On Trying Again

Not that I stopped recording my observations since my last posts in 2021; I've continued journaling and maintaining a mental record of life offline. What I've seen, how I've felt, what I've learned -- and I've found that there's a uniquely satisfying release in sharing thoughts on this unguarded, terrifyingly public platform.

June 2025

June 2, 2025

I share a birthday with the French Renassance writer Michel de Montaigne, who was born on Feburary 28th, about 450 years before I was born on the western coast of the United States.

Montaigne was best known for inventing the modern essay as a literary form. His three-volume work Essais (literally, “Attempts” or “Tries”) was very different from the polished Aristotelian arguments of his time: he wrote to make sense of his observations, not to persuade. He was less concerned about the appearance and laudability of his ideas than he was about discovering what they revealed.

In writing these blog posts, I'm also attempting to discover the substance and outline of my mind -- or maybe the boundlessness of it ...? Many of my observations will be idle and subjective, but I'll try to make them all honest. : )

After almost eight years in Seattle, where I returned after completing an MFA program in New York, I moved back to the east coast in 2023. In Seattle, I'd been in a relationship that lasted three years, and while we talked often about marriage, and an engagement ring was involved, we did not ultimately marry. I'd passed my years in Seattle working as a contractor within the Microsoft ecosystem, mostly as a technical writer, teaching in the English department at Bellevue College, and leading Editorial in the marketing division of a Pacific Northwest based credit union known as the Boeing Employees Credit Union.

Returning to the east coast was bittersweet. The cultural richness of DC and its proximity to New York, as well as my work on ALCG Books, a startup I created in 2022, kept me stimulated and busy. But I missed my parents, who were still in Seattle, and I missed the sweet friends and neighbors who had become a daily part of my life in the west Seattle neighborhood where I'd lived. I missed looking out of my living room window on early mornings and seeing the orange sun rise above the distant peaks of the Cascade mountains in the east, then in the evening, watching the same sun appear to sink into the shimmering blue stretch of Lake Washington.

As of now, June of 2025, I have adjusted. I teach within the English department of University of Maryland College Park, and I'm a part-time faculty member at Anne Arundel Community College near Annapolis, Maryland.

In the time I've lived here I wrote a novel and am now working on revising it. I'm running ALCG Books, teaching, making new friends, attending parties, trying new foods, visiting museums and allowing myself to experience life in its fullness, and to record my observations as I live through it all.

Like Montaigne, I write to learn, and in learning, I hope to connect.

Selfie on the last teaching day of the spring semester at UMD College Park. May 2025.