new life

i am officially a student now. on tuesday, i stuffed my messenger bag with spiral notebooks and pens, slung it over my shoulder, and sloshed through the rain to my first day of classes. my textbooks finally arrived today via UPS (long story - but the short of it is two failed delivery attempts including one where the driver knocked on the door of the building next door, and the eventual re-routing of the delivery to my work address), reading assignments have been doled out and the various syllabuses have been reviewed. and now for the actual studying....

i LOVE my degree program. every class so far has been enjoyable, with personable professors and fascinating classmates. there are several girls from china in my class actually, including one who already received one master's degree at peking university and worked as a gallery assistant at pace gallery. there's the girl from tel aviv who worked as a curator and desires to return to israel upon the completion of her degree to advocate arts education. there's the half-indian, half-german girl who just graduated from central st. martin's college of art and design, who grew up surrounded by art and antiques in her father's gallery. and yes, my class is mostly women: 42 students and only 3 are male.

for one of my classes, i'm required to tweet five times a week. seriously.

i have felt overwhelmed in a good way this week: overwhelmed at the million and one possibilities and paths that now stretch before me, the mountain of resources that lay at my fingertips. this program's extensive network of alumni working in the arts, being in this city that's the nexus of the international art world, professors bursting with knowledge and experience and happy to impart it all to us eager students....i am in awe. and incredibly humbled.

it's slowly sinking in that i am living, in many ways, a new life. new circles of friends, new neighborhoods, new rhythms of life. i am gradually settling in, though i am aware that realistically, it may be another year before the rhythms feel natural. i am learning my way around my part-time job at a hedge-fund company, getting the hang of reading numbers and performing simple analysis. i am learning all the ins and outs of the new york subway system, acquiring the skills to decipher the tangle of colorful lines on the map, to calculate the best way from point A to point B (the iphone app helps), and to interpret the garbled voices over the intercom speakers announcing this train delay or that re-routing.

and there's the social scene - oh my. there is certainly no lack of activity here. my friend thomas informed me the other day that new yorkers often suffer from a condition called "fomo": "fear of mission out." i can see why. this week is fashion week, and tonight was "fashion's night out". i decided to make it "eva's night in." :)

but i have definitely been enjoying the social life here - in the past couple of weeks, i attended a wine tasting fundraiser for one home many hopes, a concert kicking off the US open featuring matt & kim and girl talk, and "warm up saturday" at MoMA PS1. tomorrow evening, i'm going to a friend's exhibit opening, and then accompanying a friend who works in fashion media to a fashion show at lincoln center as part of fashion week! what to wear, what to wear.....

here's to the new life. :)

cups of coffee:  2

mood:  sleepy