2012 Prospective

Welcome to another edition. I did a little something in 2011 and 2010, and I found it helpful to recap and look forward. I tell people that I don't do resolutions, but that's mostly a semantic distinction. Coincidentally, it's taken me until the fourth Sunday in January each of those times to hammer something out. The turning of the year itself is always too busy with holidays and birthdays for Serious Contemplation.

First, a little look back. It's very satisfying to look back at last year's anticipation of "this music project", now that said project has resulted in a couple more public radio appearances, decent blog traffic, a couple hundred album sales, and a three city tour that raised nearly $7,000 for charities. It was very satisfying to go beyond the "what if" and really make good on a somewhat harebrained project. We're looking forward to continuing the project on some level, but its current chapter may have run its course.

In hindsight, last spring was something of a blur. I was settled in DC life, doing my thing, and anticipating a change, one way or another, that summer, so I think it was natural. I made a conscious effort to keep my head in the game because it would have been so easy to check out. I really enjoyed my time in DC, but I was ready for a change. Amanda planting her flag at Northwestern made the choice easy.

I am so grateful to have been able to take a month off of work this summer to spend in London, Italy, and France with Amanda between her fellowship and the beginning of med school. It was an amazing trip and vacation, and it was nice to be able, somewhat, to disconnect for that amount of time. There's never enough time for everything, but we did damn well if I do say so myself.

I had been hesitant to leave DC without a job lined up, especially given how difficult it was to land my first. There was a moment, however, in the late spring or early summer, when a switch flipped and I realized that I had to go for it. It happened while taking a shower. Most great epiphanies and life choices occur during showers. Although I did a lot of work that summer looking for and applying to all sorts of things, I wasn't surprised not to gain much traction from afar. I left both CSIS and DC on September 1st, flying to Boston that evening. It was hard to leave, but it was the right call.

I had a pretty good list of things for funemployment between DC and Chicago. It was really nice to have a good amount of time at home and around Boston. I'm glad that I was able to build that in. As for the list, I was able to get most of the things done that I wanted to, although the list of books to read and movies to watch only gets longer.

Chicago has been great so far. For the first few weeks, I was helping to set up the apartment, applying to things all day, trying to meet everyone I could, exploring my new surroundings, and enjoying the transition to fall weather. This is the first time that we've been solely responsible for the outfitting of our living space, which is fun.

I started my current role at Groupon on October 17th, and it's been great. It goes to show how random the work hunt can be that the one job that worked out resulted from a simple online application with no contact or connection for a job I didn't consider myself particularly qualified for. It is a good fit though, and it's the type of work that I most wanted to be doing after non-profit public policy analysis and conference management. It's also really nice that work is a fifteen minute walk from the apartment. These are interesting times for the company and the industry, making it a great time to be involved and learning new skills.

We also adopted a dog. This is a first for any Thompson-Westra, who heretofore have strictly been cat people. Although I was originally bribed toward Chicago with promises of an orange kitten, the advantages of a pup began to grow upon my arrival. I have been largely effective at flat-out denying any allergy to cats my entire life, boosted by the fact that said allergy (if it exists!) only manifests sometimes and with some cats, but the prospect of adopting a kitty that wrecked havoc on my sinuses (helped by wall to wall carpeting in the apartment) and knowing that I would never allow us to return it felt risky, to say the least. Any pet is going to be a change, and a dog probably a bigger one in terms of needs, so I characteristically hemmed and hawed over getting a pet until we met a two or three year old white husky at PAWS Chicago this fall.



I mean, just look at this guy. Beckett has been a wonderful addition. The fates conspired to give me as close to the ideal dog as reality allows in terms of temperament, personality, smell, and dashing good looks. It's nice to have a creature so desperately happy to see you after work that you can tell it almost hurts them. It's nice to be woken up (at the appropriate time) by an inquisitive nose and beautiful black eyes poking over the side of the bed. And it's nice to have an additional companion both eager to explore the city and curl up to relax. Although I haven't been able to run with him the last couple of months, I look forward to hitting the trails at a pace above walking soon. And we both have visions of piling into a car for a day at Starved Rock or a long weekend in the Badlands. Amanda's dad had a dog, worthy of several epics, that followed him from Israel to Cameroon and across the US. I think Beckett will be ours.

One alarming development of 2011 was that, for the first time, I've been asked if I'm Canadian. This has happened on perhaps four or five independent occasions regarding my pronunciation of "about". I don't hear anything funny with it, which is more worrisome than the alternative. The only explanation seems to be that, somehow, I've had my own Great Vowel Shift this past year. I'd be ok, but still confused, if I were to develop a strong Maine accent during the twenty sixth year of my life, but unfortunately I'm sliding a little too far north.







