it is beyond me why -- for someone who hates change as much as i do -- i am finding the closest local mall in my fourth resident city in less than four years. and alone. again.

after moving an entire country away in order to keep the ocean to my west in lieu of to my east, there has apparently been great anticipation for what daniela would have to report.

well here it is:

i want my fucking money back.

the golden gate bridge is neither red nor golden.

in fact, it's gray.

and as far as my extensive (read: brief) marketing and legal backgrounds tell me, this is grounds for punitive compensatory damages. (dear lawyer friends: i know this really isn't the case, but grant me temporary poetic license.)

oh wait ... that's the bay bridge?

about 2750 miles away from the place i've called home for the last year, i find myself removed from the classrooms i'm used to, far from the people i love, and -- most heartbreakingly -- light years away from my bamboo plant, anita.

somewhere in the gene pool, i caught a contagious strain of an adventure disease, a syndrome that, when active, inspires me to detach myself from all the comforts of life, relocate to somewhere i've never been, and explore/pursue/screw.

this disease manual, however, doesn't have a chapter on what to do when one's feline gets out of his carrier on an airplane. twelve rows later, i jumped into a guy's lap, grabbed the cat from between his legs, and apologized profusely for my loose pussy. (no joke.)

when my heart stopped pounding after the drama of chasing a 15-lb cat at 30,000 feet, i realized that jobs and academia have been the impetuses for my moving every summer (*except one) for the last 8 years. needless to say, my mom and i have gotten very efficient at danielafying living spaces with bright colors, unnecessary amounts of toiletries, peach-scented air fresheners, and homemade chocolate chip cookies.

however, what this perpetual movement means for me is that when i'm sitting alone on a sunday evening feeling homesick, i'm not really homesick for my bathmat or my mattress or my kitchen sink; rather, i'm homesick for things like:

my friends.
inside jokes.
my TIVO.
my pots and pans.
and anita (the bamboo plant).

miami's humidity.
the st. louis arch.
politically-inspired DC happy hours.
and aldrich 109 in boston.

ex-best friends.
ex-crushes.
ex-boyfriends.
and my ex-childhood.

this summer's relocation stimulus was accepting an internship doing a job for which i'm mostly unqualified at ... we'll call it kuugel, like noodle kugel ... a company that works in an industry in which i have little expertise located at the polar opposite end of the country.

after all, it would be unlike me to begin a project or job if i didn't start by digging myself out of a 6-foot hole.

so as i was stomping the payment and chomping my gum (east-coast style, naturally) around my new neighborhood this afternoon, i began asking myself why, despite my intense distaste for feeling so uncomfortable and so alone, i love relocating. (my therapist would be proud of this accidental self-reflection.)

maybe it's the a fresh start.

maybe it's the opportunity to re-decorate.

maybe it's dropping unnecessary amounts of money at the same stores but in new malls.

or maybe it's the chance to continuously re-invent myself throughout my twenty-nothing transformation.

whatever it is, moving is exhausting, difficult, and frustrating.

... but it beats standing still.

i check my face.
i look a little bit older.
i look a little bit colder.
with one deep breath, and one big step, i move a little bit closer.
i move a little bit closer.
for reasons unknown.

you know how the first gulp of fresh air tastes after holding your breath for as long as you possibly can? the taste that vacillates between chastising ourselves for depriving our lungs of its most vital import and the self-congratulations of how much more appreciative of oxygen we are once we've experienced life without it?

yeah.

that.

it has literally taken me over a week to write this blog. partly because it's so hard to find the right words to appropriately summarize what i've learned this year. but mostly because of the percoset.

battered wife syndrome should certainly not be mishandled for the sake of analogy, but being called "irreverent" entitles me to use it anyway. recent reports indicate that i am suffering from a few of the general characteristics psychologists associate with the syndrome:

(it turns out that aside from 90% of the classes i took this year, majoring in psychology wasn't a complete waste of my time.)

1. the woman believes that the violence was her fault.

after ten months of being a 1-B (which is kind of like being a 1-L, but 9 letters off and one more year), i am emerging on the other side a little battered. unless you count the effects of sleep deprivation on my quality of life and the hours of sitting in class on my depressed sciatic nerve, no one -- thank g-d -- has physically hurt me, although my self-esteem has been tossed around like the popular girl in high school. i can't recall a time in my life, other than drama camp in 5th grade, when i have ever felt less competent, less human, and less capable than over these last 10 months.

and other than the fact that i've just done in life what allan has done since we were 4 years old, i suppose that going to business school was my decision, and therefore all the attacks on who i am are thus my fault.

in fact, now that i think about it, the most successful i ever felt this year was eating an ungodly number of twinkies in front of 900 of the smartest, most successful people i've ever met. and taking down little debbie ho-hos, my friends, was not on any one of my six 5-hour each final exams.

2. the woman has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

even though business school and i are breaking up for a year, it has become quite apparent to me that my education is everywhere. not only do i now understand more than just the classifieds section in the wall street journal, but also i have been known to run financial projections every time i sit down in a restaurant and have since estimated appropriate depreciation on the summer wardrobe i just purchased.

the good news is that this business mindedness has not consumed every facet of my life: i.e. the business ethics class is only selectively omnipresent. for instance, i didn't tell the woman at bed bath and beyond that she forgot to ring up one of the pillowcases i recently bought.

3. the woman has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.

when it comes down to it, despite being surrounded by no less than 90 people for the vast majority of the last year, graduate school is a deeply lonely and painfully transformational experience. somewhere in between drinking the harvard kool-aid and the john harvards beer, between preparing for a cold call and primping for the cold weather, between growing up and going down, i forgot about tradeoffs.

i didn't realize that pledging to not be at the top of my class meant trading off the excitement of competition. i didn't realize that not consciously planning my long distance relationships meant trading off the relationship altogether. i didn't realize that casually hooking up with only super good-looking guys meant trading off the compassion one finds in a single meaningful connection.

in short, the last year has been all about tradeoffs: careers. academia. relationships. sex. apricots.

although the fact that i have yet to run out of things to bitch about (sometimes funny, mostly not; sometimes heart-warming, mostly not; but always sarcastic and bitter) after nearly two years might lead you to believe that i have identified prescriptions to that which plagues the twenty-nothing soul, loyal readers will assure you i don't. they might also vouch for my unparalleled ability to make my life way more fucked up than necessary.

but since leaving home at 18, after four years of college, two years of working, and a poor excuse for a year of business school, i can tell you this:

the hardest thing about growing up is taking risks -- in love, in jobs, in school, in maturity, in friendship, in sex, and in the lunchroom cafeteria -- knowing that there is always the real possibility that in just a moment, we could lose it all.

so sometimes, the best we can do is just close our eyes and jump. even if we don't always know how long it will require us to hold our breasts breaths.