I’m living in Lancaster, PA, now. It’s no secret that I have a moving disorder that requires I pack my things and transport them someplace else every 6 months. So please don’t feel bad if you’re behind. Just come visit me.

I work at a theatre where I share a cozy office with the director of my department. The view from our window is brick door brick, brick window brick. More brick. I can go all day without seeing a tree–except that I can’t–so I leave my office for dinner.

Usually, I walk home. I live in the smack dab center of this little, not-so-little Pennsylvania city. There’s always something happening, something to hear–construction around the block, traffic, people yelling. Twice, an excellent brass band. On Sunday afternoons, the apartment below blasts loud music with heavy bass for approximately two hours. It rattles my things, I try to ignore it, I get annoyed, it stops.

Having gone to school with a number of folks from Lancaster County, I feel less like I’m somewhere new and more like I’m just late on the scene.

I have discovered, though, that if you want to throw yourself into a new environment, working in community engagement is a pretty sure option. “I’m just here to engage in the community” has become my no. 1 line at all networking functions and whenever I’m in awkward conversation with strangers, which is often.

I attended an event for a community business during my first week at work. I went with a couple of coworkers. It should be noted that they used that same pick-up line to convince me to come. “You’re in community engagement, you need to engage with…”

When we arrived, we did the proper thing to do and avoided all people to stake out the food. While waiting in line for what we think was Doritos with hummus, we casually bumped into someone. My coworkers started chatting with her.

From my tag-along vantage point, I could easily watch as the casual chatter slowly died out, crept in my direction, and then, perfectly on cue, “Oh yes, you should meet Vanessa, she’s new in community engagement.”

“Ah,” the woman said, smiling, “we’ll likely be working with one another from time to time.”

“Really?” I asked, trying to seem sweet and also like a kick-ass business woman who stands up for herself and is older than 24. “That’s super,” I said. “And, sorry, you work at?”

Then there was this really long pause. Like something written in a play–but no, really. She cocked her head slightly to the side, lifted an eyebrow, and said through a plastic smile, “This,” she gestured to the band, the bar, the people, the sparkly hipster-shabby-chic hanging lights, “is mine.”

I apologized. I sort of half-laughed. She didn’t. I complimented her on a really super nice party. And that was the end of that awesome conversation.

So ‘engaging in the community’ has its road bumps and will clearly require a little more time until mastery.

Though there are aspects of Lancaster life that I’ve found take very little time at all. I’ve discovered access to new knowledge and a corresponding thirst for learning that, honestly, I haven’t felt since burning out a bit in undergrad.

There is so much to learn about education and Arts education and the way we learn and why we learn how we learn–and then just nonprofits in general, the business–and then just regional theatre–and oh, my brain is on a continuous buzz. I’m reading new books and constantly signing up for blogs that use hooks like ‘young professional’ and ‘cutting edge’ and ‘Arts education matters’ and I am attending live webinars, and all of this is such a delightful, delightful thing.

With everything happening in Lancaster–a growing Arts scene, a growing yuppie scene, etc.,–I feel like the city is just rooting me on. Check out this! Learn about this! Come to our event!

And along the way, I’m feel I’m (slowly) picking up the little stuff that makes living here living here. I can now tell you which stands at Central Market are worth your dollar (and which accept credit card) and how to pass an Amish buggy on the road. I can tell you a thing or two about tea, incidentally, and give you a great tour of an excellent (haunted?) theatre.

You’re invited to visit, or heck, just move here already. Test my knowledge (or please, please don’t). If you’re already here, we should say hi to each other. Why not? Let’s engage in this community! Just don’t interrupt my webinar.

Sweaty mornings full of paint.

A special summer visitor.

Mom.

Goodbye, kitty!

I walked into Menard’s today and I wanted to die. Have you been there recently? These places are huge. With all that space they should at least grow something. Raise some livestock. Start an indoor herb garden. But just to sell things when farmland is at such a premium? What sort of strategic planning is that.

Clearly my brain is still in Farm World. I’ve left home, but heart and mind appear to be traveling a little slower. They are likely putzing down I-80 right now, distracted by a corn field somewhere between here and God-forsaken Iowa City.

My time at home was a time of family. It was a time of realizing that I’m growing up, and that means everyone else is, too. It was a time of sunny day after sunny day after sunny day and paint. I painted a shed for my dad, and hence, I also painted my hair, my arms, somehow my stomach. Paint everywhere.

