In a city of mostly bricks and concrete, the largest sign of Spring isn’t the flowers in bloom or the arrival of the leaves. It’s the people on the street. People are outside, sitting on their stoops drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and hanging out with their friends.

You hear the sweet music box tinkle of the ice cream trucks prowling the neighborhood for a sale of their sweet delights. (I have already fallen victim to the siren call of soft serve once twice this season).

Though… there are daffodils…

I’ve never been one of those people who makes goals. That whole business about identifying what you want in the future and then following through on the work to get there? Yeah, that stuff scares the living beejesus out of me.

I have spent the vast majority of my life falling randomly into job opportunities and I never really had much of a plan for what I wanted to do in life. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing… I’ve had the opportunity to work on a lot of different projects with some pretty amazing people.

Where I am is not where I planned to be, but I also didn’t particularly plan to be anywhere to get here.

And my current situation is a place that I’m not particularly content with, it’s certainly livable for the moment but it’s not what I want to be doing forever.

There are things that I would like to be doing, but for those things to be viable options of things to do… there are things that have to happen first.

Goals, if you were.

You know, those things that I like to avoid making at all costs.

At the root of it’s the fear of failure.

As lousy as this logic is… if I never define a goal, I never have to be disappointed if I don’t achieve it. I never have to be embarrassed if I didn’t achieve it. I never have to be accountable if I didn’t achieve it.

That’s a problem because by not making any short term goals, I have a tendency to not actually do much of anything towards the big picture dreams that I seem to come up with.

Which means in the big picture, I’m failing because I’m not doing anything.

So, I need to do that which scares me.

Health/Life

- Take one class yoga class by the end of the month.
- Cook meals at least three times a week.

Creative

- Prepare for a burlesque show on March 16th.
- Turn the heel on the sock I’ve been working on.

Blogging

- Write two to three blog posts a week.
- Make some needed adjustments to the blog’s theme.
- Prepare to add a button exchange / sponsors for April.

Business

- Update nikkiana.com and redesign it.
- Investigate modx.

Yesterday afternoon the sun came out and it simultaneously started pouring, so this is what I saw out my window. Of course, I knocked down my curtain in the process… and I forgot to turn off the light so you can see it’s reflection in the window… but other than that. I was happy with the shot.

As long as I’ve been doing this whole “write about my life on the Internet” thing, I’ve always found myself poking around at other blogs… I find myself looking for inspiration, camaraderie, kindred spirits… These days, I almost always end up depressing myself when I do this.

I’ll admit it. Some days it’s hard when every personal blog I click on seems to be covered in beautifully composed photographs of adorable children and well written stories about said children and the adorable things they do. Stories about husbands and home cooked meals. (Mostly) happy families.

These are things are not reminiscent of my life. Divorced. Single (sort of… it’s complicated). Living in the city. Childless. The only dish that I can cook is spaghetti. I have a dear friend who’s an alcoholic that I (try not to) worry about constantly.

I’ve realized that it’s not exactly envy that leads me to feel this way… It’s not that I want lives like the women describe having in their blogs. It’s not that I don’t want some version of it either. It’s just that my life is different, and at times it’s hard to relate to theirs, especially when I’m feeling lonely.

I wonder… where are the other lonely people like me? Do they write too and where are they hiding?

Last night I left the apartment I’ve been living in for the past nine months for good, said goodbye to my neighbors and took my bags to Manhattan to spend the next few days with my friends Sam and Cayte.

I’ve managed to make two new snuggle buddies:

They spent my first night curled up with me, jumping on my feet, sleeping on my feet… Such cute, sweet loving kitties.

They have a third, but that one apparently doesn’t get along with the other two so I haven’t seen him out and about yet.

I have to admit… I’m seriously considering getting a cat once I have a place. But, of course, I still have some reservations.

First being, I’ve never had pets. My last roommate had a dog, but I was never responsible for him. Growing up we had honeybees and chickens, but those don’t count. The idea of having a pet still strikes me as foreign…

Second, I’m allergic to cats. Granted, I have noticed that since moving to NYC, visiting friends with cats even for an extended period of time does not end up making me sick. I mostly attribute this to the fact that wall to wall carpeting is a rarity in NYC, most apartments have wood and tile floors… so there are less surfaces available that trap in cat dander. The only allergic reactions I’ve had to cats while in the city have been when I’ve accidentally rubbed my eyes after petting a cat, and the two times when Logan (James’ cat) has scratched me.

But I keep falling in love with the cats my friends have…

My friends Paul and Katie are having their wedding reception on Saturday, and seeing as what little work I’m doing these days I’m doing remotely, I figured it was a good opportunity to skip town for a few days and go to a place with a few more trees.

I’m looking forward to sitting on my parents porch and reading. I have tentative plans to see a few friends I haven’t seen in nearly ten years. I have a notion that I might attempt to clean out a closet full of my old stuff. I have some shopping I want to do. I have no idea if I’m going to end up fitting it all in.

