gender bath house, with a lady area and a man area, where you get into your birthday suit and enjoy the delights of hot tubs, steam rooms, cold plunges, and scrubs and massages. Back in the mixed-gender area, everyone wears spa-issued pajamas (pink for girls, gray for boys) and lounges around in the many dry saunas, the restaurant, movie theater, karaoke room, and well, lounge areas.

It's very Korean. But super friendly and welcoming to us whiteys. Which is nice, because it would be a lot less enjoyable if you were dealing with discrimination in the place.

Me and something like 22 of my dear friends met up there and enjoyed ourselves tremendously. I loved it! It was like a birthday for everyone!

Anyhow, birthdays are funny. Last year, I was very concerned about celebrating my 30th. It was ridiculous, me getting all pouty because things weren't working out perfectly. Not to mention that I was insanely broke, stressed out, unemployed, and injured.

This year is completely unlike last year, in almost every sense.

I still don't know the future, but then who amongst us does? (and if you do, don't tell me, I want it to be a surprise!)

Things aren't perfect, but they are pretty wonderful. My outlook is sunny, I am surrounded by people I love in a city that brings me joy. I am doing work that reflects my interests and values, using skills that I went to school to learn.

What are birthdays for then, if not remembering how far we've come in the past year, and evaluating what we want, who we are, and how things are going?

I'm doing well and trying to do good, too. I hope you all are in the same boat, because right now, from my birdsnest, it looks like pretty smooth sailing.

Resolved

I'd like to be a less crappy "blogger". I neglect the hell out of this thing, which is either a mercy to those of you unaccustomed to long, rambling sentences bloated with florid phraseology, or a tease to those of you who cannot get enough of said sentences.

This year is off to a jolly good start.

Of course, I can't keep up with correspondences, but I can spell remarkably well, and my business is booming. Someday, I'll even direct you to our website.

I love landscape design, but can't help but wonder if I will be forced at some point to succumb to the nagging inner voice that tells me that my talents are being wasted on residential landscape design. I'm not entirely sure that they are, but there is a part of me that thinks in broader, grander terms and often wonders if I should be looking at graduate schools and applying myself to international aid work, or at least international development.

I mean, that was my plan at the outset. I never meant to be here in Austin, designing landscapes for whomever is willing and able to pay for my services.

I'm pretty sure that happiness (and the ability to support onesself) is the goal here, in which case I am doing relatively well... but there is always the question of whether I am doing enough to help my fellow man.

The Haiti thing, well, we all know how horrific all that is, right?

And the search for answers is not even remotely forthcoming. But it begs many questions. And those questions birth more questions, an endless flood of them oozing from the skin of this issue: where do you start? and with whom? and who administrates?

I've studied all this for years and still find my probings only able to yield more questions, and no definitive answers.

Meanwhile, I got the flu last week. It was thankfully brief, but terribly uncomfortable. My fever peaked at 103, and it made me quite nervous for a short, delirious spell.

I knew I was better when I began cleaning, compulsively, all the things I'd been too sick to lift a finger to take care of before.

And when I began to think, "oh my god, this is what it feels like to be healthy, not in pain, and functional!"

So here it is: healthy, not in pain, and highly functioning. That is my week in a nutshell.

And me, I couldn't be happier if I tried.

Sending love,

~F