Things are looking at lot different around here — at least in my apartment. Last week, my pod came two days early to my utmost delight. For almost two weeks my bed had been my primary area for eating, sleeping, entertainment and study. An IKEA trip, some Amazon orders and about a million trips to Target and/or HomeGoods filled in the gaps from the furniture I didn’t bring from home, but my apartment felt sterile and strange without my belongings….
My apartment is finally to the point that I’m not walking around piles of boxes. The counters aren’t covered in stacks of mementos. All my art is hung on the walls. But I’m still a little out of sorts. Don’t get me wrong – things are better than they were one or two weeks ago. When I first got here, I didn’t predict how much the lack of structure would unnerve me. For the first time since I was sixteen,…
I’m here. I’m settling. I’m still collecting my thoughts on California, but in the meantime I wanted to tell you about the other time I moved across the country from Massachusetts to Austin. Otherwise known as the time Tim and I set my car on fire. Every time Tim and I made a significant move, we rented a big U-Haul truck. We’d tetris all of our wordly belongings into the back in some precarious kind of way, and Tim would drive…
I made it to Riverside. Even though I had a temper tantrum somewhere in Arizona, the journey went really well. No blown tires. No giant mishaps. No overheated engines. Couldn’t ask for better. Moving with the dogs though, is a bit of an adventure. See, my dogs reflect the two opposing sides of my personality. Eliot is the wounded poet. He has a lot of feelings. As a deeply emotional dog who hates change, the hardest part of moving for him…
When I was in high school, I said “Howdy” a lot. I used it as my default AOL instant messenger greeting (these were pre-texting days). I wrote it on my notebook. Howdy was part of a horse lover, upbeat, awkward identity my adolescent self was struggling to find. Because of my howdy’s, my friends would joke with me that I belonged in Texas. Back then, fourteen-year-old Lauren would never have guessed that she’d end up living in the Lone Star state…
If it seems like all I’ve been talking about on the blog lately is moving, that’s because all I’ve been doing in real life is moving. Well, that and going out with my friends as much as possible which makes for interesting-but-not-exactly-for-this-blog content. While Saturday I spent the entire day hungover and unable to move resting, yesterday I was as productive as can be trying to pack up the last bits of my house. It made me think of some…
People tend to show their love and wealth through possessions. One of the first things I did when my Dad visited this past weekend was to hand him a few trinkets I bought him from Japan. Even as I bought them, I knew that they weren’t items he wouldn’t be able to live without but I felt it necessarily to come back with something. To me, coming back with a few items in plastic bags with foreign script says I was…
Earlier this week, I posted a kind of gloom & doom post outlining my anxieties about my upcoming move. As I hope you knew, those aren’t my only feelings. Today I’ll share a much happier posts – the things I’m stoked about! I Get to Focus on Writing More Than Anything Else. Writing has always been important to me, but it’s never been allowed to be the star of my life. Even in undergrad, creative writing was my minor so…