Now the brushstrokes change color and direction. Now the world around me swirls all sorts of new shades, shades that quickly drip and bleed together as I zoom pass unfamiliar hill and mountain, tree and field, house after house after house. As I drive East.

East to a new job, a new apartment, a new part of the country that is somehow so much smaller and yet so much fuller.

East with a new haircut and a new shower mat and a new comforter for my new bed and a new (but not-so-new) pledge that this time, this time I will stay a little longer than last time.

Wherever last time was. Whenever last time was. I guess just take your pick.

I’m not convinced moving ever gets easier, and yet, here I am, halfway between home and a new home, typing this mini post with all the optimism and confidence of a fresh-from-college grad. Even though I don’t really fit that mold anymore.

Here’s to new adventures; at every stage, at every age. Again, and again, and again. Whether you are on the farm in South Dakota or somewhere between there and the Atlantic Ocean. Stay tuned!

I feel pressured.

Sometimes my brain crawls into this odd crooked nook where paper becomes empty canvas. When I arrive here, I find it feels better, best even, to extract thoughts and opinions from the secret space in my head and to throw them onto the blank board (also known as Word Doc). To pull out useless thinking and twist the thoughts with my fingers like play-dough, to twist them into curves and lines, into words.

When I don’t write for a while, not for myself specifically, the crooked nook becomes trickier to find.

Yes, even with modern technology offering empty canvas with just a tap tap.

A good writer, I think as I stare at the blank word document, ties everything up. They have a theme. 

Good writers are the ones that take an entire twelve months of happenings, birth, death–the big stuff, yes–and somehow, God only knows, squeeze everything into a paragraph-style Christmas letter. A holiday hello complete with hook opening, sexy edited body, and a closing thought that contains not only a summary but a new nugget that you can take home with you.

A nugget-sized idea like a personalized party gift at an over-the-top wedding you didn’t dress quite right for.

The past month has been this hodgepodge of experiences, all of which I feel are worth mentioning, but none that I am easily linking.

Hence, the pressure.

I accomplished things. I suppose that this, at least, is certain.

I finished teaching for the time being–which was weird. Kiddos were saying, “see you next year, Miss Hofer!” and I didn’t have the heart to say, “I will likely never see you again. Never. Ever.”

I didn’t hate being a teacher. Sometimes I loved it. But mostly I knew, and I knew early on, that I needed to commit to the career. I didn’t and still don’t feel right continuing on in a classroom setting on this half-in, half-out basis. It’s too important a role. It’s too exhausting a job.

Accomplishment two, I ran a half-marathon. It probably goes without saying that this was less ‘weird’ and more so just ‘difficult.’ Hans, my boyfriend/running partner/person-to-blame-for-convincing-me-to-sign-up told me on many-an-ocassion that, “it would be easy!”

“By the end of our training, you’ll be cruising!” he said. He’s a very encouraging guy.

But I don’t think I ever cruised, per say.

In fact, by Mile 8 I felt like a sort of hippo who was more or less dragging my thunder thighs from mile marker to mile marker.

I did cross my very first finish line and eat a pancake breakfast by some port-a-potties, and I did feel like a complete boss in my slinky new Chicago Half t-shirt afterwards. So that’s something. That is definitely something.

Accomplishment three, I decided what I want to do next, more or less.

I’m still writing. Actually, I’m writing more. I write for work and I write quite a bit. Most recently, I started writing for Mennonite Health Services. This is my first Mennonite-related gig, and that’s significant to me. It’s one thing to write for real estate in Canada (a fine endeavor, thank you!) and it’s another thing to write for your home church.

For now, I’ll do both and we’ll see how it all comes together when I move to Pennsylvania in August. When I move to start a job at a well-respected theatre in Lancaster County.

I feel the transition. I feel it a lot. I didn’t know you could feel all your things in boxes–yes, this is getting bizarre–but gosh, I can.

Will I have enough qualifications by the time I turn 25 to start a business as a professional mover? I wonder to myself.

My wandering feet feel a little off balance as I visit hilly Pennsylvania this week. I am oddly nervous to go home the week following, I am wondering what will come the week after, I am considering and reconsidering the weeks after that.

Adventure looms.

Go ahead, wrap your story in a cute theme. Put a bow on it. Ship it around the world to friends and family and don’t forget a pic.

In December. Do that in December. Because today, it’s June. And in June, this June, anything goes.

Perfection, unnecessary.

The world is churning and turning and the future seems ever-more far away from the past.

No links, no ties, no summaries. Just twist the words and let them fly.

