Party Like it's 2004

Just laughed out loud coming across this postcard I'd made during my first (MISERABLE) summer in Baltimore in 2004, when Phil and I moved down for him to go to grad school, and for me to teach art with Americorps. The latter fell through in my first week in town, as the head of MICA's Community Art Corps suddenly and abruptly stopped returning my calls, though I'd been promised a position over the phone (in a conversation that also included the question: "Do you dip your feet in, or dive?")

So instead, I spent the first months here doing what every other recent college graduate did - searching craigslist for jobs and slowly deflating my enormous sense of entitlement and pesky self-confidence. In that time, I apparently got hold of a pad of postcard sized watercolor paper, because I set up a little studio in our Southwest Baltimore apartment (to which Pizza guys wouldn't deliver after dark, and at which Phil and I were referred to as "Kitty" and "Mcenroe"). (No, I'll let you guess) and let out steam by hand painting fake advertisements for my melodramatic unemployed self (See above) while Phil absorbed his first semester of grad school.
It's somehow not sad to me, remembering that person, and how completely and totally miserable she was in Baltimore that year... because somehow she ended up still here, seven years later, the happiest she's ever been (and in a living situation which includes neighbors who call her by her name, and pizza places that deliver 24/7)

If I answered truthfully in that phone interview, then I said "dip my feet in." But I probably lied and said "Dive" thinking it was what she wanted to hear.
You know how you think of great ways to reply to people like... 7 years after you needed the comeback? I wish I'd said "Bellyflop". Here's why: I don't know how to dive. I'm not graceful or patient enough to LEARN to dive. And I'm happy to be awkward and imperfect at what I do sometimes, as long as I know I get to end up swimming in the pool in the end.

Ms. McDonogh, if you read this - I'd like to change my answer: Bellyflop.
(No thank you, I have a job)