New Beginnings

I am back after a long hiatus! Since my last post, I ended my internship/temp job at the DOE lab and relocated to where I want to live: New York City. Sometime in mid-winter, a few weeks before I was supposed to sign up for the dreaded GRE, I woke up early on a Saturday morning and decided that I should move to New York and find a job instead of obsessing over graduate school and continuing my DOE work. It was a tough decision to make, with friends and mentors questioning my logic ("You want to move to NEW YORK?! NEW YORK?!! Why?! You can do your master's here and not pay anything. What are you going to DO? When are you going back to school? You are too nice to live in New York City. Everyone up there is rude. How are you going to find a plant biology job?") However, I stuck to my plan with a conviction that I rarely muster. Even though I was fearfully embarrassed about relocating without any job prospects, inside I proudly told myself that I was off to seek my fortune. Somehow, I found it.

I found a great little house in Queens to share with my sister and three roommates (and my dog and their four cats). After living off savings and babysitting gigs for a month, I landed a wonderful job as a laboratory technician in a really incredible lab in exactly the field I want. Of course, I am terrified because I am underqualified for the job and I still need to make a decision about grad school. Of course there are ups and downs no matter where I live. But for right now I feel that there isn't much I can't do.

My new job is to maintain flow and organization in the laboratory, order supplies, conduct small experiments and produce data from protocols, and grow hundreds and hundreds of plants. It will be a big step up from my limping progress of the past. Historic scientific discoveries took place and famous scientists have walked and worked there. The lab is so beautiful and looks out on the harbor. I think I will do good work. It may be impossible not to.

New York City is enormous and dirty and full of millions of people and cars and acres of concrete. I love everything about it: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I lived the first five years of my life in Manhattan and calling this city Home feels as natural now as it did when I was barely old enough to recite the address of the cramped old apartment in mid-town where I was born. The street smells of honey-roasted peanuts, the steam from the vents, garbage, rain, and the dankness of old buildings, the taste of the water, induce incredible nostalgia that makes me feel primordially real and especially alive and particularly ArabidopsisGirl. I belong here in a way that I never belonged in Chicago, Georgia, D.C., Tennessee, or even in the house far upstate where I grew up and my parents still live. For once, I made a life decision that is right.