As I mentioned in my last post I’m here in LA and getting settled in quite nicely I might add. But before I get into what’s new down here, I would like to catch up on a few things that I missed in the hustle and bustle of getting ready for my trip to Los Angeles.

First and foremost sometime on May 28 (or May 29 depending on my mood) I hit my three year sobriety mark. Unfortunately despite the fact that I, my family and Tamara all knew it was coming up we all managed to somehow forget about it when the day actually came. To be honest I’m disappointed that I forgot but it’s not a huge deal to me because I’m a little divided about this whole recovery thing. At this point I just don’t identify a whole bunch with the idea of being an alcoholic. That’s not to suggest that I think I could handle taking booze on again as a hobby because I know I’m a person who should never (and I mean never) start drinking again. It’s just that I don’t wake up every morning and think to myself “Hello my name is TikkunGer and I’m an alcoholic”. I also haven’t been to a meeting in probably a little over a year and a half now. I guess I just kind of feel that it was an issue at one point and I’ve handled it so why try to force myself into an environment I no longer need. Things might be different if I hung out with people who were habitual drinkers but I don’t. Of course having said all of that I know that if things ever got rough and I began to feel the urge to start up again I’d certainly start hitting meetings again. But I’m pretty optimistic that that’s not going to be happening anytime soon. I guess the bottom line is that in my mind three years deserves a little bit of recognition and so it would’ve been nice to have done something, but oh well life goes on.

Something else I’ve wanted to blog about I haven’t is that over last couple of months I’ve been actively working on part one of my final (= honors thesis) project for my bachelors program. It’s spread out over three courses the first part being a research project, the second being a project/program design course and the last being a project/program implementation course. I’ve completed my research proposal as well as my literature review and managed to get A+’s for both of them which has me quite happy about school at the moment. All that remains for part one is to complete a 25 page final research report. I’m actually doing it on a Jewish topic so I’ll probably be doing a fair amount of blogging about it in the not-too-distant future.

As for preparing to come down to Los Angeles it was stressful but it went unbelievably well from start to finish. I mean there were problems like it taking well over two months to renew my passport but everything got dealt with in a completely reasonable manner, which is not something I’m accustomed to. Probably the most difficult thing was giving away and selling off pretty much everything that I own. I didn’t own all that much but I certainly did have a well furnished one-bedroom apartment. I managed to make about $1200 but I gave away thousands just in books (no joke) and hundreds and hundreds of dollars in art that I had been collecting over the years. I basically came down with Judaica and education/psychology books, a few pieces of Jewish art, some electronics and clothing but that’s it. I actually have reduced my material possessions to about four boxes and two suitcases worth of stuff and it was an extremely painful process. Don’t get me wrong it was completely worth it but it was just hard to go through, I’m sure many of you can relate.

Anyhow this post has gotten a lot longer than I expected it to, so I think I will wrap up for now.

Be well.

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