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(Reason number 37 is that I’m bad at naming things. Hi, Mr. Bear.)

(Reason number 38 is that my mother told me if I ever adopted, she would come with me. “Just choose a kid from a country I haven’t been to yet.” Yes, future child. You were chosen solely because your grandma had never been to Yemen.)

I started this blog six years and four apartments ago. There have been relationship changes and job changes and lots of fretting about what I was supposed to be doing in the world. My city has changed. My entire mental landscape has changed.

Amber’s Brain: Now featuring 99 percent less crazy!

(Fine, 80 percent less crazy.)

(Fine, 32 percent less crazy.)

(Fine, I’M AS CRAZY AS EVER.)

(But only when I talk in all caps, which is a solid improvement.)

Aside from friends and family, this blog has been one of the few constants in my life.

DEAR BLOG: YOU HAVE CHANGED ME. YOU’VE MADE ME LESS CRAZY, CAPS LOCK NOTWITHSTANDING. YOU MIGHT JUST BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. SORRY FOR ABANDONING YOU.

Moose in the Kitchen was chosen because I’m the proverbial bull in the china shop. Put me near a stove, watch a cutting board catch fire. I slice fingers instead of carrots, drench the floor with milk, and somehow use every pot in the kitchen to heat tomato soup.

This doesn’t need to be the way the story always goes for me and my dinner. I don’t need to be perpetually dangerous with carving knives if I don’t choose to be.

I’m starting to notice when I hide behind my moose-antlered persona, when I pretend to be more clumsy and less competent than I really am. I needed that persona for years, as I learned that it’s okay if I don’t do everything perfectly all the damn time. Sometimes I drop things, sometimes I forget things, sometimes I say things I shouldn’t, sometimes I make mistakes, sometimes I set things on fire. We all do.

But I don’t need it any more.

I love this blog with the great big love of a girl for a bunch of pixels. I love the people I’ve met, the writing I’ve done, how it’s encouraged me to participate in the world. I do believe I’ve become a different person from writing here. I mean, maybe that’s just the aging process. I certainly would have grown without a blog. But dumping my life into a pile of words here and sifting through them until they made sense has helped.

It’s time for more change. Making way for new things may not be as simple as changing a url or a city – but maybe it is. It sure can’t hurt.

So here’s the announcement you probably saw coming nine paragraphs ago, because you’re a master sleuth and cunning interpreter of clunky foreshadowing.

New blog, coming soon!

As a panda this time! For I have an unholy love of aligning myself with random animals!

Next week, to be precise.

I’ll post here so you can follow the link over, if you’re so inclined. And why wouldn’t you be? I’M DELIGHTFUL.

(Someone told me that once, mostly because they wanted a bite of my roast beef sandwich, and I admit that it went to my head.)

I’m super excited about the new blog – there will be more projects, more cheerleading for other people’s amazing work, more sharing, more actual @#$ posting. I’m hoping it will be lighter and happier – it’s gotten kind of overly-contemplative around here the past year or so.

The panda is my new mascot, but the blog will be very much me. I’m finally learning to stop hiding.

See you on the flip side.

Step into the sun, step into the light.

Los Angeles has sun. Lots and lots of sun. As someone who used to take bikram yoga and an environmentally unsound number of showers just to warm up, I am reveling in this.

In fact, I’m reveling in the whole thing. In all the work, the reason I moved here in the first place. In dinners with spiked juice boxes and pretzel-breaded chicken fingers and homemade ice cream sandwiches. In driving around the city with someone who knows every historical fact about every building and is happy to rattle them off to my nerdy little heart’s content.

LOS ANGELES: THE ONE WITH ALL THE REVELING.

I even reveled in my failed attempt to go to a party in North Hollywood last week, when I ended up not so much in North Hollywood as in Koreatown, a place where there are no parties, unless whatever brawl was happening in front of the Carl’s Jr counts.

Pulling back up to the house after an hour of fruitless driving through an unfamiliar city with a phone that decided to die at a really inconvenient time, I thought, “Well, at least I don’t have to circle for another hour just to park my car.”

The only thing that might’ve cheered me up quicker than remembering that I don’t have to park in San Francisco any more was if Ryan Gosling jumped out of the bushes and opened the car door for me. Actually, never mind. I’d prefer not to have strange men jumping out of bushes at me.

Damn, Ryan Gosling. Stop being creepy.

