The options came down to the Nice, but Expensive 1 Bedroom in Midtown, the Cheap, But Tiny Studio Also In Midtown, and the Nice, and also Cheap 1 Bedroom in Decatur.
So, by being both nice and cheap, Decatur won out- although its essential Decaturness didn't hurt. It's within a square mile of like 13 different people I've known forever, and the landlady used to teach at my high school. If living in a basement apartment with adjoining landlady becomes not what I want, I can always move again next year, but in the meantime I have someplace that I'm fairly sure I can be happy, productive and live beneath my means. Limited though they may be.
Time to order myself a damn Neighborhoodie, because I'm moving back and never leaving again.
I've got a few random kid-wrangling jobs during the break, but I've scheduled in a not-quite-whirlwind trip down to Atlanta during which I'm hoping to actually secure a place to live. I'm visiting five apartments, all seemingly livable. Even though the move is two months away, knowing where I'll live and how much space I'll have to work with would go a long way towards calming my imminent-move freakoutage.
Until then- quiet empty house! Air-conditioning! And lots and lots of sleep. Tomorrow I load up my grandparents' van for the drive down to ATL.
My work family has started the process of finding a new nanny. I feel a few different ways about this- of course they are, as I knew they would. I want to help in any way I can. I'm fiercely protective and, at least a dozen times a day, remind myself that the kids will be fine, will flourish. They will love whoever comes next, and they will still love me, and I will have the honor of having been the first- and probably the longest-term- caregiver.
Then, too, there's the matter that the new person won't be working the hours I do. The kids will both be in morning preschool this fall; their little worlds are bigger than they were. For a year and a half now, Big G's life hasn't been wrapped up in his home, parents and me, and soon Sissy will join him. The new person will care for them in the afternoons; it will be an easier job, a more flexible one. I wonder if anyone but their parents will ever be so wrapped up again in their babyhood- which for Big G is nearly over. I've been around for a person's entire babyhood, and I don't know when it will sink in for any of us that this is it for the everyday relationship between me and their family.
So yes, I am painfully ready to go. I have outgrown Asheville. I feel as if my brain is poised in a ready-set-GO posture, desperate to be back in school- not that the kid-care doesn't challenge me every day, but I like making my brain hurt on a regular basis. I'm ready, the move needs to happen, and still I know the last day will be wrenchingly awful.
I work a ton. I pick up as many random babysitting jobs as I can, getting a 1-day weekend at best most weeks, so that once a month I can haul myself and my stuff down to my new home. I do recommend this method. On some weird brain-and-heart level, I feel the balance of where I live tipping- I'm at least 1/4 in Atlanta now.
Apartments are actually being listed for July, now. Of the ones I'm considering so far, one is a block from Meg and Michael, but the other two are a block from a million bars, shops and restaurants. Oh, decisions.
Countdown: 2 months and 12 days.
1. The Emory Thing: was good. I met a few people I can imagine actually enjoying going to school with, and plenty to whom I am thus far indifferent, and one fascinating Feminist Law professor. They fed us barbecue and margaritas, and shed some light on the whole securing-private-loans business. A++ WELL PLAYED, Emory- I do not regret sending in my deposit to you. F- for the fact that it started at 8:15 am, but you can't have everything.
2. Apartment Hunt, Pt. One: A New Hope: no one's really listing anything for July yet, but I visited a few places just to see what's out there in my price range, and am feeling very reassured. One management company in particular seems to specialize in nice older buildings with affordable apartments in walking distance of everyday shopping needs.
3. My Friends: are excellent, as usual. I got to go shopping with Azi, drink margaritas and eat tasty food with Jenna at the world's slowest Mexican restaurant with the world's surliest server, where they sit you at a weird bar-ish thing overlooking a koi pond to which they refer as "The Friendship Rail." And of course, spent large chunks of the weekend with Meg, Michael, Julian and Violet, who are as excellent as ever. I got to eat a breakfast picnic in the Decatur cemetery, snuggle the baby, and drink wine.
...this LJ entry has been brought to you by wine and margaritas. It wasn't really as alcoholic a weekend as it sounds.
