Oh It's On!

A strange thing happened today. The apartment was feeling a bit stuffy, so I went to open the window. I instinctively braced myself, anticipating a rush of cold air. It never came. Instead, I felt no discernable difference between the temperature inside and the temperature outside. This has by no means been a cold winter, but there's no denying that spring has sprung. In an act of utter meteorological defiance, I broke out the flip flops.

I love this time of year - baseball's ramping up and college basketball is shifting gears to March Madness. It's quite frankly a feeling I don't recall experiencing last year. I hate to admit it, but I think I had two 2010s and went straight into 2012. I have very few distinct memories from 2011 - everything is in someway contextualized by work. Moammar Gadhafi, Kim Jong-Il, and Osama Bin Laden all died? Oh, that should help market The Dictator. Republicans and Democrats duked it out till the eleventh hour on a debt ceiling deal? If it's anything like Nucky Thompson's office, can't we just call in our stand-by construction guys to pull the ceiling? Oh wait... There were riots in the UK? Uh...I worked for some Brits.

Now I know I'm exaggerating a little bit - and perhaps taking important world events a bit lightly - but looking back on it, that was how last year unfolded for me. 2011 was unrelenting. After a pretty relaxed January, I started up on Boardwalk, got a week between that and The Dictator, and just a couple of days before I had to move to Pittsburgh. Next thing I knew, I was ringing in 2012, and I had no idea where the last year of my life had gone.

I had missed every seasonal transition last year, locked away in some artificially-lit, windowless, black-box stage. Which is exactly why opening the window today was such a surreal experience. I had a front row seat as spring burst onto the scene - the sun was in full bloom. I have about a week and a half before jumping back into the working game, and there's no telling what pace I'll keep for the rest of the year, but today was revelatory. My faith in seasonal-change has been restored, whilst my seasonal affective disorder has been squelched.