Hello all. It’s been more than two years since I last posted here, and more than three years since I posted here about the status of my life.
In part, that’s because there has been less of an overt need to “make sense” of what I am doing from a macro-scale. Whereas in 2019, I was trying to figure out where I was going to live next, what I was going to do next, who I was going to befriend next, now all of that has settled into a sense of stability.
Since 2020, I’ve been working on Nickelodeon’s Noggin team, using a combination of my creative mindset and technical skillset to use their in-house, custom-made visual logic tool to contribute to interactive projects for little kiddos. I have found this ironic because I remembered Nickelodeon from the West Coast Trip in January 2018, and the calm, chill, yet creative vibe that existed in their Los Angeles office I definitely find true here in their New York office, where I work hybrid, and have been grateful for the opportunity to come on board their team.
Since 2021, I’ve been living in Astoria, Queens, for a short period of time with a roommate, and since early 2022 on my own. I’ve come to very much enjoy my little neighborhood of the city, the bouge-y, chill food places, and the people on this street I have come to know. It almost reminds me of Pittsburgh in a way of having this “small, homey city” feel, yet with the perks of being a short subway ride to Manhattan and that vibe of the city at large.
I’ve also enjoyed seeing things slow down a little. Looking back on the years before these, I can see the the sequence of having to do this and that in order to achieve some kind of milestone or rite of passage, from completing grad school to finding a job to finally finding an apartment. And now it feels very nice to just rest with all of that for a moment.
Which I have. Nickelodeon is not the ETC, and right now that is what I need. Instead of feeling so many responsibilities that I am coming apart at the seams, I know my role, I execute it, I feel gratitude when I see our completed projects (***shameless plug for any readers with kids, go to noggin.com, subscribe, and check out OTJ102, it involves ice cream and is the project I’ve worked on that I am still the most proud of***), and very rarely do I feel absurd levels of “crunch” that makes me feel like I’m in true danger of falling. Living alone has given me a chance to find the areas of my own space that I either like or dislike. And since the beginning of this year, my best friend from undergrad moved back to the city, so now I have a best bud to share some of these chill vibes with.
And yet, it also feels somewhat strange to – as I tell some of my friends – feel like, for the first time in a long time, I do not have an “A plot” to my life, some kind of medium-scale goal to focus on the near future, which in the past usually took the form of trying to make friends or passing some kind of academic achievement.
So it’s been a process to get myself to actually rest (made more difficult by the chaos and uncertainty that feels omnipresent in the world at large, but I think having my own pocket of stability in the face of it all helps ground me in the present, the best I can). My mind still moves around a lot. And I can envision a moment sometime in a year or two when I’ll feel the itch to travel again, or move to a new city, or something along those lines.
But right now, I’m just happy that, after many decades of feeling dominated by needs to reach certain levels, I now have a chance to reflect back on all of it, and at least try to find rest, until the moment comes when the winds of change beckon again.
Until next time!
Matthew Floyd 