Hannah & Julie

roommates, technically adults, writers on the side.

The Comeback Kids

by hjadmin

Hi, guys.

So it’s been a while.

It kind of feels like we’re old friends that lost touch, then felt guilty about losing touch so we avoided you for far too long and now we’ve run into each other at some mutual friend’s party and we don’t know what to say.

I guess we can start with a few things we’d like to get out of the way:

  1. Yes, we haven’t blogged in over a year. First we were busy graduating college, and then we were busy figuring out what the hell life looks like after you’ve graduated college. There were more than a few times when we looked at each other and went, “shit man, we really have to start the blog back up again.” And then whenever either of us had free time, we ended up eating M&Ms on the couch.
  2. We’ve wanted to melt your brains with our awesomeness since May 2016. At the end of senior year, we got really attached to this idea of a grand finale. We’d sum up everything we’d learned over four years of college and three years of blogging, tell a witty story to end it all, and leave the fate of the blog hanging in the balance. Then we’d come back with a surprise grand premiere in the fall, garnering critical acclaim from our kingdom of delighted fans. (We know how this goes. We’ve watched half a season of Game of Thrones.)
  3. Life got busy, and our plans got big. Our plans for everything got big – this blog, our jobs, the new kinds of adventures we started to find. As far as our writing went, we wanted to build you something incredible. Something bigger than our out-of-the-box free WordPress site, which was starting to feel a bit cluttered after close to three years of posting. We wanted an upgrade.
  4. Websites are hard. If there’s anything that I (Hannah) have learned in the past 12 months at my agency job, it’s that websites are devious little fuckers. They freeze and delete all of the edits you’ve made for a whole afternoon for no discernible reason. If you don’t tell them exactly what you want them to do, they will give you the middle finger and then moon you. Building this new website has been like battling a tornado with a spoon. It’s still a work in progress, but everything we’ve made so far is only possible because we have a kickass group of very smart and patient friends. (Lookin’ at you, Dave.)
  5. After a year-long sabbatical, we’re ready for our comeback. Like a rag-tag underdog sports team post-inspirational-getting-better-montage.

If you haven’t already figured it out, this is one of those posts where we’re both writing things until our voices kind of morph into one and you never know who exactly is saying what. You’re welcome.

This is still Hannah, by the way. Jules can take it from here. (And also, Julie wrote the intro paragraph. I can’t take credit for that. It made me laugh too hard.)

As a result of having no idea where to begin here (and in an attempt to keep sweep our unexplained hiatus under the rug), I’m going to pick right back up where we left off.

There are so many details and stories that I want to share in this post (sort of like word-vomiting life updates to a friend you haven’t seen in a long time at a party), but I won’t do that. That’s not what I want this post to be. To be honest, I really don’t know what I want this post to be, but I do know what I don’t want, you know?

So I think I’m just going to share our biggest and most obvious life-update.

It all began on a hungover, semi-anxious Sunday morning in Dover. I was curled up on the couch and Abby was in her room, both of us feeling a little like death and staring resentfully at our schoolwork. Every 20 minutes or so Abby would march into the living room and say something along the lines of, “this BLOWS.”

We’d recently gotten into the habit of scheming about what we’d do for work over the summer. We contemplated being camp counselors, nannies, waitresses, and seasonal farm workers. Our goal was to have days off together so we could hike and explore as much as possible. Then Abby started telling me about a website called coolworks.com. You can apply to tons of jobs in and around National Parks for seasonal work. That day we lied on the floor and applied to dozens of jobs in parks out west. Glacier, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain. We were looking for serving jobs, but we entertained the idea of being Chief Cattle Wranglers and First Mates, too.

We figured, why not? It’s our last real summer before we jump into the professional world. Out of the dozen or so jobs we applied to, only one called us back. They offered us both serving gigs, and a room together in the employee housing. In Estes Park, Colorado. Starting right after finals.

We agreed immediately, and resolved to figure out the details later.

Now we’re here.

We still can’t believe it either.

If it weren’t for school, I’m not sure we’d be able to convince ourselves to go back.

We’ll be back here every Monday with stories about our post-grad adventures, our existential crises, and our moms.

Let the comeback begin.