‘Sup, Nietzsche?

In the spring of 2007, I drove Krull’s sporty car from his apartment complex on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica to pick him up with a couple of colleagues for a leisurely lunch. It was a remarkably slow day in Investment Banking Land, and they had suggested some fantasy lunch destinations, such as Moonshadow’s in Malibu. We ended up going to the more practical Babalu on Montana, which is a delightful Santa Monican eatery—I am getting nostalgic thinking about it.

On the way to Babalu, with three or four young finance geeks in the car, the “shop talk” was off the charts. About 40 yards before we arrived at the restaurant, one of the young men (none of whom I had met previously, by the way) finally noticed my silence and said, “But that’s enough out of us. Let’s let Nate complain about his job.”

“I really like my job,” I returned without thinking.

“Oh. [Pause] Well, fuck you!” was the banker’s metered response.

That seems like such a long time ago. In fact, this blog is sort of a vestige of a prior phase. Disclosure: I do feel guilty for not posting to this narcissistic forum since February, but in times of transition, there are just some things that you can’t have floating around out there on the Internet…and I am sort of a miserable self-censor. I know, I know, I never finished my 25 Things About Me, but I think it was on February 5 or something like that when The New York Times ran an article about the Facebook phenomenon, and I really could not go on doing it without feeling like a douche.

Coincidentally, that date was also right about the time when Krull was offered a job in San Francisco, and life sort of just changed. Within a month, our gorgeous little house in Los Angeles was vacated, a new apartment on Russian Hill was leased, Krull was settled, and I had refocused my efforts away from blogging and vodka-ing (yes, that most certainly should be a gerund) and exploring L.A. job opportunities to apply to whatever law schools I could.

There has been very little stability in the last few weeks, which is quite a learning experience because the only things that are stable are those that sit at your core: family, values, ideals, friends, love, talents. This has been a great time to reconnect with all of those things, and I have a clarity and confidence that I feel I have been lacking recently.

So I am leaving my apartment and that job that I really like (I actually love it and have been crying for several nights thinking about leaving), and I am going back to school.

What do I think of all this? Well, I don’t really know. I know that I feel good about taking a step in a new direction and getting a degree I have considered for a very long time, but I am suddenly going to have a very different life when the end of July rolls around. While I am really looking forward to the change, leaving a situation that I have grown to love makes me curl my right nostril and contemplate whether I am doing the right thing, and whether this move will help me to build a life that will be satisfying and sustaining.

In the end, it will be a far cry from a mid-week’s lunch at Babalu, and I guess I had planned on that lifestyle being my reality for a good couple of years. I know that I am grieving on a lot of levels…the loss of our first house, the loss of Santa Monica, the loss of a return to California, the loss of a dream, and now the loss of an amazing job…and I am also proudly celebrating a new step into a new future. To paraphrase Nietzsche, to forge ahead into a new world, we must first destroy another.

N.B. RE: Nathan Kicks It—as I sit in LAX, across from the Hudson News whose attendants still recognize me, in the terminal that I entered seven months, two weeks, five days ago after having smoked my last cigarette—it is my intention, having gone public with my plans, not to be merely a fair-weather friend to this blog any longer. But the theme and context will be revised in the near future, I expect. Hey, if I have to deal with all this change, I think my blog might have to bear at least some of its brunt!