2018 was a weird year.
The older I get, the fewer friends I seem to have.
OK, that’s not entirely true. I have tons of friends — but most of them are in LTRs, or are married, or have kids, or have moved away, etc. So, as a single 29-year-old, making plans to go to a concert or take a vacation or go to dinner is no longer as simple as polling my roommates to figure out who’s doing what for spring break, or walking across the street to ask my neighbors whether they’re down to go to a music festival with me in two days.
The only real chances I have to get together with friends take loads of planning. Like, yunno, weddings and bachelorette parties and whatnot. Finding friends who are free for international vacays, last-minute concerts, out-of-town weddings? It’s practically impossible.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years not doing the things I really wanted to do because I was afraid of doing them alone. I’ve passed up concerts, weekend trips, street festivals — you name it. I spent years turning down the things I really wanted to do because I was so afraid of doing them by myself.
Guten Tag and hallo! I’m sleep deprived AF and am currently typing this on my phone from a seat on a budget airline flight somewhere between Berlin and Chicago!
I’ve got a preeettty bad (good?) habit of buying super cheap flights for super short trips months in advance with the “oh I’ll figure it out later” mentality. So, when I was surfing Skyscanner three months ago and landed on a $320 round-trip flight from ORD to SFX on my birthday week? No brainer. I packed my single backpack (#nobaggagefees), left Chicago at about midnight this past Tuesday, arrived in Berlin Wednesday afternoon, and landed back at O’Hare really late Saturday night — just in time for my 6 a.m. Sunday shift at the Trib. Perk: My trip only cost me a single vacation day.
Happy birthday to me, right?
So, this is a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
I get asked — a lot, actually — how I do my nails since I pretty much always have them done. I worked at a bar throughout college, and health codes don’t allow for nail polish usage in the food service industry. So, all through college, I couldn’t ever paint my nails. If I did, it was for a two-day span and then the polish had to come right back off for my shift. Long-lasting manicures weren’t really necessary.
Once I graduated college and got fired from my bar job (long story), I started painting my nails again. I was a reporter so I always had my notebook and pen out in front of me, and had a lot of attention on my hands. I started making more of an effort to keep my nails polished. I started getting acrylics done right after college, but didn’t like the feel of them, and thought they looked a little too high-maintenance. Plus, they were expensive! I started painting my own nails instead. And, after a few years of trail-and-error, I finally figured out what products work and what don’t.
Here’s my step-by-step.
It’s just before 10 a.m., and I should be tired. Exhausted, even. But I’m not.
I woke up about 16 hours ago, and worked for 11 of them. I returned home an hour ago, ate dinner and got ready for bed. But right now, the sunlight is bouncing off the walls of my apartment, warming the chill of my unit that still lingers from last night. I slid my windows up and open before I walked out my door at 8 last night, and I’m thankful I did. The cold is refreshing.
Last night was an unusual night at work in that I stepped out from behind my standing desk and its four screens — equipped with internal CMS programs, Chartbeat, analytics software, Tweetdeck, emails, Slack chats, cable news, etc. — and hopped into the passenger seat of a pool car, shadowing a Chicago Tribune overnight reporter for an almost 11-hour overnight shift spent following gunshot victims, making midnight calls to public information officers, chatting with witnesses and drinking plenty of coffee.
OK guys, ready? This is a post I’ve been asked to write multiple times. I’ve been putting it off because I wasn’t really sure how to write it without sounding like a privileged and/or condescending asshole, but people keep asking me this question, and I really do want to answer it.
The question? “Randi, how do you afford to travel?!”
It’s been a little more than a week since we were evicted from Tribune Tower, but it seriously feels as though it’s already been ages.
I worked from home last Sunday, then arrived at work bright and early for our first day in the new newsroom last Monday.
It was… overwhelming, to say the least.
But, we’re settled in and I am absolutely loving our new space. It’s bright, modern and slick, and is so much of an upgrade over our last newsroom.
It’s a very bittersweet day for the journalists at 435 N. Michigan Ave. here in Chicago.
Today’s the day we move out of our home: Tribune Tower, where we’ve worked for almost an entire century.
Oh, hey. Another weekend travel post. *Ducks under desk*
My mom likes to joke about how — if I’m not currently on a trip, I’m planning one. She’s not wrong. As soon as I got back from Boston last month, she asked where I was off to next. I told her I’d been thinking about visiting New Orleans for a while, and surprisingly, she said she wanted to go as well.
So, NOLA it was!
So, I haven’t really been around too much lately, and I don’t really have to struggle to find the words to explain why. I mentioned at the beginning of the year that 2017 was shitty, and — while I was hoping 2018 would be better — we’re almost halfway through the year and it’s pretty much just as shitty as last year. Welp.
I’m still trying to take things day-by-day, dealing with the fallout from my recent breakup, parents’ divorce, work transitions, etc., and so far that’s meant refocusing my attention away from things like social media and blogging and toward things like reading, yoga, traveling and happy hour with my girlfriends.
Ironically, it seems like the more time I spend doing the things I love, the less time I have to blog about them.
Anyway, I wanted to give a little “Life Lately” update. I used to do these every other month or so, but haven’t posted one since last year. Where has the time gone?