So I haven’t angsted over parking since I left San Francisco. In fact, I haven’t angsted over anything. Suddenly, I am suspicious. LA, YOU ARE TOO EASY.

Except for all the laundry from Sir Calzador’s muddy paws, that is. The muddy paws he doesn’t understand he has, so why has he been banished from the bed? Again? Calzador just wants to snuggle. I’ve suffered enough guilt from those wide chocolate eyes, Sir Calzador. I understand my bed-sharing performance remains unsatisfactory, but I refuse to yield. Besides, I did let you try to sit in my lap when you are not even remotely a lap dog. You get nothing more from me. I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO GIVE, DOG. Dog’s facial expression implies that this isn’t true, as I very obviously have a roast beef sandwich to give. Sorry, dog. No roast beef for you.

Changing cities can be disconcerting, especially when you suddenly acquire a dog and rhododendron bushes full of Ryan Gosling. But it’s been so seamless that I suspect myself of accidentally selling my soul to one of the lesser demons for sun, a cute dog, and all the parking always.

If I did, it was worth it. My brain is quiet, my body is warm, and the dog hasn’t put paw prints on my white sheets in six whole days.

I like it here. Thanks, LA.

San Francisco has been my home for ten years, a home I’ve loved beyond the bounds of rationality, the way I love most things. I have ten years of history here: ten years of ex-boyfriends, ten years of sandwiches and sprawling in the park with friends, ten years of cursing the fog banks and eating ice cream cones for dinner when the sun logs its annual sixteen minutes in July.

They say there’s a great big world out there, and the map assures me it’s true. I’ve even seen some of it. But there’s always more. And if I’m ever going to live anywhere else, now’s the time. I don’t have much anchoring me, and while it sometimes feels a bit shifty underfoot, it would be churlish of me not to appreciate the freedom.

So I’m moving to Los Angeles.

I’m going to miss my city. I’m going to miss my friends. My family. I’m going to miss my street, with the Baptist church and glowing neon cross that attracts women in frisbee-shaped purple hats. I’m going to miss my apartment, with its random afternoon raccoon invasions and the step that likes to trip people.

When I moved in three and a half years ago, it was exactly what I needed. Small and comforting, entirely my own. No parents, no roommates, no boyfriends. Just me. My mom said it was a good place to heal. She was right. In the three years that I’ve been here, I have healed. I don’t miss the boyfriend any more. I don’t even miss the dog. I loved the man and I loved the dog, but they’re part of my past – and some pieces of your past have no place in your future.

This apartment has been good to me – and it’s affordable, no small consideration for a freelance writer who wants to live in central San Francisco and also eat. The only thing unhooking my claws from the door jamb is the idea that sometimes you need to let go of the pretty good to have the amazing. Even if I don’t end up with amazing, at least I made the leap. Opening up that space might allow in something I couldn’t have imagined otherwise. But doing so requires abandoning what feels secure, familiar, loved.

I leave in twelve days. I’m leaving a lot. But I’ll gain a lot too. More time with Nicole and Drea. A little Anthropologie-style house with a roommate, a big garden, and a dog named Calzador. I’m going to build a business, have parties on the patio, explore a new city, and write, write, write. I can’t wait.

But first the goodbyes. They have to be said, even though I prefer accidental goodbyes, the ones where you kiss someone and walk away, still thinking you’ll see them soon. But you can’t “accidentally” move out of an apartment and a city.

I love my life here. I can’t really say why I need to leave San Francisco, despite the ten paragraphs I just spent trying. But I do. Things are changing, and that change needs my help. So I’m striking the match.

Then there’s your brain. Where everything really happens anyway. Nothing in the human experience escapes the story we’ve invented. As much as those stories torture us sometimes, the brain is also where all the great stories come from. West Wing, Friday Night Lights. David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell. Jane Austen, Milan Kundera. Each brain filters its stories differently and sometimes people write them down, giving us all access to endless variations. That’s an incredible thing.

But the brain is noisy. Full of agitated, hungry hamsters. That’s okay. You learn not to judge what goes through your brain because that’s a big, fat waste of a life. I speak as one who’s wasted a good 75 percent of her waking hours listening to the hamster brain. Hush, hamster brain. You can go to sleep now.

