Blog Swap!

Okay so I'm participating in a blog swap over at 20Something Bloggers and I got this cool swap buddy named Amanda.  I think she rocks because she loves Harry Potter and she lives in New York.  So read her entry and check her out!!! (Oh and I'll post the link to my post over at her blog when it's up.....I haven't e-mailed it to her yet...)  *Here's the link for my post over on her blog*

Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I present to you, Amanda Lucci!

Hi! I'm Amanda (www.amandalucci.com), and as part of 20Something Bloggers' blog swap I'm infiltrating Josie's blog today. 20SB asked us to write about our summer, and I can't think of any summer in my life that changed me more than this one. 

As a journalist, I had always dreamed of moving to New York City after college and starting a fabulous career, but up until literally two weeks before graduation I thought my dream would have to wait. I applied for, I kid you not, like 100 different jobs and internships. With this economy the way it is, let me tell you from experience that the people on the news aren't kidding when they say the job market sucks. It's really, really bad out there. Luckily, the stars aligned and pigs flew and just as I was about to accept defeat, I was offered an internship at a Manhattan-based startup.

So, two days after graduation, I boarded an early-morning flight to La Guardia. I'll admit, I was terrified. I was planning on living with my boyfriend, but with my last minute moving plans we had not solidified a living situation. We ended up living like vagabonds for the first two weeks — I crashed in a friend's vacant bunk at NYU, apartment-sat for a former coworker in Williamsburg and met some interesting insects at a hole-in-the-wall hotel in Chinatown. We eventually decided to sublease from a schoolteacher in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is not exactly the most thriving neighborhood in Brooklyn (let me put it this way:Jay-Z grew up in the projects two blocks away from us).

We've now been living in New York for almost two months, and though it hasn't exactly been the glamorous city life Carrie Bradshaw made me think I was going to have — think lots of nights spent building rat traps and coming up with 100 different ways to make chicken stir-fry — I can't imagine spending my summer any other way.

I did experience a lot of new and interesting things. I appeased my inner nerd at all the fabulous art museums, saw a Broadway musical and celebrated the legalization of same-sex marriage from one of the most historic places in the LGBT movement. I'm also seeing some of my favorite musicians in concert, eating at great restaurants and doing a lot of shopping — my wallet is shrinking, but my to-do list is still bigger than ever!

This is the first fall since my toddlerhood that I won't be going back to school, so I decided there's no reason to leave the city just yet when there's so much more I want to explore. I went ahead and signed a one-year lease on a fantastic apartment in a much younger, livelier part of Brooklyn, and am working on getting set up at my next internship. A lot of people told me in the beginning that I was crazy to just hop on a plane with no real plan, but I found that the best way to learn was by making mistakes and having no choice but to fix them. Moving to New York on two weeks notice was the biggest, craziest, most exciting thing I've ever done, and I am thankful every day that I took the chance. Like they say, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. I might not know what exactly the future holds for me yet, but I do know where I want to be, and I'm willing to live out of a suitcase, get spider bites and live paycheck-to-paycheck until I get it.

Did you have an awe-inspiring, life-affirming, mess-making and/or lesson-learning experience this summer? I'd love to hear about it.. visit me at amandalucci.com or talk to me at @alucci on Twitter :)