Oh, and the most tragic event! Which really should not upset me as it does, but whatever. I finally found a face wash a few months ago that worked wonderfully at keeping me from looking like an adult-onset prepubescent pizzaface. Unfortunately, it's been discontinued. Even more unfortunately, there's only one other product I can find with the same active ingredient. Did I just spent $44 stocking up on face wash to last me through early 2010? Yes, yes I did. This was not in my austerity budget, dammit.
In preparation for the move, I'm keeping myself to a pretty strict budget these days- I'd set some savings goals to fund the move and the Month of Sloth*, and around the end of February I realized I needed to get cracking to meet them. I did stay on track for March, though, so I'm feeling okay about it- I think I've hit on a good sense of how much money I can afford to save without living in such austerity that I eventually crack and can't stick with it.
It sucks, though, when random, unexpected expenses come up. After several years of daily use, my iTrip broke, so I have been reduced to listening to the 3 CDs I have in the car (most of mine are in storage)- all mix CDs I made in 2004 and 2005. Surprisingly, I haven't yet driven off the road in a fit of existential despair- I was not often happy in those days, and often expressed my unhappiness through whiny-ass indie music- but still, I need to replace the iTrip right quickly, or else make myself some new mixes. Which means I need to come up with the money someplace.
Also on the to-do list- a purge of my clothing and book collections, finding a place to live, and an attempt to eat like someone who wants to live to see July. For a while there I was all, "Fuck it, this money thing is enough stress. I'm-a eat whatever the hell I want." That maybe needs to stop, or at least be adjusted a bit.
In the meantime, though, I'm going to Atlanta this weekend- supposedly for Emory's accepted-students weekend, but also to buy more expensive facewash at Sephora (which I budgeted for. Because it makes my skin function, dammit, and you can't put a price on that shit!) and snuggle Baby Violet and look at apartments.
Time marches on. 12 weeks till blast-off.
* Oh, haven't I told you about the Month of Sloth? Probably I have, but if not- I'm taking the month of July and most of August to sit on my ass, set up my apartment, read a lot, and have adventures when
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
negiplease visits me in Atlanta. I have never done such a thing, and am so inordinately thrilled about it that I had to come up with a name for this extended period of laziness. I love the Month of Sloth.I do have mixed feelings about it. I use Facebook more these days to maintain a daily sort of contact with a lot of people; I even, god help me, signed up for Twitter in order to follow various friends. I'm not using it yet, but give me time. (This is, of course, like two months after having various conversations in which I professed to just not get Twitter. I am large; I contain multitudes.)
Anyway! Hello, March. It's sunny outside and warm a lot of the time and my quality of life-wrangling-children has improved immeasurably with the weather, even as the lame-duck status of my job makes it more difficult in other ways. All the time people ask me whether I'm looking forward to the move, which is coming right up in three-months-and-change, and usually- especially when they are people who I know via the kids/my job- my answer is complicated. Deeply ready to leave Asheville; thrilled to potentially, finally be living sans roommates-and/or-family. Excited and intimidated and anticipatory about school itself. And then there's the inherent contradictions in just how I feel about the children and my job- ready to be done with the day-to-day aspects, to have my life focused again on school. I'll never be ready to leave them. It will be awful, as it would have been a year ago when it wasn't the right time anyway; it would be equally terrible, on the day I actually go, if I waited still more years until I was still more miserable and socially stunted and intellectually frustrated and forgetting to be young/queer/badass.
That's another thing about my job (which presumes heterosexuality unless proven otherwise; I am out to my work family, of course, but don't tend to go around having the queerball conversation with random playground moms/other nannies.) And about Asheville, which does have a small queer community of sorts, but not the kind I was used to in the Valley or the Bay Area or Atlanta. And it's not really my flavor of community either, so that any attempts to join it have ended up with me feeling as out of place as I would at a frat party or a Baptist revival. And sometimes I find myself forgetting, reading over years worth of life in which it was so everyday, and missing that. I don't know. I don't think I'll ever go back to my college-years life of homodom, in terms of sheer engagement in the Hampshire community's drama and incestuousness. Living here, though, the moments when I do find myself interested in some dude- more frequent than I might have once predicted, though still rare- make it so much easier to talk about my life, to just be here, that it's tempting to just run with it. If I could. If that-a-way didn't lie madness.
