Heeeeey, blogfriends. I hope I’ve been conspicuously absent from your bloglife, and at least one of you thinks I’m battling a creative depression, but I wanted to pop in and tell you that I’m actually living

Okay, I don’t want to be melodramatic, but things really are going well. I won’t rub it in your face if you’ve been waking up before noon to go to work every day, but unemployment has been incredible for me. No, I haven’t bought myself any new clothes since July and it’s eating away at my soul a little bit, but I’ve been cooking dishes that involve more than four ingredients, catching up on the backlog of unedited photos I have, watching every movie ever made, going to the gym regularly and not hating it, playing five rounds of Candy Crush per day and absolutely no more because I’m not addicted, doing laundry in the middle of the afternoon when no one else is around, and applying for jobs with the resume and cover letter I’ve edited so many times since July that I think I should start a resume-and-cover-letter business instead.

I’m eating dinner with my friends and not worrying about the money because there will surely be more money when I need it. I’m invested in my low-carb eating, loving it, and losing weight. I’ve been riding in cars to places like the Bronx and Connecticut and Staten Island. I’m dating, and it’s totally surreal and also totally not at all as scary as I thought it’d be. I’m visiting Ohio for two weeks at a time and not having to worry about using up my vacation time at work. I’m loving Brooklyn more than I ever have. I’m loving myself more than I ever have. Oh, geez.

Here are some pictures from my current life:

I went to Ohio for the Circleville Pumpkin Show last month and had suuuuuch a good time in addition to falling even more in love with pumpkins, if that’s possible. I ate all of the things I planned to eat, and my roommate/landlord/former co-worker/friend Jack was there, and I got to hang out with two of my best friends from high school whom I hadn’t seen in years, and everything was completely new and yet also totally the same in the best way.

Since I was in Ohio for my birthday for the first time since I moved to NYC(?), I threw myself a birthday party the night before at my BFF, Tracey’s, husband’s favourite Italian restaurant, Caffe DaVinci, which has also become my favourite Italian restaurant (with Olive Garden a very close second, of course), and got to see so many of my friends. On my actual birthday, I spent the day harvesting corn with my dad on the farm and the night eating fried ice cream with Tracey and then going to see Battle of the Year, the breakdancing movie starring Josh Holloway of “Lost” fame. We were the only ones in the theatre, obviously. I accidentally got child-sized 3-D glasses and spent the entire movie with my face being crushed, but I was raised to not complain about things, even on my birthday.

Jack and I had to go to Sheepshead Bay to rent a car to drive to our friend’s Halloween party way out in Long Island (because renting in our neighborhood was literally twice as expensive) and then had to return it the following Monday morning at 7 a.m., so we went through the McDonald’s drive-thru (the least New Yorky thing you can do) and then got to see the sun rise.

My friends and I went as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Halloween, and obviously I was April O’Neil, and owning a red wig is the highlight of my life.

That Sunday, we took the car to City Island, a little slab of land off of the Bronx that isn’t even a full square mile, and had fish and chips at Johnny’s, and the moon was rising over the water all orange and full when we arrived, and a lone swan swam through the pool of light reflected off the bay, and we ate outdoors even though it was waaaaay too cold to, and it felt like summer had officially ended.

Things started to die, like these flowers on my rooftop,

but that made them even more beautiful in some cases, like when my friends Ash and Kim and I went to The Cloisters museum in Washington Heights to see medieval art, and Fort Tryon Park was the epitome of autumn, and Kim brought costume jewelry for us so we could take pictures of ourselves in which we pretended to be princesses. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

Jack and I went on many a long walk through our neighborhood right as the weather was changing and people were beginning to huddle indoors, so we were the only ones to see the Manhattan Bridge look like this at this moment. Just as I took the picture, two of the subways that use it to cross from Brooklyn to Manhattan passed each other going different directions, and I had to close my eyes because it felt too perfect and powerful.

Of course there are some scary parts still to this life. I feel like I’ve squandered my unemployment by not blowing up my photography business or eating all of the $35 prix-fixe lunches in town for my food blog or not using this as an opportunity to learn French and then become the attaché to the embassy in Paris. I’m concerned about seeming flippant or unmotivated when I tell people I haven’t had a job for four months and haven’t exactly felt bad about it. I’m still fairly concerned about never finding a job again and having to live out of the dumpsters behind Per Se, but I’m also really trying to enjoy this while it lasts.