It’s pretty late and I’m tying up some work related loose ends, all the meanwhile keeping Mad Men on in the background and occasionally checking in to stay up to speed. Then suddenly it hit me. I’m living the Mad Men dream right now. I live in NYC and I feel pretty at home here, which some might say is the hardest part of all. Plus I get to work in a pretty cool creative field keen on mastering the art of perspective shifting and pushing various envelopes.
It didn’t happen overnight. Nothing does. Even things that feel like they’re meant to be I think don’t happen overnight. Sometimes I feel fortunate enough to tune into the moments when it just feels like everything I’ve done leading up to this point makes sense, even if it didn’t at some points along the way. The Mad Men moment just now was one of those moments. It’s like seeing your life from another vantage point, from outside of your definitive moment and locale. Like taking on the perspective of an on-looker objectively taking stock of what’s offered.
The webpage I designed in 6th grade to keep up with all my friends and write LyKe DiS oN aIm AlL nYt3 makes sense now too. Picture the ultimate realness of internet throwback gold, you don’t even know how much I wish I kept the site up (RIP shupz.cjb.net). Weird memory but it just feels like a piece of the larger puzzle. I wish I stuck with it, I really do. But I’m comforted in imagining how my fresh middle school website might very well be part of why I’m here today, doing what I’m doing and doing it well.
I don’t always feel like that but in this moment I do. So I’ll savor it as best I can, and what better way to remember than to write a note to self. Remember watching Mad Men, thinking I might be living a Mad Men dream except in a different century, with internet, using words like Meta, and maybe it’s not really anything like the show at all except for the loose connotation of advertising. It doesn’t really matter how I got here anyway, it’s that I am here at all. Here being the place where I feel like I belong.
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