Here I Am
I was at Barnes & Noble last week and a book called ‘The Average American Male’ caught my eye. I can’t remember who the author is, but I grabbed the book, sat down, and read the entire thing – cover to cover – in about an hour. Granted, I’m a pretty fast reader, but I’ve never actually sat down in a bookstore and devoured a book quite like I did that one. It was in the fiction section, which prevents me from accepting any specific incident in the book as fact, but I find it hard to believe that the book is entirely based in fiction. Essentially, it’s an anonymous portrait of an American man in his mid-twenties, living in an urban setting in America . It’s vulgar, loud, and highly obnoxious (which are precisely the reasons I couldn’t put it down). After I put it down, I decided that I simply must find a similar voice for myself. Perhaps not so vulgar, loud, and obnoxious – but honest and uncensored. That is what I hope to put forth in this blog. Here is my story so far:
I’ve lived in Seattle for my entire life. I was born, raised and schooled here, and now I work here. I’m a liberal non-feminist (I know, I know… interesting combination) and I don’t belong to a church, although I was raised Episcopalian. I graduated from the University of Washington two years ago and now spend my time working in one of two places: as a hostess at El Gaucho Seattle or in the advertising department at an athletic corporation in the city. In the past three years, I’ve moved from the University District to Greenlake to Belltown and now reside in the mucher edgier/trendier neighborhood of Capitol Hill. In my humble opinion, Capitol Hill is the shit. It is the only neighborhood in Seattle where you can’t see three Starbucks on every block – instead, you can see three transgender individuals alongside two college students, a hippie, a yuppie, a hipster, and a gangster. I love it. As much as I love Seattle , I’ve been getting a major travel bug lately and might have to get out of here in the next year. My stint at the athletic corp. is over in March and I just might jump across the pond to Australia and New Zealand for a couple months – just to see what’s out there. That’s a hypothetical though; I’m not very good at making plans. For now, I’m just throwing every other paycheck into savings and will go from there.
In the meantime, I will focus on losing the 20 lbs I’ve gained since college graduation by participating in a triathlon in February. That should be interesting, but I figure that I’ve always wanted to do one and there’s really no time like the present to go after it. It’s difficult to train when you work as much as I do, but what else am I really doing with my free time? I don’t have a television, so I’m not sitting at home and I really don’t have any extra money lying around, so I’m not shopping… I think I’m actually just spending too much of my free time partying with my friends, which needs to stop. I love to work out and need to focus myself on becoming a multi-sport athlete. I’ve been looking up training plans on the internet and found a few that are 12-16 week programs with reasonable time commitments. I plan on spending 5-6 days per week training for the triathlon. Additionally, I am going to do some real grocery shopping tomorrow morning and adjust my diet to help shed pounds that are inhibiting my training process. The way I look at it is, I just turned 24 and before I hit a quarter-century, I want to have accomplished something HUGE. Travel is on the horizon and I hope to be in another part of the world or country at this point next year, but intermittently, it is very important to my development for me to accomplish a major physical turn-around. Word.