I'm ready to be gone from here. One of other-Sarah's friends said, astutely, "You're ready to be your age again." Yes. I'm ready to be done being the paid version of the 30something mom, and to actually live my 20s as such before I become the actual version of same. I don't want to be tired of that gig before it even happens.
Oh, and then also tonight I read through my LJ from 2003 and was like, "Oh my god, I was nuts/insane with unchecked depression/a pain in the ass/kind of a jerk/all of the above." Is this some kind of wonky five-year cycle? And what do I do with it? Not like it's occupying a ton of mental airtime, really, it's just disconcerting to realize how different things were, how different I was.
I don't want to be that girl again, even if I could, but this girl is so far from who she was that it's hard to figure out which parts I'd like to salvage, when I have the chance.
It's at the point where it feels like January has a mind of its own; where I'm glad it's the 27th because no matter what, after Saturday, we're done with this mess. It will be February, a short month regardless of general feelings-of-dragginess, and then it will be spring. And before then, I'll be traveling to the Bay Area for a few days of being sociable, which will probably help with the Ready To Move On Doldrums I've got going on.
High points:
Over Christmas, as I forgot to mention in my, like, two entries so far this year, Big G moved to a big boy bed and Little G started walking. So those developments have made my work life that much smoother (although it will be nice when Little G starts talking a bit more, so we can have an end to the incessant "EEEEEHHHHGGHH!!1!!" Translation: "I WANT THAT THING! NOT THAT ONE! THE OTHER THING! WHY ARE YOU OPPRESSING ME BLARGH BLEH."
Also, Big G is at a peak for saying both sweet things and unintentionally-hilarious mean things. Which means I get to "aww" at the forty-times-daily "I like you, Sassy!," and also mess with him by responding to "I CAN'T LOVE YOU BECAUSE YOU WON'T GIVE ME RAISINS" with, "Tough luck, guy, I still love you." "NO YOU CAN'T." "But I do."
Yesterday I bought a TV bigger than I would ever, ever intentionally go looking for, for hella cheap, off the internets. If it's bigger than I end up having space for post-move I can resell it and probably make a profit; otherwise, now I can watch The Simpsons in gigantic, flat-screened splendor.
Oh, and there was also some business about us getting a new president who doesn't scare the bejesus out of me. That happened.
Low points:
I got into a minor car accident last week. Really it was the best kind to have- car is still drivable, it was clearly the other guy's fault, his insurance is being responsive- but still, pain in the ass.
I've been coughing for two weeks, and it's finally settled into an annoying headcold. Which can't stop me from going to Atlanta this weekend, as I have The TV The Size of Texas I need to haul down and put into storage; so I hope I'm better in 72 hours.
And I'm perpetually broke, what with the saving for the move, but that's okay.
In other news:
Oh look. It's STILL January.
Shut up, my name is awesome.
But they speak the truth. Name your kid Sarah in 1984 (or Ava in 2006, or Whatever The Garner-Afflecks Named #2 in 2009), and doom them to a life of their name always being followed/modified by "...A." or "...pi."
Tomorrow I'm back to work, about which I have mixed feelings. Thrilled to see the kids, happy to get back to having some structure to my days, wishing the next few months would pass quickly. Still knowing that when it has passed, and I have a week left with the babies, I'll be a mess.
In the meantime, I'm beginning to sort through my things, boxing up stuff I won't be needing before July. I'm planning to rent a storage unit in Decatur, so when I visit between now and moving I can bring down a few boxes each time and thus hopefully avoid having to rent a U-Haul or anything. It helps to have tangible things to do, working towards the next big thing.
And in the morning, it's back to the babies. Who will no doubt have grown a foot in my absence.
I got into law school. Again. I am officially, for real moving to Atlanta in July. I am thrilled beyond belief.
I neglected to update my Livejournal about any of this, for a month or so. Oops.
