And no Gilligan, either

My sister lives on a boat -- I went out last week for my birthday. Here's what I learned...

The fun things about living on a boat:

• the gentle rocking as you're falling asleep
  
• the sounds of the birds in the morning
  
• it kind of feels exotic
  

The things you don't know until you get there:

• when you go to the bathroom, you can only use five sheets of the one-ply toilet paper per flush
  
• when you shower and you're lathering your hair, you need to turn the water off
  
• you have no yard
  
• you don't really have any privacy if you're friendly with everyone on the dock -- imagine living in a normal suburban neighborhood, and your neighbors can not only see into your house as they walk by, they might also walk right up to your house and stick their head in the window to say hi. That's what it's like to live on a boat.
  
• you can't really have any "stuff" because there's no room
  
• you can't sit up in bed because the ceiling is six inches above you
  

Apollo 13

It's the 35th anniversary of Apollo 13 going into distress and Jim Lovell coming thisclose to the moon and his life's dream, but coming away with his life, instead.

It's also my 35th birthday -- yikes! It used to sound so old. When did it stop?

The Beginning

Search for what? Love? Happines? Peace of mind? The perfect man? The perfect job? Sanity, even? I guess if I have the first three, finding the last is pretty easy. Who knew that I would be 35 and single? Who could have guessed it? Certainly not me. But here I am, living in Ithaca fucking New York -- don't get me wrong. Ithaca is a beautiful place. Just not somewhere I would have picutred myself living 10, 20 -- even 5 years ago.

I left my otherwise dull existence in Rochester in 1999 in search of everything I hoped for. I moved to Baltimore, knowing only two people there, to take what I viewed as the perfect job -- working in baseball. And it was, for a long time. But somewhere along the way, I discovered that work was everything. Discovered that I had let work become the only thing in my life. I lived, ate, slept my job -- working 70 hours a week, six days a week. Left my cell phone number on my voice mail when I was away from the office -- just in case someone needed to get in touch with me. Which is inevitibly what would happen. I got one raise in five years (though the perks of my job were great, they didn't help with the bills) and increasingly felt taken for granted and unappreciated.

Add that to a little bit of homesickness and I started yearning for home. For New York. To be closer to my family and friends. A year of searching, sending out resumes, constantly looking at job openings on line and I finally found a job in Ithaca -- only an hour from "home." Is it the perfect job? No. Is it a satisfying job? Most of the time. Am I miserable there? Never. It's what it is. It allows me to leave work at 5 o'clock, to have my weekends and to build my life outside of work. And so begins my search for redefining my life -- all facets of it.