At 7:05 EDT exactly two years ago today, I began a completely new phase in my life. After having my last sugared coffee and black-bottom cupcake at Starbucks and some of my last regular soda and whatever else I used to eat before, I started down a path that I've been traveling now for two years.

I don't have a whole lot to congratulate myself for. Not that I haven't rallied to the cause - to the contrary. I simply managed to do what I should have been doing all along, and what everyone should do and is well within everyone's ability to do, which is simply take a moment and think about what they're eating or doing, and start taking the long view.

I'm now aware - painfully aware, perhaps at times even too aware - that what I do, the personal choices I make, are going to have an impact now and twenty or thirty years from now. I have lived with a very intimate knowledge, an intense realization that I am temporary, at least from this physical world's perspective (I'm still working on the rest of it). And I have good days and bad coming to an acceptance of that cold, hard fact.

I feel that in the past two years, I have a much clearer perspective on certain things, and a much lower tolerance for others. I no longer suffer fools very well (a group that has an ever-growing population in my eyes), but I am much more careful to automatically assume the worst in people. Well, at least I try much harder not to make that assumption.

Two years ago I was granted a different perspective. Not an entirely new one, but certainly one I did not have on June 27, 2005. Along with that, I acquired many new demons. I fight them on an almost daily basis these days. I feel the need to constantly and almost without abandon throw myself into whatever it is I'm doing. I feel like I've lost my ability to appreciate the moment, the Now, and perhaps am overcompensating. It's what I do in lieu of letting my mind wander to the scarier realms where I profoundly feel just how small and temporary I am.

Materially, my life is much better than it has been in a long time. Jenn and I are in as good a place as we have been since we've been dating. That's not to say we're in a great place in the grand scheme of things, but at least they're better. Two years ago today, I was a failed freelance lighting designer. Now I run the box office for one of the most energetic theater companies in the country. I have a position in my chosen profession, the one I spent all of my time in higher ed preparing for, earning recognition and respect for my ability within an industry I love. The last two years have been about rebuilding, and rebuilding correctly.

There's really no point to this except to check in, thank the scant few who check in here, and maybe relay some sense of where my scattered thoughts are at right now, in the midst of preparing for a new season, selling out the final show of the current season, and just living life in the midst of another summer in Washington (now my 8th).

Oh, and to let y'all know that I'm seeing the Transformers movie tonight. Yep, 5 days before everyone else gets a crack at it.

So, I don't know precisely why I haven't written or whatever... frankly, I'm not that terribly interested in jotting down the minutiae of my life. So, here are the broad strokes as I'm thinking about them right now, since the change of the calendar.

January: Two weeks after Jenn and I started moving massive amounts of data onto our brand spankin' new networked hard drive, the thing crashed. Like, no power was getting to the thing. The bulk of Jenn's digital music collection is on there, as are the entirety of our digital photos from the day she got the new digital camera, as is the entirety of TF episodes that I'd amassed over the past few years, along with a bunch of other stuff that we'd started to archive to (what we thought was) a safer, more reliable medium.

I opened a help ticket with the manufacturer, with the net result being them telling us to send it back and they'd fix it, but we'd lose all the data thereon. This was an unsatisfying answer, as we had no other backup for the photos. Pretty much everything else could have been replaced. Not those, however.

I then talked with a data recovery firm, who said they'd take a look at it, and could guarantee that they'd get the data off, but the price would probably be in the $2700 neighborhood. For a drive that cost just over $200 to start with, this was an unsatisfying answer.

The next step is getting the manufacturer to allow me to open the case without voiding the warranty. Then I can (at least, theoretically) take the drive out and slave it to my system. I'm not entirely sure I understand that process in the least, but at least it's an option.

Current status: I'm a little nervous that the manufacturer won't allow that sort of thing (even though I've heard of a few similar cases to mine, and they've always granted the permission), so I'm still waiting on myself to get in touch with them. On hold.

January: Spent an appreciable amount of time working for Brookings again, as my replacement ended up leaving for a higher-paying job in December. Found myself hating the place even more this time around. My last day there ever was in mid-February. Current status: Good riddance.

February: While I was over at Brookings one day, my boss at the theater sends me this message:

We’re going to have a Talk tomorrow. You’re not in trouble, in fact, far from it. But we’re probably going to have a talk tomorrow.

There was a Development position opening up, and I knew she was up for it.