And now it's Christmas Eve. My gifts are all wrapped, orange peels are boiling on the stove to be candied, and I'm pleasantly buzzed on pinot noir, a state I will most likely maintain for most of tomorrow's festivities. We're watching Love, Actually and spent about an hour confusing Hugh Grant and Hugh Jackman before my sister exclaimed, apropos of nothing, "Oh wait! Hugh Jackman is WOLVERINE!" Um, yes.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it; happy day to everyone regardless. Tidings of comfort and joy.
I am wearing The Kids' Mom's pajama pants because my pants are in the washer, because Sissy threw up on them, for the THIRD TIME IN TWO WEEKS. Fourth time in a month, if you count the time in November I ended up driving to Atlanta in maternity yoga pants because I got puked on five minutes before leaving for my trip.
What fresh hell is this, December? Can the kids stop being sick now, please?
The returns came in as we huddled around my host's computer back in Merrill. My dad worked at CNN at the time, so I called him every hour to confirm what was happening, to try to make sense of it after Gore was declared the winner and then...not. We ran up and down the hall, updating people, shouting the names of states won and lost. I called my then-best-friend (my later-girlfriend, my now-nothing) on the hall phone and sat huddled on the floor, as we asked each other over and over what was happening to our country.
I was at Hampshire when we found out, when people leaned out windows or staggered into the quad and screamed, and the next morning when we were all going to move to Canada. The newspaper I saved that day was the Boston Globe.
Last night I was in Asheville, 800 miles from Hampshire. I huddled around a computer with my mom and sister when the news came in. But these kids were there:
At 2:45, when they began singing- and flute-ing!- The Star-Spangled Banner- I grinned. As
driftingfocus said, this is HAMPSHIRE. We don't really do national anthems. Well, L'Internationale, maybe. This Land Is Your Land. Not straight-up patriotism. And then it was around the 7 minute mark, and they rang the bell for Barack. And then I was crying, for the dozenth time today. The bell is the heart of Hampshire's sentimental, superstitious side. You're not supposed to ring it, or even walk through the arch, before completing your thesis. I certainly didn't; the weight of tradition was too great. People have parties to officially ring for the first time; I rang it with my friend Jamie. And many times after, but never before.
So they either tracked down an alum to do the ringing, or- more likely- said, "Fuck it," risked jinxing themselves, and rang and rang and rang.
And it's eight years since I met that campus, and I mock it and love it and miss it and am annoyed and touched by it every day.
We ran into the street and screamed.
My sister's new voicemail message is, "Who's the maverick now, bitches?"
(From here.)
As it happened, the JTT (and Poor Dead Brad Renfro!) vehicle Tom and Huck was filmed in nearby Huntsville, AL. It being a low-budget Disney release, this wasn't exactly big excitement. But the Tuscaloosa News had free tickets to the premiere, and they decided to get an actual preteen girl to write a review. And my dad had just such a kid in mind.
( My initial foray into the world of journalism, behind the cut. )
"What is it with this guy," indeed.
I'm pretty sure that after this article came out, my mother threw up her hands and preemptively joined PFLAG.
Hair: is short again. After four years of growing it out, the maintenance and split-end factors got the best of me. It's long enough to curl still, but too short for ponytails.
Concerts galore: Magnetic Fields in Raleigh with Becca last Saturday. (Practically a religious experience; Becca was a good sport about my geeking out; they played songs I wasn't expecting but in a good way.) James Taylor at a free Obama event in Asheville the next day. Dolly Parton this most recent Friday with Azi, Jenna and Julia. (Also with rain, tarps, long underwear, polarfleece, wine and calzones. Who goes to an outdoor show in October in the rain? THIS GUY.)
Atlanta, as always: I got lost at Emory in the rain, but otherwise loved my law school tour/info session. Meg and Michael's in-utero baby kicked me, while their 2-year-old non-baby and I enjoyed each other immensely as always. Baby-In-Progress played a supporting role when Meg and I dressed as Sarah and Bristol Palin for a Halloween party. The aforementioned Dolly Parton show was tailor-made as an experience we will laugh about in 20 years. It was cold and wet, and we were tipsy and giddy, and there was Dolly Parton.