That’s why we all like sex so much, I think. There’s a moment, right at the good part, when your brain just…stops. It’s still. Almost the only time it’s ever still. This is amazing. It’s peace. For the six whole seconds before it starts up again, prodding you to remember that maybe you did that one thing wrong and your partner maybe isn’t the best person for you to sleep with anyway and you have a deadline in two days… yup, there it goes. But for one minute, there was relief. Even grace. Sometimes love. It’s best with love.

Work. Work and money. That’s fun too, if you look at it the right way. One of the best parts of living in San Francisco is that people are always making amazing things. For work, after work, during work when maybe they should be doing something else. Everyone is creating. The smart ones are getting paid for it. (I’m not that smart yet. But that’s okay. I’m learning.) Money is a game when you think about it. How you can collect enough of it to board planes and buy birthday gifts and eat toro sushi on dishes someone else will wash for you.

Then there are the monsters. The gremlins. The trolls. Most of them are just in your head – worries that never actually happen, worries that do happen but weren’t nearly as bad as you thought, worries you never thought to worry on until they blindsided you on a Wednesday morning. Evil little gremlins who look like parking tickets, that cold you can’t shake, abuse, unbearable loss. But if you look at them and feel them and love the gremlins, as best you can, they usually evaporate. Not the illness, not the unbearable loss, but holding love in the midst of pain gives you just enough space to breathe again.

Here’s my favorite part – the people. The people you love. The people you hate. If you don’t hate anyone – and you probably don’t – there are the people who aggravate you or manipulate you or teach you how to hurt. So you learn how to get over that hurt. You learn that no one can manipulate you unless you let them. No one can hurt you unless you allow it. You resist that lesson because it means that maybe you didn’t have to hurt as badly as you did or for as long. But maybe you did. Because that’s how you learned. Don’t get caught in that particular hamster wheel. No regret. Just keep moving forward.

Because you have the world. The great, wide world. Stuffed with elm trees and hot sand and endless stretches of concrete with grass poking out of the cracks. You can see as much or as little of it as you want. Every piece has its own microcosm, until it barely matters what you see and what you don’t. That patch of daisies on the corner of the cul de sac where you grew and lived and died has as much as the Amazon rain forest or the Great Wall of China.

Life is a playground. An astounding, incredible playground. I rarely remember this. Most adults don’t, I suspect. Kids do. Kids are full of joy and rage and live everything fully and loudly. Until we teach them to forget, because forgetting is how you get through a world where most don’t remember. Twenty or forty or fifty years later, you start to remember. That making things just for the joy of creating is good. That running around in a circle until you fall down is fun. That blowing bubbles just to watch them drift and float is one of the best ways to spend an afternoon.

You remember that nothing matters as much as you think it does. And everything matters more than you ever imagined.

But what if there isn’t someone out there for me? Maybe the person I always thought was out there, the one I would find at the right time for both of us, the one who was, in some sense, waiting for me too – what if he doesn’t actually exist? What if the entire Disney franchise totally screwed me over? For every person who finds an amazing partner, it seems there are two or three others who don’t. What if I’m one of those people?

If I am one of those people, a proud member of the crowd that never quite finds their lobster, what does that look like? What does my life look like?

It looks like Paris in the fall. I have an apartment in Paris for September and October if I want it. If I manage things properly this summer (meaning, if I work my sweet ass off), I could live in Paris and work and write and eat butter-saturated pastry and walk along the Seine and invite all my friends to come stay with me.

It looks like living in another city. Since I can live wherever I choose without having to worry about anyone else, maybe I should. As much as I love San Francisco and it will always be my home, it might be time to go elsewhere for awhile.

It looks like developing my own Sunday morning traditions. I’ve wanted to start some sort of regular brunch for awhile now – anyone who’s free shows up and we drink mimosas in the sun and eat those waffles. Maybe now’s the time. A summer of brunches before I pack up my apartment and leave for Paris and then the great beyond of Somewhere Else.

It looks like doing what I want, when I want. There are advantages to not being required to entertain your inlaws for a week when they visit. Advantages in not having to smile through your partner’s work parties as you listen to whatever incomprehensible coding thing everyone’s discussing and make weak jokes about java and python not meaning coffee and FUCK, SNAKE like they used to.

It looks like adoption. I don’t have any real attachment to my biology – having a child is about the relationship, not the genetics. There are so many kids who need good homes. When I’m ready, I would be a good home.

