“Just try. Work as hard as you can and give yourself entirely. You might succeed, you might fail. In the end, you’ll achieve a lot of knowldege and you’ll realize what you have learned and conquered from that.”

Merci pour ton sagesse, tu sais qui tu es.

“I’ve never thought it was possible to love someone too much, but maybe it is.”

….maybe it is.

I guess saying “Rabbit Rabbit” when I woke up this morning yielded something positive.

I was officially accepted in to the Birthrights program for June.  This has been something I’ve been dreaming about for years to do and FINALLY the timing is right and I’m in.  The smile on my face is so enormous right now I can’t even fathom stopping anytime soon.  This is step one in what hopefully will be a traveling year to remember.  All I need to do is hear back from Istanbul and Thailand then I’m set.

Seriously, nothing can get me down today.

Alright, some of you might be thinking, “No Cas, you’ve always been a little crazy.”  If that’s the case, then kudos to you because there is truth in that statement.

Last week though I looked in the mirror and was just sad.  I was sad my body didn’t resemble at all what it used to look like between 2002-2007.  It should come as no surprise–I miss running track every morning I wake up.  There’s something to be said about intensive sprint workouts and lacing up those yellow and black spikes I swear by before pounding out a 400.  Some of my best friendships were forged during 300 repeats or 4-2-2-4-2-2 (ouch).

What I also miss from track is how incredibly in shape I was.  I miss having the body of an athlete.  In high school cross country I slimmed down to 125 pounds at 5’10”, yet I was eating at least a pound of pasta every night.  During track season I would reach 145 max from the weight training and sprint workouts.  Northeastern track, well, I think I topped out at 165 by the end of the season.  I put on muscle I didn’t even know was possible and I honestly think my thighs could take out most of the men in Kerr Hall.  Didn’t matter–I was still rock solid and knew I could easily put out a 22:00 5K without even blinking.

Now….not so much.  Ever since my knee surgery I’ve been hesitant to train competitively again.  I ran a lot in Paris because it was so serene.  Running has always been a fantastic way for me to process my thoughts and organize my feelings and Paris was no exception.  It all came to a tumbling halt though when I had that unfortunate incident October 2008 and was mentally afraid of being pushed in front of a car again on the left bank.

In an attempt to stay physical but not face my running demons, I picked up Bikram over the summer and fall.  Sporadically that is.  Bikram is an amazing form of hot yoga consisting of the same 26 poses completed over the course of 90 minutes in a room that hovers around 107 degrees.  Sounds horrifying but I’m addicted.  Running and yoga are two polar opposites where running contracts your body and yoga stretches it out.  I’ve always been notorious for not stretching properly so putting my body in a heated room automatically forces my muscles to stretch.  Since getting my unlimited membership for March I’ve been going at least 3 times a week and have certainly slowly seen some results.  Okay well that’s a lie…some weeks I’ve gone 3 times, other weeks I’ve been hanging out with Relyt and partaking in activities that result in vertical trainwrecks.

That being said, when i looked in the mirror I was finally mentally ready to make the decision to transform my body, like I have so many seasons past.  I don’t have a coach and I’m not going to train towards a competitive goal at this moment in time, but rather, have the self satisfaction that i could go out there at any time and run a 23:00 5K without blinking (I say 23 because without a coach sub 22 is out of the question right now).

After a weekend of running 4 straight days and purchasing dixie cups so I can ice my shins (I forgot about that unfortunate side effect), yesterday I started my 8 weeks of dedication to transforming my body.  I’m going to try and get in double workouts at least 3 times a week, maybe even more as I feel the strength in my body increase and can handle double cardio in a day (ie long morning runs and hi/lo tempos in the evening).

Yesterday consisted of: 9am Bikram class, running errands, 4:30 run of 4 miles (including running up Wait St on Mission Hill) in the monsoon followed by an ab circuit when I got home.  What I found incredible (other than I consciously chose to run in the pouring rain again) was how great it felt to run in the rain.  I felt amazing to run by people who expressed horror on their face walking to class, and here I was running by them completely drenched by choice.  What’s more perplexing is that even though my legs felt so heavy and exhausted from bikram earlier in the morning (and the weather) I actually shaved 15 seconds off my overall time on this run, compared to the last time I ran it a week ago.  <—WOW.  Did not see that coming.

Off to bikram round II then running this evening around 7pm.  Send out good thoughts please!

Well kiddies it’s official.

