Atlanta has always loomed large in my family’s personal accounting of its history.

We aren’t Georgians, as far as I know, at least not on any branches of the family tree close enough to crane your neck and see. I didn’t know the word Atlanta when I was three because this green, rolling state, with its peanuts and its peaches, had anything to do with us or our shared, Carolinian past.

I knew because, a century and a half before I moved into a leafy apartment on its outskirts, General William Tecumseh Sherman was here.

I grew up in the Deep South, where Sherman’s name was not said — it was spit. The split of the country still runs deep and fever-hot in the blood of its Southern inhabitants, as does the smoldering of Atlanta. Continue reading →

It’s never really a brain tumor.

That’s a paranoid fantasy you have when, in reality, you have chronic migraines. Or you need new glasses. Maybe you are stressed.

I thought all of those things over the last three months, as my headaches gradually ramped up in intensity. First it was this is annoying, better take a Tylenol, then hey, I’m just going to close my office door and turn the light off, okay? Then I stopped being able to get out of bed, and learned I couldn’t work from home if I couldn’t stand to look at a screen. The headaches were joined by a steadily increasing nausea — we’re talking throw-up-all-over-yourself-in-Atlanta-rush-hour nausea. When it reached the point that I couldn’t keep down a sip of water and a Zofran, I decided it was time for the ER. Continue reading →

“Of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. Continue reading →

15 things you REALLY learn at App State is, by far, my best-read blog post ever. It’s gotten about 10,400 views, which is nothing for “real” bloggers but a ton for me. Most of those views came after I graduated, so I thought I’d follow up with a few of the thousands of things I’ve missed about Appalachian since I left.

I miss the smell of the Stadium lot on game day, even when I wasn’t going to the game.

…and I miss the smell of King Street when these were cooking. Continue reading →

Grateful for my train ride to & from work. I don’t mind having a long commute when it means I get to start and end every day with a book. I’m going through one or two a week, which I’ve never done with a full-time job before.

Grateful that my best friends and I fight. Things don’t go unsaid or unnoticed or shoved down below the surface. They get resolved. Continue reading →

A million times in the last two weeks, I’ve stopped in the middle of ordinary moments and thought it again: I’m so glad I moved to Atlanta.

It happened as I was dragging a smoothie through a straw in cold, rainy Midtown, a few blocks from the staid, stately house where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind. As I flipped pages over the din of rushing trains, hurtling from my Peachtree Corners apartment to my downtown office. As I sat in relentless traffic and then, at the office the next day, felt some warped camaraderie with everyone else who’d sifted through the sea of bumper cars the night before. As I tried on restaurants and grocery stores and libraries for size, walked past impossibly gleaming skyscrapers in Buckhead, took accidental exits into neighborhoods I probably shouldn’t have been in at night, and soaked up the feeling of having more city to explore than I could ever exhaust.  Continue reading →

Start: March 23, 2014

End: December 16, 2016

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exploring: 

Go to 10 restaurants I’ve never been to before (10/10: JR’s Loghouse, Corner Bakery Cafe, Flying Biscuit, Buckhead Pizza, River House, Last Resort Grill, Tin Lizzie’s, CB’s, Thai Spice, and a barbecue place I don’t remember the name of but I swear I definitely went)

And 10 Atlanta-area coffee shops, Starbucks doesn’t count (5/10: Espressos, Octane, 45 South, Sip, Coffee Bianco)

And 5 Atlanta-area bookstores (2/5: Read it Again, Book Warehouse)

Take a day trip to Athens

Take trips to visit 5 people (5/5): Boone for Hannah’s graduation, Columbia for Morgan’s graduation, Charleston for Jared’s wedding, Brevard to visit Hannah, Lake James with the girls

Do five tourist-y activities in Atlanta (3/5): Varsity, Braves game, aquarium

Have a picnic in the park Continue reading →

Just because I’m feeling particularly thankful these days.  Continue reading →

I’ve written these before, but it’s always worth doing again (and again, and again, and again). I’m also grateful that everyone who reads this is going to forgive me for ending the title of this post with a preposition.

So. I am grateful for… Continue reading →