It looks like appreciating people for who they are rather than expecting them to be something they can’t or shouldn’t be. Allowing relationships – and non-relationships – to be what they are, rather than trying to stuff them into my claustrophobic box of perfect. It means walking away when something isn’t right, because it doesn’t have to be right. Because there’s no law or requirement or life codicil that proclaims everything – or even anything – has to be right. Right doesn’t have to exist any more. And that? Feels like relief. Sweet, unqualified, absolute relief.

Not ever finding him doesn’t mean I’m more or less worthy than anyone else. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.

While this isn’t precisely what I’d choose if I was mapping out my life, it doesn’t necessarily look bad. In fact, it looks kind of nice. My life, my terms, my decisions. One thing I do know – a relationship doesn’t save you from loneliness. Or sadness. Or provide any kind of real security. You provide that for yourself, whether you’re in a relationship or not.

So that’s what I’m doing. And it feels good.

(For the record, if I ever become a millionaire, I’m throwing a totally obnoxious party with champagne and glitter and oysters.)

This is a weird thing to mention, in a blog post or anywhere else, but it illustrates my point:

I was living with an actual millionaire - and I was worried about money.

No, it wasn’t my money. We didn’t have a joint account and I wasn’t buying Louboutins with it. I was paying my bills, he was paying his. He paid for the house because it was his house and I bought the groceries and given our respective situations, I was probably spending a higher percentage of my income at the time to keep us in roast beef than he was to keep us in gorgeously-renovated Victorian. But had I truly ever needed anything, the money was there. And every week, I worried.

Hard Damn Lesson: Money doesn’t provide security.*

* Note: I’m still not entirely convinced I believe this. Most of the problems I’m wrangling would absolutely, unequivocally be solved if I had a million dollars in the bank. (Or even a thousand dollars in the bank.) No, money doesn’t buy happiness. But it does buy food and comprehensive healthcare and plane tickets to see loved ones and the good towels. But I also know it’s possible to have all those things and still feel like you’re suffocating.

One of my worst, most depressed moments in the past decade came when we were sailing around the Caribbean. I was sitting on the back of the boat in the harbor in Antigua. It was a balmy night, full of stars and boats bobbing gently in the water, lights on the prow and moon in the sky. It was like floating in heaven, if heaven also has shrimp and beer. And I felt absolutely wretched. I wanted to fling myself off the back of the boat and swim for shore or just sink. Whatever it took to stop feeling the way I was feeling.

It was probably a combination of wicked PMS and my space-loving soul not yet knowing how to handle being on a boat with six other people for an extended period of time. Whatever it was, I was miserable and I didn’t know what to do about it. So I just sat on the back of that boat and cried.

Hard Damn Lesson: Flying to amazing places doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy once you get there.

Money, relationships, Caribbean islands – all the things we’ve been trained to think will make life a sun-drenched field of leaping unicorns don’t guarantee so much as a plodding, moth-eaten pony with a paper cone glued to its forehead. Sure, those things help. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s much easier to be unhappy with a lot of money than without. But in the end, it doesn’t make much difference in the way you feel.

God, this sounds awful, doesn’t it? WAH, I HAD A RICH BOYFRIEND AND AMAZING TRIPS AND I WAS SOOOOOO MISERABLE. Boo-fucking-hoo. That’s probably why I haven’t ever mentioned this before. PLEASE DON’T THINK LESS OF ME BECAUSE I HAD EVERYTHING AND STILL WASN’T HAPPY. Never mind, go ahead. I probably deserve it. But god, this was important for me to learn. I would even call it the most valuable experience of my life. All those things we’re taught to aim for, to desire – they don’t make life perfect. The things you think should make you happy don’t always. So what does?

Lessons I Learned The Hard Way

I make me happy. The way I look at my life. How grateful I am for what I do have, whether it’s a hell of a lot or not much. My friends and family and building those relationships, even when they aren’t ideal. The joy I take in random things, like drawing misshapen elephants or writing love notes and leaving them all over the city.

All of that is completely under my control. Doesn’t matter what job I have, how good I am at cooking or writing poetry or bocce ball, who I’m dating, how much money is in my bank account, how long it’s been since I sat on a tropical island. None of that affects my happiness in any real way.

For awhile I had the perfect little life. Loving boyfriend, plans to have kids, a gorgeous house in San Francisco with a yard for the dog and a parking space for the fancy car, trips wherever we wanted, time to write. On paper, it was goddamn idyllic.

