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Despite all attempts towards parsimony I currently have three (3) bags that should fit in one (1) bag, a bunch of work at work that I would like to finish by 3pm tomorrow, an apartment that needs to be scrubbed to get my deposit back, a short list of errands bombarding my head that are sort of uncontrolled, and twenty four hours until I should be having a shower/having dinner/heading to the airport.
But it’s sunny where I’ll be the day after tomorrow, and I’ll never have to move this stuff around again after getting rid of it this time, and if tonight goes okay and tomorrow goes okay then the rest of everything should be just fine.
Just. Fine.
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Friday night lights style college ball game. Spirals into the end zone, home team wins. Checked the club revamps in town with a friend of a friend who gets to skip any lines. The times they are a changing as cover gets a little more expensive and the djs get a little more slick. Kids still look the same though. Tonight there’s a huge birthday party in a classic bar that could get messy.
Meanwhile I am curled up in bed avoiding the cool air and reality that today is one of four left. Today has been a series of unproductive discoveries and annoyances. Frustrations. Distractions from all the peaceful weekend goodbyes that had seemed so possible. I am going to make pancakes and address the situation. I am going to be fine.
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When I was a kid I saved all my money and bought bonds. My allowance was something like $2 and I kept it in a bank account and watched the interest compound. My brother bought action figures.
For years I asked my mom about the bonds. Today she told me they are lost, she thought she left them in a safety deposit box and they aren’t there. My parents stored endless action figures for my brother for a decade, he has unpacked them and has them all around his house.
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This comes live, from my phone, in bed. This phone with capacities that took forever to bother using, which will be surrendered in a week. This will be fine.
Today offered a new solution to the ongoing tech sync problem, something to test out. The multi month to-do list has worked out pretty well but I would feel better leaving knowing that my minor digital life was synchronized and triple backed up.
It is bizarre to observe as I am able to mentally detach how much happier I am and how my faculties for certain kinds of thinking return. Illusory? So much humming of the circuitry, even when not consciously thinking about the work. Because while some parts of this came so naturally others took continual input to maintain?
Everything is… Sort of empty. Sort of almost not quite. Ideally things would be ready by this weekend. Scrubbed, sorted, done.
[Five nights, six days. Not really my thing. I am eating an apple from Bs backyard tree, where all my fruit comes from these days. Tonight , a roast with some vegetables picked from a friendly garden and some horseradish picked by the side of a highway, grated up and mixed with vinegar.)
The problem maybe is being too in love with ordinary America and ordinariness in general.
But, scanning and cross referencing sources, making plans and walking guides, signing up for random lists. For me the ideal tour would be bizarre NYC, the kind of high quality oddity scene only sustainable in a dense urban space. Modern galleries, unobtrusive people watching.
Show me what you got.
I finally quit my job.
Good idea, bad idea, I guess we’ll see. There hasn’t been any huge backlash (I put appropriate spins on what I’m doing out there for appropriate groups, I think) but there will probably be some less than warm goodbyes. The thing is, it’s not that it was a bad job or the people were bad or the work was unduly terrible. Everything was okay. For other people with things like mortgages, children and houses – this job makes all the sense in the world. It’s probably better that this move wasn’t forced by hating life in any real sense, because it’s not a rash decision, it happened with careful measure and patience.
But still people will ask why. It seems.
Maybe they’ll get an answer or a version of an answer.
Maybe they won’t.
How does it feel to be hurtling towards unemployment? Better after I found out I have more in currency stocked up abroad than I’d thought – enough for September, enough to get bearings, enough to ride out a possible exchange rate dip. This is so minor yet feels better. Small sureties.
Some practical details in case you’re interested.
I decided to delay organizing anything for the next step, no tickets, no visas. I’m also staying with my bank even though I’m not in love with them because (1) the online banking is easy and concise, (2) they have offered all kinds of overdraft protection and inexpensive credit that is a backup to the backup of the backup, (3) the card appears to works everywhere in any machine. I do figure I’m going to open up a separate TFSA within the next bit so the cash held in it earns a modest bit of interest and keeps pace with the modest current inflation.
Selling furniture, so far, has been a pain. Hopefully the town is flooded with students ASAP who need student furniture. To be fair, the only thing that was ever new was a queen mattress. The donation drop date is probably the weekend after this one. A run by the used CD/DVD store is sure to be disheartening but will hopefully be worth lunch.
Outstanding: insurance and fresh credit cards.
Tonight: the second edition of trial packing. Since the first round, a few things have shifted because of a trial and wear project. I also need to seriously test the capacity of my carry on and how the “second bag” surfboard bag with a longboard skateboard in it is going to fare…
Things that will be missed in my current neighborhood: the cupcake bakery, the massive biblio, excellent if rarely used transit proximity, the best if rarely used liquor store in town.