I’m just glad to be heading out of the city.

I tend to be one of those people that goes and gets a haircut once very three or four months. Sometimes closer to six months. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I don’t have a regular salon or stylist that I go to… I had thought I’d found somebody, but the last couple of times I’ve tried to contact her I haven’t been able to get ahold of her. Sad, because she was really awesome and she’d come to your apartment to do your hair.

Yesterday, I just finally decided to do it. I picked a salon at random from Lifebooker (It’s one of those salon booking / discount sites, I believe they only serve NYC and LA, though). Booked my appointment and got my hair cut.

Before:

After:

I’m kinda on the fence of what I think about the cut. I feel kinda the same way toward it that I usually feel about most of my haircuts. I looked great walking out of the salon, but hours later, the front began to curl in ways that I don’t feel fits the rest of the haircut… My hair’s certainly not super curly, but there’s enough curl to it to be really annoying when what you want is bone straight. I’ve honestly been debating the brazilian keratin treatment that seems to be all the rage these days, but that’s a little more than I want to spend on my hair.

I was the baby of my generation. I once did the math. If you took the average of the age difference between me and all of my first cousins and my half-siblings, you’d come out with an average age difference of 15 years. When I was born, my generation was on the verge of being adults.

I grew up in a family that was somewhat shrouded in mystery in terms of an explanation for The Way Things Were. By the time I came around, all of the turbulent times in my parents generation and grandparents generation had quieted. Divorces happened. Certain people didn’t speak to each other anymore. You didn’t mention certain people around other people. There were all these unspoken family etiquette rules that I had imparted to me but no one wanted to take the time and explain what happened. The few times I got brave enough to ask directly, I got shut down. There was a culture of “we don’t talk about it anymore” in our family. What I know is pieced together from bits and snippets of things I’ve overheard over the years, some of it corroborated with the few relatives I’ve been able to have frank family conversations with. My vantage point is still largely colored by the eyes of a child.

My father had been married before my mother. He had a daughter at age twenty-two, my sister. He divorced. His ex-wife has a second child three years later, a boy. The boy’s father done run off. My father raises the boy as if he were his own, my brother. I was born when my father was forty. If you’re lazy and don’t want to do the math, my sister is eighteen years older and my brother is fifteen years older.

When I’m nine, my sister gets married. I’m the flower girl in her wedding. We speak far more than we ever have in my life during the wedding planning process. The wedding was at the beginning of December. At Christmas, my parents and I fly to Arizona to celebrate with my mom’s parents. My father’s mother house sits for us. My sister tries to visit us on Christmas day to find we aren’t in town. My father didn’t tell her to avoid catching grief from his ex-wife. My sister become enraged, sends Dad a letter saying she’s hurt and doesn’t want to speak to him. There is no contact for eight years. I bonded with my sister only to be dropped cold. Harsh lesson for a nine year old who is obsessed with the fact that she has a sister. I’m seventeen when she starts speaking to me again. I’m told by my mother and her mother to be nice but to not get attached. I don’t. We are cordial to each other, but we have not been nor will likely ever be close.

My brother wasn’t a frequent visitor, but he didn’t harbor the ill-will toward our father that our sister did. He was just thankful he had one at all. When I was a junior in high school, my brother opened an arcade in the mall with three of his friends. He genuinely tried to forge a relationship with me when I was in my teenage years, and while he wasn’t the sort of brother that I’d wished for, he did look out for me at a critical time in my life. We don’t have a lot in common, so we don’t tend to keep in close touch.

I had wished for siblings that I wanted to talk to constantly and could tell all of my secrets to. My siblings weren’t interested in being that. For a long time, I was angry about that. With my brother, the lack of closeness wasn’t for a lack of making an effort. It was more we just didn’t have much to bond over. With my sister, I resented her for not being important enough to her for her to make an effort despite her anger with our father.

I had come to the point where I had accepted the reality that I will never have the relationship that I had fantasized about as a child with my brother and sister, but I had not yet gotten to a point where I could begin to make peace with why things unfolded the way they did.

One of the reasons why I love people who tell stories from their lives is because sometimes someone else’s life experience is just what you needed to hear to make sense of your own.

Enter James.

His father stopped contacting him when he was eleven, after he and his mother moved across the country. Two months ago, he found out that he has a half-sister who just barely turned eleven.

James taught me how to be empathetic towards my sister’s childhood experience with our father and how the announcement of my existence may have affected her. She possibly felt abandoned, it was likely painful. These things began to occur to me as James would tell me about his own experience. As he began to converse with his sister, he started talking about the emotions that it stirred up, ones that I imagine my sister might have experienced similar about me.

The realization that it’s very likely that my sister wasn’t interested in being a big sister to me because it was too painful of a prospect makes it much easier for me to understand why she made the choices that she did, and in the end makes it easier to forgive her.