Within two weeks, I was running the Box Office at Woolly Mammoth. Which made sense, you know, because 16 months previous I'd never worked in a box office in my entire life.

Current status: Still feeling a little overwhelmed, but loving it.

Since then, I haven't had much time for anything... Jenn, this blog (or, really, staying current with the news - though I'm trying). It's a damn shame. Moreso the Jenn thing, really.

Things have finally calmed down enough in the past couple of weeks that we were able to take stock of our situation and we realized that there's really nothing holding us back at this point from getting a house together in DC except ourselves. So we've provisionally decided to do just that. (Provisional, because we want just the right place, at just the right price. Not that our standards or expectations are too high, but we really just kind of want to do it right and find something that we can stay at for several years.) Come August (or, possibly, November), we'll have a new mailing address. I'll be sure to get that to you this time, Hanson.

So, if I were to make a list (because that's the only sort of indication that I've been alive, from a 'net standpoint, for the past four months) of the highlights from the past four months, maybe chapter titles in the big book of my life, they would be:

1. Brookings retrax
2. All Talk, More Work (the Dull Boy remix)
3. My patriotic duty as a mass-consumer, wherein I discuss eBay shopping sprees and new glucometers
4. Morrowind, or That Game That Sucks Me In Every Time I Even Think About It.

Looking forward...

May: I get to take an extended break from work (potentially up to 5 days... still waiting for word on that fifth day request) beginning on the 12th. Kinda want to go up and visit the blood. Plus, Rollver!

June: DMCP, and the new season prep.

July: Fringe. (Mostly just a lot of hours... not a whole lot for us to do otherwise. At least that I can see at this moment.)

August: Gearing up for the season, then it hits and Jenn and I skip town for this place.

Maybe I'll feel like going into greater detail about all or some of this. Maybe not. But if you are still reading, thank you. I owe you a dollar.

Got myself one of them thar desk thingies. Came with the new title. I've already adorned my new space.

I don't know if this is an interesting thing to write about, or even if it's worth writing about, but it's been something I've been thinking about this weekend, and it's a bit on the self-congratulatory side, and I'm really not looking for any pats on the back. I've just been thinking about this particular thing a bit over the past few days, and I figured I ought to a) get it down in writing before I forgot about it, and b) throw you loyal readers a bone with a little meat on it.

I went to work.

It's not much, and it's utterly unremarkable in the Grand Scheme of things, or even the Small-To-Medium schemes of the block of this street.

But this week just passed was a really important one for me. For the first time since I had the stroke, I had as intense a work week as I had at any given point in the first four years of my life here in DC. About 55 hours, all told, between two wildly different jobs, managing very different things.

And I feel better right now, at the end of that week and just hours away from the start of another one, than I have in the past year. Part of it is spring's fault (favorite season and all), but this exhaustion I feel is absolutely genuine, and I relish every bit of it.

See, for the past ten months, I've been giving in to my hypochondriac side. The slightest eye twitch, the slightest head rush, the slightest anything, and I'd start worrying, "My God, is this another stroke?" I knew rationally that it wasn't. I distinctly remember what the stroke felt like, and nothing that I've experienced since last summer has felt even remotely like that. But when you're worried that you might be having a stroke (you being me, with my recent medical history), reason kind of flies out the window.

On a few choice occasions, especially since January, these little bouts of hypochondria have exploded into full-blown panic attacks. As in, have the digits 9-1-1 plugged into my phone and hovering my thumb menacingly over the Call button, waiting for just one little twinge. It was like High Noon at the O.K. Corral facing off against my brain.

But never another twinge. Never another trip to the ER. Never another stroke. So far [knocks on wooden desk].

But these twinges, real or not, have kept me from operating at 100%. As I've been slowly reintroducing myself to regular work, I've forced myself go slowly, because I thought I needed it. Six months ago, I didn't have a 30-hour week in me, let alone a 60-hour one.

This week, I had the chance to do one. So, no time being like the present indeed, I jumped in.

And so, here I am, at the other end of it, not only surviving but thriving.

I was made to live like this. I haven't had a week like this since Cherry Red closed, and I realize only now how much I miss it. (And don't get me wrong, Woolly isn't Cherry Red, but it's at least still theater, and I at least still like it.)

It's fucking awesome to be back. Thanks for letting me bend your ear eyeball.