San Francisco, CA
H&M Shirt (similar) | Shorts | Tank | Shoes | Sunglasses | Purse (similar)
I was talking to a neighbor (and new friend), Alisa, the other day, and she said, “It’s so crazy how much STUFF you guys do,” meaning all those mini trips to wherever that we’re constantly taking. And then she asked: “Is it because you need things to write about for your site?”
In the beginning, I think it was.
A couple of days before I officially started blogging – when I was still in the get-a-bunch-of-content-up-pre-launch stage – I remember dragging Kendrick all the way over to a cheese shop on the Upper West Side (basically Pluto if you live, as we did, way over on Second Avenue) and having him take pictures of me selecting weird cheeses. We did it because I’d decided that I wanted to do a hi/low kind of series on the site, making a fancy version of a food and a not-fancy version of a food and doing a blind taste test to see which was better, and for the first installment I wanted to see if I could make the perfect grilled cheese.
Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing we would usually have done on a weekend – walk miles through the city to pick up cheddar, and photograph the entire journey (I know this is fairly normal in this selfie era, but in 2009 it was extremely weird to break out your cell phone to take photographs of yourself with a piece of cheese) – but, fairly unsurprisingly, it was so much fun. We ended up wandering through Central Park in the rain, taking photographs of each other spinning around with an umbrella, and when we got home, instead of turning on Hoarders we hung out together and talked about the process of cooking and the food we were eating and things we ordinarily would have just done without even thinking about them, let alone exploring them. (And then we turned on Hoarders, because we’re still human beings and Hoarders is amazing.)
And so the answer to Alisa’s question is yes, at first we totally did it because of the site. We spent our weekends during those first couple of years actively seeking out things for me to write about, because I was so nervous about the idea of Monday morning arriving and having nothing at all to say….but then, over time – sometime around when Indy arrived – it stopped being a thing we did on purpose and started being a thing we just did.
There are lots of wonderful things that have happened over the years as a byproduct of this site. I’ve gotten to travel to cool places, meet interesting people, do things I never imagined getting to do. But best of all, I think, is that it made us start to go. Anywhere. And then eventually it taught us that the best adventures you ever go on tend to be the ones that happen by accident, when you’re on the way to somewhere else.
The other day, we were all just hanging out, and out of nowhere we decided to drive into the city to eat Burmese food at Burma Superstar. Morgan brought me there for the first time when I came out on our househunting trip; I loved it so much that she ended up bringing me takeout from the restaurant when she visited me at the hospital the day after Goldie’s birth, and I’ve been meaning to bring Kendrick there ever since. The trip to the restaurant wasn’t a huge deal – just an hour drive each way – but years ago? I don’t know that I can imagine us doing this; I can trace the desire to go way out of the way just to have an experience – even if it’s as small as eating coconut rice and sesame beef – straight back to the beginning of this blog.
And now it doesn’t really matter if I’m writing about a day or not; what was once “finding content” has now become a way of life. It was writing that pushed me to make the plan, book the trip, get up and get out. First because I needed to, and later because I wanted to. Because what I’ve discovered is that it doesn’t really matter where you’re going; what matters is that you just go. Find what you love. Find what you don’t. But either way, go out and find it.
We went to the city for sesame beef, but we parked so far away from the restaurant that we had to walk and walk and walk, asking passers-by where the street we were looking for was, stopping into bookstores and clothing stores and coffee shops and seeing what was there. And then, on the way back – our daughter’s fingers sticky from strawberry ice cream, our son navigating the streets with an iPhone app – we took a sunset stroll through our new city that, years from now, I am certain that I’ll remember as one of the sweetest walks of my family’s little life. And at the end, collapsing into the car and desperate for our beds, in a nothing parking lot tucked behind a nothing strip mall, we saw the most unexpected and beautiful sunset.