“A year from now we’ll all be gone
all our friends will move away
And they’re goin to better places
But our friends will be gone away…”
—rivers and roads from the head and the heart

When you drive four thousand miles (almost) in less than one month, you assume that, somewhere in one of seven states, you will encounter a great blog post waiting to be written.

But even the longest car ride is too short when in good company.

I guess I was too busy talking to listen—or too busy listening to others talking—that I failed to hear what was happening around me.

It takes a special intentionality, after all, to catch a story.

So I write today not because I have a great story to tell, but because the greater story of my day-to-day is unraveling quickly. If I don’t write, I feel I will most certainly miss out on marking what was, and what continues to be, a spring of four thousand adventures (or more).

I do not know where I will be or what I will be doing three months from today. I wonder aloud how I always end up in this situation while acknowledging in secret that it is my own doing.

“I am continually amazed by the richness of life that just waits to be noticed, to be experienced,” I wrote in my journal last week. “This knowledge is like a rapid heartbeat in my mind, pushing me onto the next, the next, the next…”

I am currently training for a half marathon. Hopefully, come mid-May, there will be a triumphant blog post in which I explain how me, the girl who hates—HATED (past tense, positive thinking only)—to run, completed my first race. And not some fifty-meter dash warm-up. This is go big, or go home, half-marathon style.

But today, I’m just training.

Most days in Indiana, training in the spring means running in mud and getting rained on. One of the perks of traveling then is getting to run in places other than good ol’ I. N.

I spent Easter in Lancaster County, PA. While there, I learned two particularly important lessons, among many:

The first: Just because you are in PA–and eating Amish ice cream and going to farmers’ markets where you eat food from around the world and then eating candy while dyeing Easter eggs–does not mean that you can skip a training day for your upcoming race. It also will not improve your running time.

And just because you have been training for a half marathon since January does not mean that you are capable of running up a hill.

There is absolutely no part of my body that enjoys running up a hill. I don’t care how fun it is to come down.

From what I can deduce, my body is simply baffled by the entire concept.

Stop, it says. Something is wrong. You are trying to go up. Why are you trying to go up? That is impossible. 

I will also note, running up a hill is an entirely different thing than hiking up a hill. Colorado or no Colorado experience, hill or mountain, I don’t care. It’s the wrong direction.

But with Mr. Boyfriend toughing it out beside me (and looking great, dammit), what choice did I have?

So this is the second lesson I learned in Lancaster County, PA: Sometimes you have to run up a hill even if run is just about the least-accurate descriptor of what you are actually doing.

It felt like I was pulling, maybe walking while semi-crouched, perhaps better still, failing. But needless to say, not running.

Making progress is such a matter of perspective, isn’t it though?

I feel like I am relatively apt with words. Sometimes it seems to me that if you only phrase something right you can make anything sound like it is progress. 

(Oh yes, watching this popular TV show is giving me additional common ground so that I can better chitchat, enabling me to network with new people, who will potentially lead me to my dream job.)

After driving four thousand miles (almost) in one month, I tell myself that this is progress.

I made big decisions, I met new people, I shared significant time with significant others.

But as I’m running up this life-hill, some days it feels a little bit more wandering. The muscles are stretching and pulling and people next to me are somehow still beating me, and my entire being is asking, What are you doing?! 

Today, though, I pause.

I pause and breathe and re-ground myself. I pause and choose, intentionally, to look at the miles. You can’t argue with them. At least, I can’t. Four thousand miles (almost) is still (almost) four thousand miles, and the journey I’ve travelled in one month alone is one that I am proud of.

It is progress, because I choose it to be.

I don’t know where I will be in three months.

And really, you don’t know where you will be either.

But I think we share a mutual hope that we’ll both be moving, whatever that might mean, in whatever direction that might be. Maybe we’ll be trying something new, eating something delicious, completing something important, telling a friend how much we care or sharing a feeling we have never shared before. Maybe we will just be letting life unravel as fast as it damn well pleases and enjoying the ride all the while.

Even if the journey down isn’t quite worth the hellish run upward, perhaps the view from the top will help us see something that we could not or did not see before.

The options are endless (almost). And exciting (always).

“Been talkin’ bout the way things change.
And my family lives in a different state
If you don’t know what to make of this
Then we will not relate…
Rivers and roads
Rivers and roads
Rivers til I reach you…”

Oh hello, West Virginia.

Hey, South Dakota!

Exploring Silver Lake.

The streets of Chicago at sunset.

Hi again, Chicago.

Lancaster County, PA.