What do we need this for anyway?

This coming weekend is an important weekend for me because it is this weekend that I move out of my very first Philadelphia apartment and move into my second Philadelphia apartment... which happens to be pretty much up the street from my first one.

The real significance here has nothing to do with the proximity of the two living spaces and everything to do with how important Philadelphia has become to me and why I absolutely had to create this blog.

I grew up in New Jersey which means that for most of my life, I hated Philadelphia. To me it was just another city but it was farther away and less cool than New York. But I also had a unique reason to hate the place: my heart. More specifically, a heart defect I was born with that forced me into Philadelphia every so often so that I could visit CHOP which apparently has one of the best cardiology facilities in the country. So it became that my first memories of Philly are of laying in a dark room and having cold goopy shit spread across my bare chest by a stranger who (while trying to distract me with a Disney movie) pressed what kind of resembled a computer mouse into my ribs in a way that was just slightly uncomfortable enough to almost be considered painful. I was an infant when these things began but the creepily vivid memories that I have must be from when I was four and older. God I hated that place.

I think my point is that Philadelphia has been a significant part of my life and quite literally my heart pretty much since I was born. My heart defect was just a tiny hole between chambers, but blood was moving through the hole and causing one side of my heart to swell to an abnormally large size. It wasn't an issue when I was young but doctors warned that it would cause problems for me as I got older, so during my college years (when, incidentally, I had left New York to attend school in a Philadelphia suburb) I had a procedure done at CHOP to plug the hole which caused my heart, in a sort of reverse-Grinch-scenario, to shrink down to a normal size after years of engorgement.

And it was also during my college years that I began visiting nearby Philadelphia and realizing how awesome it was. So here I am today: a two-point-five-year, normal-sized-heart-owning resident of what I refuse to call The City of Brotherly Love because I really think it should be called The City of Ball Busters (more on that later [maybe]) and I am absolutely obsessed with this damn place.

Oh yeah, so why the blog? Well I think there are a lot of disgustingly beautiful little things that had to fall into the right places in order for me to be where I am today, and I love finding those little pieces in unexpected places. They are everywhere: books, music, paintings, beer, cats, literally everywhere and I intend to document every single one that I find. I'm also interning in the archives of the Free Library of Philadelphia and working toward a Master's in Library Science from Drexel, so this place will be a repository of sorts for me to make sense of my nonsensical research projects to follow.