Exactly one year ago, I got home from an afternoon at the Eagle and saw this message from an intriguing cutie. Of course, my questionable self-confidence and overall cynicism about meeting people through apps kept from thinking there was much to it, so I left the message sitting there for a while. But he was REALLY cute and seemed more interesting than the usual options that came my way, so I finally took that initial gesture in good faith and said hello back.

We got on well, and even met up in person a few days later and discovered that we REALLY got on well.

That two-day gap in which I talked myself into writing something back to that cute dude remains the longest stretch of time that @mental-missteps and I have gone without some kind of interaction during this past year. I’m glad I took that chance. The payoff certainly has been greater than I would have ever guessed.

I love that dude. SO MUCH.

mental-missteps:

A sleepy Saturday morning…

Someone is really making me regret being away at a conference

Me at Body & Soul, January 2016, when Bowie seemed like the worst thing that could happen that year.

( @mental-missteps Dance is more cathartic than expressive for me, but let’s add some to the list.)

It’s been a mostly pleasant time since I left my old job back in September. For the first month or so, I was actively using my newfound free time to get reacquainted with New York, which I actually never quite had time for since moving back in the Summer of 2013. [Insert small rant here about how I let myself work too much, and how my job made that all too easy to justify.] I investigated my new neighborhood, explored various parks up here in northern Manhattan, puttered around my apartment tweaking this to get to feel just right, lost a bunch of weight that had crept up on me over the least couple of years. (I don’t stress-eat every day anymore!)

I also joined a few museums and visited a few others to get myself thinking more about other kinds of creativity than just typography. A long-running passion for type, compounded with a demanding job in the field, had made me a little lazy about investigating other forms of art, no matter how much I have always enjoyed it in many, many forms. It’s been good to set my lens a little wider again.

Eventually, a few opportunities to do some freelance projects came to fruition, easing my fears that I’d starve or default on my mortgage before the year was out. It’s been fun to have a little more variety to what I do again, although I confess that the biggest project was a Monotype follow-up — curating an exhibition in London about Eric Gill’s work. It was fascinating and somewhat cathartic to wrap-up a long-simmering project with Monotype, but with a little bit of distance as an outsider.

Although the first few gigs as a freelancer materialized through the momentum of people knowing who I was and that I was suddenly available, I figured it was time to prepare myself to face the world properly, so I overhauled my online portfolio for the first time in years — like, about 8 years. It was a vivid reminder that I have a pretty eclectic background within the relatively narrow field of design and typography. Also, a reminder that I still don’t have much of an interest in designing web sites.