Media Splay: Branching Out

The Gemini in me has been, as to be expected, distracted; jumping from one beautiful, creative flower to the other.

Last month, I went to Amsterdam for work followed by a much needed and enjoyable four-day layover in London. My time in the former–the highlight of which was dinner and a much needed drink with one of the kindest men i know–was laced with some misery, personified by the cold, the damp, and Schipol Airport officials who apparently don’t know where Barbados is and whether it is authorized to issue passports to its citizens. London, my home away from home, eased some of the anxieties brought on by my stay in Amsterdam, and my body relaxed itself right into the flu. Good times were had anyway, and the Delta crew on my way back to New York plied me with orange juice and sympathetic smiles.

But what that European journey did do was to open me back up to all of the things I’ve said I wanted to do and have for various reasons side-stepped or done with hesitation: photography, more painting, more writing, leaving New York. My London-based friends, a warm good-natured bunch, have convinced me that I should move back. I left them saying that I will. And I mean it. But that is at least a year off.

More immediate, though, is the delve back into the creative things that keep me engaged with that sane part of myself. With the economy tanking by the second, taking a good chunk of the publishing world with it, I have had to think about not only where I physically want to be in the next year, but what I want to be doing there.

In the past few weeks, I have taken to branching out in every possible way; unburying myself from my stack of magazines and books and music, to actually going out more in New York (always happens when you know you will be leaving a place), joining Twitter, starting a new short story, and creating a photoblog to force myself to take more pictures (you will seem of that stuff cross-posted to this blog). Basically I am doing the things that genuinely make me laugh, think, and feel::when I’d stopped doing that is hard to say, but I’m glad I’m getting back to it.