The apartment itself was sort of functional and never felt like home, just a quiet crash pad for an expanse of time that has gone very quickly. The restaurants downtown are sort of lacking, and theres no late night food of note, which has probably saved me in the long run. Last week I finally kicked my 7-11 nacho vice when I saw this girl openly coughing near the station and the cheese came out in globs and it was only 7pm instead of 3am.
Im still emptying my kitchen. Last night I made a large tray of sort of organic fairly low fat granola from everything that could be used for baking. Its tasty, like oatmeal raisin coconut cookies. Just mixing everything up was pretty satisfying, dumping a bunch of stuff in a big bowl and coming out with a 500 gram bag.
*
Reducing things piecemeal, instead of just throwing them out, has been very perspective-inducing. I thought I was living a nomadic somewhat minimalist life before, moving into my apartment with a few boxes and simple furniture. I didnt think I owned a lot of clothes or shoes. I considered my beauty routine pretty lo-fi. I felt like I had some versatile cooking skills and lived by buying fresh. Ha!
The idea of starting again is really comfortable. If nothing, with a better idea of what I want and need. A lot of consumption in my early twenties was about sorting out an identity. Trying different clothes, owning stuff used (an iron) and less used (springform cake pans), figuring out how to stock a kitchen and feed myself (looking back on what I was eating at nineteen is sort of funny. Bags on bags of burritos, yes please). Going through this process makes me very wary of the wedding registry gun.
Its also been months since I bought anything that wasnt food. Nine months since a pair of shoes, three months since any kind of personal grooming product. It’s been a sort of practical fast.
*
Yesterday I sold a DVD for $10. While its true theres a bunch of messing around that comes with listing stuff online, its also weirdly satisfying to have someone show up at your house and take something away that you didnt want and give you money for it.
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A five minute entry before slipping out to make dinner-and-a-show type plans.
Most of what’s left is packing/cleaning. Gradual packing has been pretty so far/so good, so a gradual cleaning process would probably also be very useful. Emptying room by room.
Even though this should be a crazy stressful period it’s mostly not, yet.
Weirdly, stuff has been working out extremely super well. Last minute appointments, things that will make other things convenient falling into place.
Life: not so bad, at all.
This city is overrun!
I am starting to savour possible lasts, just a bit. This kicked in mid last weekend, at my first bar. The first bar I ever attended where they stopped checking my ID and free drinks were possible (alas both of those privileges have faded with time). So much insanity. Think a dance floor unexplainably full of dudes, mass shuffling to a Thriller remix (which was the point where I told E that it was clear, God Loves Her), and some guy who do-see-do’ed around me in odd concentric circles as I laughed hysterically. Words don’t do the scene justice, the universe conspiring for a memorable goodbye. We were in the bathroom and I was looking in a mirror I’ve examined myself in a hundred times or more and I needed to take a picture, of us, looking in that mirror. Something to remember this place by.
I don’t know I’ll ever make it back there.
Of course, we don’t make it back a lot of places. But there are some where so much has happened that it takes on a certain kind of personal sacredness. Two of the trashy bars from my trashed out youth have been disassembled and rebranded this year.*
Random thoughts pop up constantly. Like: I should get all my change together to make sure I use it up. Everything inconsequential; some form of processing above ground.
My new passport arrived. Thanks to the awkward lighting and three retakes, I look more like a terrorist than ever, and will continue to look as such until 2015. I used the old one to get the new one and the post office lady remarked it had gotten a lot of use, hers was mostly blank. And yet in comparison to everyone I judge mine against, I feel like I haven’t been anywhere, even though of the four and a half years the passport was in operation I’ve spent at least eleven months out of the country, probably closer to twelve. That’s about 1/5 days, stats masters.
As I write this an obscure song I listened to daily in one of those places pipes in over the coffee shop speakers. Believe.
Because I read too much WSJ, NYTimes and G&M, sometimes paranoia sets in about what’s a good and bad idea before thirty. But, one of the radical things that happens on going to far flung places is that you realize the media is severely, seriously wrong about a lot of objective things taken for granted (politics, geography, you name it), and much is not to be believed.
Someone asked me about going to the “safe, Southern part” of Africa. This made me laugh because only a few years ago, the Southern portion of Africa had a rap for being the belly of hell. Apparently a month of FIFA without any massacres (save a bombing in Uganda that probably didn’t register and certainly didn’t drive any of the foreigners I know personally out) a safe place makes. I’m not saying it’s safe, or unsafe, but if anyone was wondering if the PR job that was FIFA 2010 was effective, at least temporarily, I’m going to venture a yes.
*I promise all my favorite spots aren’t watering holes – they tend to be socialization hubs. I still miss my favorite apartment and various houses my friends lived in during college but, oddly, am probably not permitted to rampage through them years later in search of nostalgia
Underthecurrent 