New Hampshire.
It's strange sometimes when your past and present mingle over drinks. I just got back from a midweek weekend in Manchester, New Hampshire visiting one of my oldest childhood friends and her new apartment. We each drank a bottle of wine, swapped a semester's worth of gossip and stories and stayed up late... we had a good time. it's always nice to know someone who is a year older, someone who encounters things slightly before you do and can warn you of the dangers of the real world, loan payments, and what it's like to actually have a kitchen, dishes, and how to develop enough personal motivation to keep a clean house. Ginnie and I have also mastered the art of catching up after a long time apart... it's like nothing ever changes and over breaks from college or summers in different places, it seems only to take a few hours to be right back to being the inseparable, silly, scheming pre-teens we were reaking havoc on Morgan Farms Drive.
This afternoon I arranged to have Jack meet Ginnie and I in Nashua for dinner and drinks. They got along well and both want to work / work in local TV news, a field I've managed to learn quite a bit through their interests. It's just amazing though because Ginnie and I have been friends since I was 7 years old and going on 22, it doesn't seem like all that much has really changed. It's also amazing how they both know to pick on me for the same things... I guess I am pretty consistent and my friends over the past fifteen years aren't all that different from one another.
Tomorrow is the big haircut makeover day. Time to feel like a whole new woman all over again with a healthy trim and a new warmer color... I think I need a new look to make the dramatic leap from Middlebury to SoHo. After a few conversations with Hanhardt and Ippolito it looks like SoHo will be the new daily destination. John said that the whole Gugg staff is moving from uptown to SoHo, so things are hectic and kind of chaotic right now (or as he spun it, "exciting"). Granted he's been in SoHo all along so I don't see why the move even matters to him... but just the same, he assured me they have a "physcial" place for me (fingers crossed on a computer of my very own, or we're talking LONG days w/o email) and they are working on some jobs for me. Still don't really know what my job is, what my hours are, or anything else important, but I guess I'll become aware of all the details once I get there and things fall into place, or they don't fall into place and I have to deal with it...
In some miscommunication, and my sister's inability to take a message, I am still a little unclear about my start date at the Gugg, it might be Monday, it might be Tuesday. I think I'll go into the City on Monday and at the very least scope out the new neighborhood and get situated as to where I will be working and fending for myself in terms of lunches in the trendy streets of SoHo. It's close to Sheldon La Pierre's place, so I'll have to surprise him again... Sheldon is an art dealer I met when I was bumped to first class on a flight from Hartford to JFK last year, a trip ultimately landing me in Scotland. He's tall, has cigarette-skinny legs, and seems to always wear a black turtleneck, and he just doesn't wear it, he
wears it. We had good conversation, he gave me a card, and I email him every so often. Last summer Lauren, Brian and I popped into his gallery and he recognized me when and answered the door, and in a bubbly sort of way, exclaimed, "Shit! Come in here!" But he's fabulous and I'll have to make my way to his gallery at least once this year, he's like my first NYC art world connection and for that, I'll be forever grateful.
Still haven't quite unpacked my stuff from Midd... but I need to repack it all and schelp it to Westchester this weekend. That's becoming a tiresome routine the back and forth, boxes and suitcases, winter shoes and summer shoes. I have two trips to Connecticut planned for June, so it's not even a matter of staying put for long. Blah. But hopefully for July and August I can just think of myself as a true, or at least temporary, New Yorker and I'll have a steady stream of visitors coming to see me in my neck of the woods.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:46 PM
