To those (all four) of you still following this blog since February 21, 2006, I very sincerely thank you for sticking around to be a part of my little adventures over the past five years.

Because this started as an assignment in Steve Manuel's COMM 269, I find it fitting and shockingly comforting that the 5-year-mark photo is a Penn State THON photo, the same subject as the first photo posted on this blog back in 2006.

It's funny because I've wanted to end this blog multiple times over the past 60 months, but never had the heart to kill it, as it's brought me together with so many wonderful people who share the same vast range of kooky interests or who just like to read about a perspective on the world. Without Steve and this blog, I wouldn't be living with Rachel Goldfarb, as she was a casual friend of a friend during my college years until we started IMing about my posts while I was in Asia. Or have found one of my best friends (and my introduction to large productions), Jen Bilec, who grew up two blocks away from me, but didn't really know one another until we started talking about this blog. Or went to Paris to toss around innovative production ideas with my brilliant Australian friend and contemporary, Brad Hayward. Or kept up four-hour phone conversations every few months with a kid I knew from Kevin Hagopian's film theory class, John McClellan, who prior to his moving to New York in 2009, I had spent all of five hours with outside of class. Or intrigued the VP of Event Production at Madison Square Garden, Tim Parsaca, enough to want to keep talking to me when I first moved to New York. These people are now amongst some of my closest friends and confidants, distance or no distance. Ending this blog would be one of the dumbest things I could do.

The humorous part about this is that I really only kept posting and writing this blog so my parents had an easy way to explain to neighbors at the annual neighborhood Christmas party what the heck I was doing when I took my first job out of college in Southeast Asia in 2007.

When I came back in 2008, I thought I would end it, but cool things just kept happening. I kept seeing things I wanted to show people, experiencing things I wanted to share, meeting people I wanted the rest of the world, even the microscopic sliver of those reading this blog, to know.

These past five years were absolutely unplanned, but this has reaffirmed my notion that planning is absolutely not for me. These five years have been gorgeous. Of course, there are always some bumps and bruises along the way, including the saddest November of my life and a 2 a.m. piece of cheesecake in Times Square ten months later that was so tear-soaked, not even I would eat it. Rest assured, Linda was there with me as I sobbed into my confection and mumbled about photography, insanely high rent/bills/loans and seemingly no direction. She reminded me that freelancing in the arts in the epicenter of the western world is no cheesecake walk and that I would be more than fine, that I was already more than fine. I reminded her that she did, in fact, like Roxy's cheesecake.

Even throughout the bad times, you've gotta make things good. Sometimes it's hard to remember that a ton of amazing things were happening as you were weeping in that diner. I look back on my photos from that terrible November and the months surrounding the cheesecake incident and say, "Wow, look at all the cool things that were happening. Look at the people. Look at the places. Look what I learned."

I believe that everything always gets better. Sometimes it gets a bit worse before it gets better, but it always, always gets better. Every day is the best day ever. Every week is the best week ever. Every month is the best month ever. Every year is the best year ever.

If you think about it, years are just comprised of the smaller details that are the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds of your life. Important decisions are made in all lengths of time, as anyone who has ever stood at a chalkboard menu with me knows, but when you look at the big decisions, remember the small ones too. I know, for a fact, that that turkey and avocado sandwich on wheat is what got me here today.

Thank you to everyone who has inspired me, and who continues to inspire me, to keep this silly little blog alive and well.

Photo: Cover band Go Go Gadjet performs at THON 2011/Bryce Jordan Center/State College, PA/2.20.11