Oh, the brilliant lights.

I'm visiting New York City and it's marvelous.

My day-dreamy love-affair with NYC has always been just that. Daydreams. I had the wonderful experience of visiting for five days with Anne and her mom for both our High School senior trips. Mrs Pam is an adventurous, sweet lady and we zipped up and down the city to see all the tours and show she had arranged: touring the UN, backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and seeing Avida, seeing Wicked on Broadway and Il Divo at Carnegie Hall, and touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art - as well as enjoying the local pizza, coffee, and cupcake shops. Since then, NYC was like a fuzzy dream in my head and I couldn't wait for the opportunity to visit again, and wishing deep-down for the opportunity to move there. I told myself that once I graduated, I would visit. So now I am.

I asked my friend Emily, a NYC resident of five years now, if I could stay with her, and it all worked out beautifully. With the encouragement of my boss and co-worker I set up dates in mid-August, which is when I felt I should go, and bought the ticket a month ago. Since arriving here late Thursday afternoon, I have seen Times Square, 'Chicago' on Broadway, the movie 'Expendables', the Museum of Natural History, 'Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind' by the Neofuturists, three New York City markets, 2 fantastic coffee shops, the lower east side, the upper west side, Midtown, Harlem, Central Park, the observatory of the Empire State building at night, Seaport, Wall Street, shopped through 5th Ave, and ate a ton of food and spent time with some wonderful friends.

And I still have three more days here. ((^_^))

When I think of the nitty-gritty of being back in Huntsville in a few days, I feel.... frustration at the Alabama Board of Nursing, because the renewal requirements for a recently registered nurses are vague and contradictory, and their website format sucks. Annoyance because my website bookmarks to hundreds of websites have become unbearably disorganized and I don't know an efficient way to fix them, thus making me hate browsing the web when I need to. Nervousness because it'll remind me that I have a mere three weeks to find a job and a place to live in Nashville and the lil-engine-that-could attitude towards it all is sometimes challenging to maintain. Anxious because my room is in varying stages of packed/unpacked/donate/yard sale/debatable stacks and boxes and in piles in my closet and I just...can't...handle...the chaos.

However, it's okay. Because I'm visiting New York City. And when I get back from this brilliant adventure, I'll tackle my responsibilities one day at a time. Until then, I'm gonna breathe this all in.