2012 has been great so far, springboarding from a great holiday break back home with a solid New Years in Boston, a nice birthday back in Chicago, and a definitively successful Recession Sessions tour through Chicago, Boston, and New York City. Work has picked up now that I'm on larger cities, and I'm at the point now where I'm no longer playing catch-up. I'm looking forward to pressing forward at Groupon and seeing what the year has in store for the industry. This year might require a little more decision-making on the MA, MBA, or PhD side as well.

It's nice to be able to keep a foot in the door of the policy world through YPFP. I'm looking forward to seeing how that organization continues to grow. With the election year shaping up as it is, I have never been more glad not being involved in campaign politics.

A goal from last year was to put more effort into maintaining and improving my Spanish. Attempts to regularly read Spanish news turned more into regular attempts to read Spanish news, so either I need a new plan of attack or a more concerted round two. I still occasionally and inexplicably feel what I can only describe as homesickness for Madrid, so maybe I can prod that nostalgia, as well as positive occasional random Spanish conversations, into actionable guilt-avoidance. It is reassuring that comprehension hasn't slipped much at all. Johanna will be in Barcelona this fall, and visiting her would be nice.

I am jealous of people who really enjoy cooking. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of that world, but it is always fleeting. I wish that I enjoyed it more, because I think it's a really appealing activity in theory and a moral good. In practice, however, nine times of of ten my urge will be to pour another bowl of cereal rather than put thirty minutes into food preparation (my historical odds of cooking versus cereal for every meal are vastly better than that, I'll have you know). I will continue to fake it in the hope that I'll make it and, in the meantime, be a loyal sous-chef and somewhat less sporadic culinary helmsman.

It was nice and enjoyable to keep up running a good amount. I really didn't anticipate to be at a point where, at the drop of a hat, I could run eight miles without thinking much of it. Unfortunately, somewhat randomly my knee started to hurt a lot this fall and vehemently remind me that it's still upset every time I try to run again, so it's been a while. I suppose I might be past the point where simply waiting for it to heal itself is a reasonable course of action, so yes, I should do something about that. The Chicago marathon is in the fall, and I'd really like to cross that off the list. It's just a matter of my joints holding together long enough.

Having a gym in the apartment is nice too. Pull ups and push ups, or activities that mirror those motions, keep me pretty satisfied, although occasionally the thought of boxing, CrossFit, or Krav Maga is pretty appealing. Once it's nice out again I might look into a sport. I've been on hiatus from ultimate for a while due to agility-limiting injuries and I waffle on whether, damn the torpedoes, to pick it up again on a somewhat serious level. We definitely need to find some good hiking areas around Chicago as well.

Although Recession Sessions has been a great experience, I need more regular group playing. With my recently purchased Seagull S6, I'm looking forward to finding something more regular here in Chicago and overall working more music playing into my routine. Not only playing around but also some more regularly concentrated skill-building would be ideal. I need to get my charango repaired again too. I'm considering looking more seriously into an orchestra to play with too, but the time commitment may be too much for that one. Working up the pipes for the tour was fun, but I don't think I'll be joining a chorus any time soon.

I want to make sure to write more too. I really enjoy it, but don't have the urge to as much as I'd like. If I can be better at working regular writing in, I think it would click, whether it be blogging or writing more op-ed style pieces. It might be a good goal to keep up an article or two a year published in a newspaper or journal, which has been quite manageable so far. My high school debate days are calling to me, and reading a lot of Hitchens around the time of his death drove home most recently how beautiful language can be. Writing, rhetoric, and appreciating language are nice things.

I still periodically consider moving forward with more presentation design. Before getting a real job here, I did a decent amount of talking to different small business people and entrepreneurs at conferences to test the waters, and the waters appear pleasant. There's obviously a good amount of planning that has to go into it, but probably not as much as I pretend.

What are the tentative big travel plans this year? Amanda will spend six weeks working this summer in Senegal at a hospital in Dakar, so I just might have to meet up with her afterward for some adventuring. I'm also looking forward to stepping foot in California this spring for the first time. I'm sure we can work a few more things in this year too.

It's hard to find time to do everything in the world, I'm told. In this 26th year I think I'm getting a better idea of what kind of things I want to focus on in work and play. I'm looking forward to seeing how this year plays itself out.