Last night O’Lala and I sent out our applications to teach in Thailand.  It was incredibly exhilarating and now we get to play the horrible waiting game as the program reviews our materials.  Let’s just say sending everything was a huge relief, especially after the whole ordeal of getting passport photos.  Who knew they cost so much, even at CVS?  At least I charmed the photo guy to giving me a package deal for them.  Can’t say my PR skills don’t come in handy running errands.

I have to admit though, as big as a relief it was sending in the application I now sit with a little anxiety.  I guess at every crossroads there comes hesitation.  After hitting “submit” it all really came to the forefont that I seriously might be moving to Asia.  The thought is both exhilarating and frightening.  There are certain things I must admit (as much as I don’t want to) that I will miss.  Hanging out with my roomies while shouting at March Madness games, lounging around playing frisbee at the park on a nice Saturday, running around the Esplanade and taking trips to the Arboretum.  As precious as these things are to me, I know that the experience coming up will Jack Bauer anything on the table.

Perhaps it’s not the fact that I might be moving to Asia, but rather that we ALL are now graduating and won’t have these opportunities anymore to just coexist with one another.  We are still in that grace period where our identity is neither adult nor college student.  Maybe my sudden nostalgia for all things Boston is based on the fact that after May 7th, it won’t be the same again.

Well, let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells now.  The night is a starry dome.

The past couple of weeks have been amazing and at the same time a lot to digest.  I think it’s natural that at any point in this life we come across that age old question: What am I doing with my life?  I too am in this boat right now, along with what seems to be the majority of my peers.  Let’s take my life as case study, shall we?

Stats: 22 year old Northeastern Graduate, with honors.  Worked for Boston’s top entertainment/hospitality/PR companies and produced shows for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, but still can’t get a good job.  [awesome]

Desires: Would ideally love to move back to NYC and get back in to the fashion circuit.  Another part of me wants to stay in Boston and try to work for the Red Sox.  15% of me wants to say “EFF THIS” and just move to the Vineyard for the rest of my life where things are more simple.  And then there’s everything in my being that wants nothing more than to move back to Europe and find a synthesis for all my heart’s desires.

The Rest: Since moving back to the States it’s been sincerely hard for me to feel as if I’m “home”.  While I was in Miami over New Year’s with the girls from Paris who I absolutely adore, we were lounging poolside when one of them threw me the latest issue of The Economist.  Inside was an article that describes exactly how I feel about being back, entitled “The Others.”  One part in particular hit home the most:

For the real exile, foreignness is not an adventure but a test of endurance. The Roman poet Ovid, banished to a dank corner of the empire, complained that exile was ruining him “as laid-up iron is rusted by scabrous corrosion/or a book in storage feasts boreworms”. Edward Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American scholar, caught the romance and pain of exile when he called it “a strangely compelling idea, but a terrible experience”. The true exile, he said, was somebody who could “return home neither in spirit nor in fact”, and whose achievements were “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever”.

The willing foreigner is in exactly the reverse position, for a while at any rate. His enjoyment of life is intensified, not undermined, by the absence of a homeland. And the homeland is a place to which he could return at any time.

The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland which they left behind changes. The culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding”.

I didn’t leave Boston on great terms and it feels like I came back to an even harder set of circumstances.  Boston and America in general did not have the charm or life that it once held in my eyes and in my heart.  I had to burn every bridge when I left Boston, so it was like starting over in the worst way possible.  Moreover, I had built a life in Paris and quite a stable one at that with amazing people, traditions and routines that I still dream about on a daily basis.   That anxiety, coupled with the stress of senior year and graduating, has left me feeling lost.

Something funny happened to me last week.  My friend Aly asked me to assist her at her job.  She works at an international organization that helps displaced refugees in 3rd world countries make a life here in America.  The family she was picking up at Logan that evening was from the Congo–Lord knows what they witnessed down there.  They didn’t speak english and she needed someone to go with her to translate their French and help get them settled in to their apartment in Lynn.  I graciously accepted to volunteer and assist.  As we greeted them in Logan they looked as they had been traveling for days.  A family of 8 (six of them children) and each family member had one bag.  Not one suitcase, one bag with a zipper on it.  That’s it.

