Midtown Me

Sometimes I feel as though I am seeing my neighborhood through my own eyes…deep huh?
As I was driving out of TJ’s parking lot today these were my thoughts, :”Modern Urbanism as experienced by me. I live in these streets not on them. I walk in between these tress not through them. I don’t really attend the festivals and larger city sponsored parties. My gatherings happen more on the sidewalk crack side if things.
I feel separate from the all of the perceived baseball hat clad assholes who feel like they are a part of midtown and live near piedmont park because they are “part of the scene”. I am much more akin to the strung out older gay men that take their vodka tonics with little tonic and have death defining roller blading stories on the hills surrounding the park. I too have had my suicidal, down in the dumps, inhabiting this neighborhood before it was like this stories.
But this is the thing…
Nobody gets it, believes it. Top all of the rest I am simply a white girl in her late twenties paying too much rent to live by the park and go back and forth to my job which is no longer in the food service industry. I guess I could pretend to truly be one of these women…except I’m not and I would always feel inadequate (or superior) when listening to their laments of over paid corporate jobs and joy if their proximity to this park.
This park, this piedmont park is my heart and soul.

What started out as my in between has slowly become my…life…twenties…college years and adolescent memories. It is my everything. I am fine like that. I will continue to represent, proverbially dressed in black for the poor and beaten down, living in what USED to be the hopeless side of town.


~How I Feel About Paris Today~

More than ever baby, more than ever. The more I become comfortable with being an adult that is from the land I inhabit, the more I feel closer to affecting my dream, living my authentic purpose and getting the fuck back to Paris.

The Basics

I often find myself trying to fool myself into seeing my life in the simplest of terms as possible. I mean to say…the good things are simple things, like bread and olive oil kind of stuff. The most entertaining things are the free things like a night of love to be shared with your closest friends and a bottle of your favorite wine. And the worst things, the things that hurt the most are also the simplest of all as well – like being lied to and excluded from things. My whole point about the basics is that I only ever understand those pleasures for what they are – after they pass. In the middle of making a beautiful cake, I never feel like I am living the most beautifully simple and domestic part of my life. In the middle of the walks I take in my neighborhood I never feel like I am “WALKING” and it is a beautiful and simple pleasure. Most of the time I manage to understand these things for what they are after they have already come to pass. In the middle of these moments everything is always more complicated and over processed. The only time things really slow down for me is on the beach and even then sometimes my idea of what I should be feeling interrupts the simple pleasure of what I am actually living. I am planning a party – a brunch if you will – for Hugo. I intend for it to be filled with the best of the simplest of pleasures. I even intend the time to be simple and non-complicated. I intend sunlight and baking and open air. I see myself wearing braided hair and a sun dress – (you see how I over think these things) but most of all – I hope to see him smiling and hopefully feeling loved and cared for by the people in his life. That is the simplest, the least complicated, the most basic gift I can give him.

The highlight of my life

So I left you last with a cliffhanger of sorts...what do I regret the most was the question du jour. I haven't really been able to pull myself back here to the keyboard to type out the answer to that. Mostly because it seems so...trivial...juvenile...and...outdated.

I guess I'll just be out with it then. But first, I think a section change would be appropriate right about now.

~How I feel About Paris Today~

I regret leaving Paris. I know, I should be zen and accepting of my life in the past 7 years. And I am...for the most part. I understand the monumental importance of coming back here to the states and more deeply planting my roots. Sometimes, however, I just can't help but wonder about the what-ifs. What if I had stayed and taken the job working for the American family in St. Germain...what if I had not gone off my au pair visa and moved on into a student visa and then graduated and become a grown-up in between? What if I didn't comeback and eventually end up driving around in my big red truck and I didn't own a slate cheese plate and have to order lavender products online because I went to the south of france in the summers and picked my lavender up there? What if??????

This is the regret cycle I find myself in the middle of. To answer my own question...If I had stayed, taken the job and the studio, moved on to the student visa and eventually a different job...maybe some guy...I wouldn't have the slate cheese plate or the big red truck or the moments I've spent with my father in south Georgia.

I wouldn't feel so close to my sisters and mothers. I wouldn't have Hugo or Harmony or Kate or Marian or Bianca or Branka or Fernando or all of the other names.

I wouldn't have been a bride's maid in Marie's wedding. I wouldn't have left Paco on the eve of Kate's wedding. I wouldn't have raised my dog into her old age or been present for the birth of Atlas or Riley.

I wouldn't have ventured to see Coleman in the hospital and Kate in that hospital gown. I wouldn't have planted the garden with my father and maybe never connected my love for produce back to him.

I wouldn't have eaten at Trois with my mother and probably we would have never done that Sunday brunch at the little pizzeria, drinking mimosa's in the Late February morning sun in Atlantic Beach.

Hugo would have never told me that he felt so lucky because out of all of the people in all of the world he got to choose exactly the right one to fall in love with. We would have never traveled to Mexico or Miami together and I might not have ever dragged anyone else to see that castle in the Alps or get stuck with me on standby in Frankfurt.

I wouldn't have zipped through a jungle in Costa Rica or cooked that one precious dinner of plantains and rice in Puerto Viejo with Cayla.

I wouldn't have been the one to take Chelsea to the airport to take leave of us all. I wouldn't have known what it felt like to come home to an empty apartment with only a note from my older sister waiting that read:"I stopped by and walked Shaka, you weren't here. Call me later, I love you."

So many things I would have never known or loved or done in my life. I do realize that there would be a million other, different ones in waiting for me. None of those imagined, regretfully lost, moments that were simply not to be my twenties in Paris, feel even half as good, not even in the imagining, as all of these ones I've lived here.

My regret in all of it's shades, is something I can handle...