I'm so bad at introductions, you guys.
Most people reading this already know me and are only reading this so they can be supportive in the least involved way possible. I'm not knocking them, just acknowledging that we, as humans, are incredibly selfish and will behave in the least altruistic way at least 64% of the time. (If you ever find yourself being intimidated by the $10 words I employ with regular gusto, know that I had to google the correct spelling of altruistic and then some antonyms of altruistic just so i could see if unaltruistic was a word or not.) (It's not.)
I'm not trying to be cynical. I just recently reread The Fault in Our Stars and the world seems a little bleak to me. If you haven't read The Fault in Our Stars, you definitely should. Or maybe you definitely should not. Whether or not you will enjoy this book is entirely dependent on how willing you are to have your emotions ripped from your body, trampled on by a stampede of stiletto-wearing dingos, eaten by those dingos ("A dingo ate my emotional well-being" lol), and then flung back into your face as eventual emotion-filled dingo-excrement. Luckily for authors and screenwriters everywhere, I am the kind of person who loves going through that kind of emotional turmoil. Repeatedly. Have you ever closed a book in the middle of a sentence to shout, "WHY WAS I EVEN GIVEN EMOTIONS?" at your bedroom ceiling, which is where you have placed your image of a vague, metaphorical sense of a non-binary gender higher power? Have you ever dry sobbed into the pages of a book because your body literally had no more tears left to cry? If you want to experience all of these things and more, read The Fault in Our Stars!!!
WOW, I let those two paragraphs get away from me. What I'm trying to get at is that maybe I don't need to write an introductory post, because most of you reading this already know me, either through the carefully crafted internet persona I have maintained largely through Twitter, or through real-life (in which case, you have probably received some really pathetic text messages from me. Thanks for still answering my phone calls, everyone).
While I don't need to introduce myself, perhaps I should introduce this blog. This is a corner of the universe I want to use to keep track of the last year I'll be spending in the city I have lived in for my entire life, Pittsburgh. Not to say I'll never come back to my hometown, but by this time next year, I plan to be living in New York City, indefinitely. So yeah, that's terrifying. A few months ago, I had a really surreal moment as I was walking home with a friend. We had just been to an end-of-the-year goodbye dinner for another friend who was going home to LA for the summer, while the rest of us would be spending our summer in and around Pittsburgh. Dinner had been magical. We ate Thai food and stacked our phones in a pile in the middle of the table so we couldn't use them at all (this is a practice that I recommend everyone partake in for at least one in every three dining-out experiences with friends. Thai food optional.) Everyone else was going to see a show, but this friend and I opted to just walk home. The walk was longer than we thought it would be, and the sun began setting as we got closer to home. We reached the top of a hill just as the sky turned the kind of purple-pink that only early summer sunsets deliver; the dark of the Pittsburgh skyline stood out against the pastel sky and I can honestly say it took my breath away. I've been taking moments like that for granted for 21 years. I don't know how many more moments like that I'm going to get in the city I've called home since the day I was born. When I'm not too busy inundating the blogosphere with my usual brand of witty, sarcastic, and self-depricating humor, I want to share little snippets of why Pittsburgh is the best place in the entire world, and how ashamed I am that it's taken me twenty years to figure that out.
Maybe I should also explain the blog's title. One of my favorite quotes in the entire world is, "She took the leap and built her wings on the way down." I've been trying to live my life more according to this quote recently. I like plans. Plans are great things. Plans are how things like cities and television programing and work schedules are created. I really hate doing things without plans. But I've come to realize that maybe my life would work out better if I just let things fall into place sometimes. A recent trip I took happened that way, mostly through divine intervention and how amazing my voice teacher is and the Secret (I'm a big fan of the Secret, everybody. Except for the weird, victim-blamey parts). But a lot of wonderful things were created without plans, like microwaves and my artificial sweetener poison of choice, saccharin (I know Sweet'N Low is totally going to kill me. I'm over it). For the record, I had to google "things that were created by accident" just now, because PLANS ARE THE ONLY WAY. But from now on, I'm trying to build my wings on the way down. I'll let you know how that goes. (It might not go well.)
I want to end this by saying that everyone totally has permission to publish any and all blackmail-worthy information they have on me if I do not regularly update this blog. I had a blog last summer that I posted to exactly three times. I let it die. People got really mad at me. I swear to my vague, metaphorical sense of a non-binary gender higher power that I will not let this blog fall to the same fate. Everyone totally has permission to show my mom the pictures of me during Tour de Franzia 2012 if I do. And that's a promise.
UPDATE: I PICKED AN OMBRE LAYOUT TOTALLY BY MISTAKE. NOT HAVING PLANS WORKS. HAHAHAHA.