Seeing that struck a chord in my heart that has refused to cease from resonating.  I know I have a lot of stuff, but seeing everything first hand put such a great perspective and knocked me back in to reality.  Granted, I’m in fashion and PR so naturally I have to have a lot of clothing and accessories due to my job description, but I could easily fit all my shoes in to two bags.  Watching them was emotionally draining and rewarding all at the same time.  I don’t know how Aly does it on a daily basis.  The kids were so excited they couldn’t stop tackling me and tickling me.  The smile on their faces showed they didn’t have a care in the world, they were just happy to be.  That innocence children hold is so precious.  The father was concerned and asked a bajilliondy questions all about his children and their english lessons and schooling.

I think about them every night and wonder how they are.  On a semi-related note, my friend got into the graduate program at the institution in Paris I was at for undergraduate.  He wasn’t sure if he was going to go until I told him, “Seriously, if you don’t do this now you’ll never be able to do it again and who knows what it will bring.”   Then I thought to myself, why am I doing this?  Why can’t I give back and do something with my life that’s a little bit more emotionally rewarding than pitching a clothing line or restaurant’s new chef? More importantly, why am I not taking my own advice?!

That sealed the deal.  I’m applying to teach abroad in Bangkok for a year starting in October.

I don’t know what’s going to happen and that thrills me. Home does not feel like home anymore than it did when I returned from Paris, so why not do this adventure and see what happens.  A girl I know who went to Loyola is doing the same thing now and I see her pictures and her stories and I ache to do the same thing.  She’s been volunteering at this orphanage camp on the border of Burma and Thailand.  The children there are refugees from Burma and the majority of them even witnessed their parent’s execution.  Regardless, they still hold that laughter, that smile that brings out the preciousness involved with innocence and a hope that anything is possible.

One tiny detail that makes a huge difference is that one of my closest friends, C.O., will be joining me on the excursion.  She is in the same boat I’m in and we need something to spark our personalities back to life again.  I’m still young, the rat race can wait.  Once I’m on that fashion/PR circuit or whatever I choose, there’s not getting off it anytime soon.  I don’t want to tell my kids or grandkids I spent my 20’s going to work Monday through Friday (sometimes also Saturday and Sunday in this industry) from 9-5.  I want to tell them that I spent a year in Paris, learned yoga at a retreat in India, went sky diving over Interlaken, went scuba diving in Bali, attended a Full Moon Party and picked up snippets of Thai, Mandarin and Japanese on my travels.  The thought of being in Thailand and helping the global effort and exchange of cultures is invigorating to me.  Maybe I was put here to be a translator between cultures.  Who knows, the path might lead somewhere else I could have never dreamed of in my wildest years.  Maybe Travel Channel will ask me to join their forces and I get my own show.  All I know is that I’m excited about the opportunity that is ahead of me.  I’ll wrap it up with the ending paragraph from the article in The Economist.  If you don’t want the story spoiled, I highly recommend you cease reading here! ; )

“But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.”

I am on cloud nine.  This week has opened so many doors both personally and professionally.

There’s not stopping me now.  Watch out world.

Dear Google,

Thank you for making a Super Bowl commercial that touched so close to home, I ended up crying in front of the 20 guests at my own party.  As if I wasn’t missing France enough, you had to go and make this:

Bisous,

Cas Cas The Explorer

When Dickens said, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he was clearly referring to the life span of an undergraduate at an institute for higher learning–or at the very least mine.

Well kiddies, it’s official.  Northeastern =  fin.  Now for the million dollar questions: What will she doe next?  My million dollar answer: No effing clue. In my heart I know that there really is such as a thing as a quarter life crisis, however, more on that later.

So many mixed emotions and feelings with being done a semester early.  In my opinion, it mildly (at  least) reflect what limbo must feel like.  Do I stay in Boston or move back to Manhattan for the rest of the “year”?  Should I stay in Boston till May and spend the summer on island?  Or even, do I begin applying to grad school and/or au pair and look in to teaching english abroad?  Regardless of what I do or where I end up, college changed me for the better.  I think going to Northeastern also gave me a leg up on the “growing” and maturity level we’re all searching for as undergrads.  Going to a four year school is really like leaving the party at 10 or 11 pm.

While at Northeastern I’ve lived in three major cities of which I’ve had to ability to co-op in two, and the third one gave me the best year I will ever have in my life.  The things I learned about other people, and consequently learned about myself, can never have a price tag on it.  I put on fashion shows for New York Fashion Week, opened up a Neiman Marcus, put a client (repeatedly) on episodes of Gossip Girl, had my photo end up in countless publications, travel to twelve or so countries in the E.U. while living in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and coming out of it with the best friends an individual could EVER ask for.

….Blessed.

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not ready for this.

Or perhaps, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.