Goodbye J-School, Hello World

"It shall be a carnival of the liver," he said, wiping vodka sauce off the corners of his mouth before returning to his keyboard to type, pausing periodically to drink from the tall can of PBR beside his laptop. He was a backwards-baseball-cap-wearing Boston Red Sox fan, an objectionable hipster and my dear friend.

Our whirlwind friendship began what seems like a century ago. We met last August, just after I'd moved to New York, shortly after journalism school began. It was before my first chili-covered mango drenched in lemon juice on Coney Island, before that snowy October morning spent in a small bistro in Hell's Kitchen, before my first, last and only H&H bagel. It was before the moment that New York became "home," when my plane back to the city from Boston touched down on the landing strip at JFK. That was when my objectionable hipster friend and I met.

Those were the days, before I was a new-to-New York New Yorker, before he and I were about-to-be Columbia Journalism School alumni, and before he was about to head off to Miami. In those days, I was already a hipster un-apologist, the rare type whose cognizance of her hipsterdom doesn't weaken her hipster identity. This blog, about that time I moved to New York City and entered "adulthood," is a tribute to him, his debauchery, the tilt-a-whirl in his liver and the whack-a-mole beating a drum-and-bass rhythm on his kidneys. A tribute to him, alongside some pictures I make on the way to that ever-elusive "adulthood."

Here's to you, dear friend, and the life you'll live up in Miami. A cheers to life's next leg.