Revisit

First time that I returned to a hotel in which i spent 80% of my time living in for the first quarter of the year. We have all had that nostalgia spurred by a smell... Hotels seem to have that ability down. Upon walking off of the elevator onto my floor the aroma greeted me like an unwelcome old friend, and yet I smiled. In this consistently inconsistent life I have subconsciously started to capture small strings of familiarity. Perhaps it's time to move on?

Another element on my mind: is my lifestyle that much different? If so, can people relate to it? Does it change me and my mindset? Do the freedoms that I have taint my judgement and skew me towards selfishness or is it difficult for others to grasp my point of view merely because it's rare and uncommon? The volatility of our lives varies and now I am realizing that committing to something as little as a location for a weekend can be difficult. What's rare is more of my reasons - the fact that something else may come up AND that I have the freedom to change my plans on a whim make it hard for me to know far in advance what my plans are. This leads to a selfishness... But if given the opportunity to change plans without consequences, wouldn't you take advantage of it? The lines between rationality and consideration begin to blur.

Lazy Saturday

Haven't had one of these in a while! Back in Boston and at my apartment forming of the last times. Unfortunately it's been tainted by the states losing to Ghana in the world cup...

Lazy Saturday

Haven't had one of these in a while! Back in Boston and at my apartment forming of the last times. Unfortunately it's been tainted by the states losing to Ghana in the world cup...

Everyone knows everything

Food for thought: the title is a line from Jack Kerouac's "Dharma Bums". Reading this in my hotel room earlier made me consider the validity of this statement.

Valid: considering the mantra of the book, there really is nothing to know - nothing really exists, you make it exist. Therefore, everyone knows everything in from their perspective because they make everything.

Invalid: the absolute idea of everything strays from kerouac's thesis - of course one person can't know everything let alone everyone knowing everything.

Consider how you precieve others... More than likely it's the latter case and you feel that it is prudent and efficient to have this mindset.

Now consider how life would be if everyone followed Kerouac's mantra.

Email to Friends

All -

The past six months of my life have been very touch and go - living in Boston, working in New York and normally in another location every other weekend. I have been making some major changes to my living situation and a product of those changes is having the opportunity to see you or travel with you for a weekend at a time. There is no better time in my life nor will my lifestyle ever allow me to do this in the future. The next few paragraphs provide a more detailed explanation, but the thesis remains the same: I want to see you all.

A few weeks back, I was sitting at 'The Other Side Cafe' in Boston with my sister Lexie and her husband Chris. We were talking about an upcoming predicament: my roommate Gary was moving out of our Back Bay apartment and moving down to New York. I was unsure whether I should stay in Boston or head to New York City with him. I've been with a consulting firm for almost two years now and have been working primarily outside of Boston for the last six months - four or five days out of the week had me in New York and the weekends were spent in various locations. At some point I had settled on moving out of Boston, but was unsure where to - New York City was the obvious choice but there was still the chance that I would have to move on to another city for work.

After explaining this to Lexie and Chris, along with the fact that my company puts me up in a hotel while I work and pays for the flights to and from the client site (under a specific amount), they threw out the idea of not renting an apartment. The main thought is that I have enough family between them, my parents in Stamford, my closest friends (who I consider family) in Boston/NYC/DC, and my grandparents in Puerto Rico, to have a different place to go each weekend of the month. In order to cope with this drastic change, I would tackle this as a project - keeping a blog of interactions (djwallman.blogspot.com), places that I've visited, the effects and issues that come along with this life, what makes the nomad life successful and unsuccessful.

There are obvious reasons why I should and shouldn't do this, ranging from saving a large sum of money each month that I keep this up to possibly becoming extremely lonely and tired. After thinking this over for two weeks and realizing that I had been returning to Boston for 2 days out of each month, I decided to go with Lexie and Chris's suggestion. Starting in July, I will be rotating between Cambridge/Boston, Stamford/NYC and Puerto Rico, and will have most of my possessions in Cambridge or Stamford. I now know that I will be staffed in Atlanta primarily from Monday to Thursday of each week (this means flying anywhere is fairly simple and if you are living in Atlanta, I implore you to please get in touch with me).

All this being said, one of the main reasons that swayed me most was the idea of coming to see any of you or travelling with any of you somewhere for a weekend. Note that this doesn't just limit me to coming to see you in your home - I am more than willing to meet up in a foreign location (within the continental US or cheap island to fly to) on a Thursday night and take off either Sunday night or Monday morning.

If you have an open weekend and are interested, shoot me an email and please let me know - I need about three weeks to a months notice to ensure that I can plan to get there. As I mentioned above, I will be keeping track of all of this, and so can you, on a newly created blog: djwallman.blogspot.com. I'm going to keep this up for as long as I can with my goal being 1 year. If I can't handle it, I have a few outs here and there, but I think it is an experience to be had.

Again, I hope to see you over the course of the next year, and if you have any questions, I'd love to talk!

Thanks!

DJ