Life is a Parkway

I had mentioned in the first post that I was planning on signing a year-long lease. Allow me to elaborate.

Living in Linden since the end of my Yale career hasn't been all that bad. Three squares a day (okay, two squares a day; who eats breakfast anymore?), free room and board, free utilities, a parking space and ample location in relation to work and nearby shopping have spoiled me greatly. It's served as a fairly central location between my three part-time schools in 2008 -- east of Union County College, north of Rutgers, south of Montclair. It certainly doesn't hurt that I'm still surrounded by many of my friends from high school and even as far back as kindergarten.

That said, with my upcoming year-long sentence tenure at Montclair State looming on the horizon, I needed to break free of the dreaded Commute up the hellacious Garden State Parkway. Mind you, the Parkway is a beautiful 5-lane road that I enjoy frequenting for pleasure drives, and it makes the Turnpike look like a steaming pile of crap (which it pretty much is, north of exit 11). But between the hours of 8 AM and 6 PM, the Parkway morphs into something sinister and foul, where you become quick friends with the bumpers directly behind and in front of you as you share your hour-long trip at a max of 15 MPH. Considering I would spend at least 15 miles on this road in each direction getting to and from Montclair, it was simply not something I could do for an entire year.

My first option was to share a 2-bedroom apartment in Parsippany -- 10-15 miles west of Montclair, on a corridor with less traffic and no tolls -- with a good friend from high school, but eventually he felt like he wasn't ready for the move. (Considering I'm still having slight reservations myself, I can see where he's coming from.) This leaves me to choose a glut of 1-bedroom and studio apartments in the Montclair area, although the costs are a bit formidable on some. Right now, ironically, the place I am looking at most seriously is not an apartment at all, but a 1-bedroom cottage. (No telling yet if the roof is thatched, though I will be certain to inquire upon visiting.)

I'm hoping to have more interesting [to the rest of you] things to post about in the near future, it's just that the apartment/cottage hunt is taking up the greatest percentage of my time at the moment. Soon enough, you will be treated to more interesting random babble, even though it will still most likely be babble.

Introductory

As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted my very own blog.

Okay, that's a lie -- the first time I remember actively wanting a blog was last year around this time. I wanted to make a sports blog, a goal brought on by my urge to publish my writeups on Ivy League football. That never happened because I could never settle on a good name (I was cripplingly demoralized when I discovered that "sportsmanlikeconduct" was taken), and the idea faded into obscurity.

Here we are a year later, and I've hung up my cleats as the Yale Precision Marching Band's resident beat writer for the Bulldogs. The time has come for me to move on to the greener pastures of grad school, as I move towards my second lifelong dream (you know, after owning a blog) of becoming a math teacher. A lot of things are about to change, and what better way to celebrate that wonderful journey than by posting it on the Internet for all you lovely people to read?

Of course, even though it's a year later, there's still the damned problem of needing a name. I am sadly not clever enough to make up for the 5 years of established puns out there on the internet, so coming up with a URL that wasn't already taken was an adventure. I eventually decided to focus on a word that pretty well describes exactly what you'll get out of this blog -- "tangent".

I like what I've settled on as the blog URL for several reasons. Obviously, I think I've picked a sufficiently mathy term. If the Wikipedia article contains a capital sigma and more than three lowercase Greek letters, you know you've done right. Yet the blog's name doesn't jump right out as being specific -- you're more than welcome to interpret it as "thetan gent's pace". (Disclaimer: This blog does not endorse Scientology.) And because of this wordplay, my blog will forever remind me of the most painful New York Times crossword clue of all time, when "Bug spray at the beach?" became "Off on a tan gent".

I don't have a specific type of post I plan on making here, a set topic that I'll focus on. ("Tangent", remember?) But something I do hope to get started on is a "Project 365" photo journal, an idea inspired by my good friend Katie's current endeavors. I think it would be highly appropriate for me to start a year-long photo journal as I get ready to sign a year-long lease, so that's something to look forward to as you all set your RSS feeds and Google reader pages and whatnots. I can't promise you anything fancy, though -- my only two camera options are a point-and-shoot and my cell phone.

With that, I welcome you to The Tangent Space. Please, make yourself at home.