It was worth losing it all to learn that I control my own happiness.

My security, my self worth, the joy I get from life – all of them depend on me. Just me. Knowing that makes having to rebuild my entire life from scratch absolutely worth it. It’s great if you can learn this without having to start over. Most of you probably have. Cause you’re much smarter than me. I’m stubborn and resistant and this often forces life to plant its steel-toed boot in my ass to get me to see what’s real.

It’s okay, life. I appreciate the boot. Keep it coming.

NOT REALLY, NO. That cheerful smile hides a rather gothic sensibility.

She looks like she’d ask for a nice book, doesn’t she? Maybe a Rosamunde Pilcher novel or something by the Dalai Lama. But, no. My mother’s 66th birthday was on Saturday and the fondest desire of her morbid little heart was for me to compose her obituary. Before she died. So she could actually read it, without the aid of a oujia board or some serious sage.

Turns out, writing your mother’s obituary is really hard. Because you’re forced to contemplate her inevitable demise. So you cope by discussing yourself in the second person (hi!) and making fun of her cooking.

* Yeah, she wasn’t born in 1968. She had already finished grad school and met my father by 1968. I thought she’d enjoy being 43. She thought I had no clear conception of reality. I mean, she’s right – my grasp on reality is tenuous at best – but I do know the year she was born.

** “That doesn’t really encapsulate the drunk father.” “I SAID ‘MORE OR LESS’, MOM.” She later admitted I was right – she was loved, cared for, given opportunities, and had an older sister who only occasionally lined her up against the garage and hurled squishy purple plums at her head like some miniature farmer’s market firing squad.

*** SO ENTERTAINING. For her birthday breakfast she made us omelettes, and by “made us” I mean “handed over plastic ziploc bags and told us to squish up the eggs and toss it in the boiling water.” This works better than you would think, even if my brother did note that life was nicer when we just sat down and she fed us.

**** Mom’s vegetarian, so she never serves meat. At least not to us. We find it a gross injustice that the cat gets salmon and we get tofu.

Happy birthday, mom! You have many good years left in you, even though you play fast and loose with salmonella poisoning.

Bitter Baking Company was a BiSC sponsor and immediately made an irrevocable and obnoxious fangirl out of me. So when Nicole asked if I wanted to do a cookie giveaway, I said something eloquent and appreciative. Something like “GIMME.”

So I’m giving away a box of cookies. Because I love you. Here they are:

Who doesn’t want a cookie that tells you you’re pretty? I ASK YOU.

Guess which of these is something a drunk guy said to me in a bar? Hint: it’s not the one about being pretty. I went to Santa Cruz this weekend with one of Drunk Guy’s compadres-in-crime and told him that his drunk friend kept saying hilarious things and I kept putting them on Twitter and then I put them on cookies and his friend gave me that “who the hell are you?” look, a look I have to admit I’m rather familiar with. He also thought it was kind of awesome, as well he should. Drunken ramblings should be immortalized on cookies whenever possible.

ANYWAY. THE COOKIES. THEY ARE AWESOME. If you want them, you should leave a comment down in that handy little comment box. Maybe tell me which of your Tweets you’d put on a cookie. Or follow my fine and upstanding example and just say “GIMME.”

I’ll choose a winner on, say, Thursday morning. You should probably be in the continental U.S., otherwise shipping gets insane, and there’s enough insanity in the world already.

[The winner, as chosen by random.org, is Madame Ali Martell. Hooray! Thanks for playing, everyone.]

Ever bake something and wonder why it doesn’t look like the picture in the cookbook? And take sixteen whole minutes to remember that you aren’t Nigella Lawson and you substituted baking powder for baking soda (because how different are they really?) and that might begin to explain why?

Ever stroll blindly through the park, so engrossed by your own cycling mental processes that you don’t register accidentally ignoring a friend until two blocks later? Then have to send a sheepish “Sorry I was raised by dingos” text?

Ever look back at specific points in your life and think, “I was drowning and I didn’t even know it”?

Ever chat on Skype and discover that if you move your head a certain way in the tiny video box, you closely resemble a lurking crocodile? And decide to film it and send it to all your friends? Then realize you really should find a hobby? Then decide that filming yourself impersonating a crocodile is so totally a legitimate hobby?

Ever ask a bunch of rhetorical questions and wonder why no one’s socked you in the mouth yet?