Georgia, the person not the state: Will be a year old in 2 days. Seriously? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?
Election:: Please be over now.
This really makes me way sadder than is reasonable.
(More details are here.)
I've submitted my application to Emory. I'm hoping I'll hear back by the first of the year; in the meantime, I have to decide whether I feel like applying anywhere else. It feels like hubris not to, and as last year's admissions cycle made abundantly clear, it's certainly possible that even a great outcome could come in the wake of a changed mind, a whole new set of goals. I hope not, but things happen. So I'm thinking Georgia State, also, as an Atlanta backup plan, and maybe one/several of the NY schools I was accepted to last year. If I applied to Columbia again, I might get in; and if I got in, I might not be able to turn it down, so I'm thinking it's best that I just don't. Not that it wouldn't be a different kind of amazing, but...but. The money, and the having to move after law school, and the million ways in which it would be 10x more stressful to move to New York than to Atlanta, and all for something I don't think will be proportionally better.
It's probably a little unhealthy, and certainly a little disheartening, to find my condition is perfectly described by today's Dinosaur Comic.
I'm thinking that a lot of my internal conflict and malaise comes from the tension between the life I ACTUALLY want to live, and the stories I'd love to be able to tell.
Perhaps I want to want Columbia more than I actually do, at this point. Knowing how close I came to getting in (the never-ending series of deferrals, until finally in August they admitted to having a final, full class) makes me want to get in just to prove I can, but it feels hollow. The real and complicated truth is that I'm happy when I'm in Atlanta, and I bite my lip every time I get onto I-85 to drive back north, and I can feel a small part of how happy I will be, someday next year, to drive down with my car full of my cats and books and my life, and never have to leave again. And I can't let go of that first whole, full happiness I've ever found in a place of my choosing; not for anything that is less solid and guaranteed.
And I am reminded of that Free Will Astrology horoscope that I posted back in January:
Your divided sense of home will disappear, allowing you to feel more united than you've been in years.
Yes.
Happy birthday to me. 24 is coming together nicely.
I have almost instantly become re-entangled in the group of people I knew all through high school. It started with me finding Meg's Facebook, of all things. And then a month after the initial, "What are you up to these days?" email I was at Meg's son's birthday party, posing with the girls I met a decade ago. We were taking pictures and someone proposed a reunion photo of these women, who all grew up together, who- excepting me- have known one another since preschool. I grabbed the camera, and it was taken from me and handed to Alexis' boyfriend instead; I was grabbed into the circle.
Before Decatur, I didn't ever know anyone for more than a couple of years before we moved again. I had a sort-of hometown in Asheville, but since we never actually lived in the city (my grandparents did, but my immediate family shuffled around between outlying towns) it doesn't feel quite right as such. I belong to Asheville and to Max Meadows, but they never belonged to me.
Neither did Decatur, though, for the longest time. It was, and is, a place where entire childhoods are spent, without the somewhat transient feel of the suburbs and college town and Asheville-outliers where we lived before. It is an intentional place, a town where people move in for the long haul. It was an enormous stroke of luck, and of my parents' good intentions, that we ended up there.
As Meg and I discussed recently, though, no one is really happy in high school- no one I've met, anyway. It's hard at the time to distinguish what of that is situational, or geographical, and what is just the universal malaise of Being In High School. I was not an overly happy teenager, in many ways, but I was happier and busier and of more use in Decatur and Atlanta than I think I would have been almost anywhere else. Vox and Charis Books and Youthpride and Decatur High School took my unfocused, desperately unhappy 13-year-old self and made me DO things, put me among other smart and interesting people in a school where I wouldn't be abjectly miserable after coming out in 8th grade, and gave me three years of being not only in one place, one school, but in the RIGHT place.
But hardly anyone loves where they go to high school, and by the time I left for Hampshire I was sure I would never return. Atlanta was too flat, too hot, too southern; Decatur too self-satisfied and close-knit. I knew I would miss it, but left happily. I visited occasionally, staying with one friend or another, never feeling compelled to stay.
Then I was three years out of college, suddenly. I am living a very different life than the one I imagined for myself in college; in most ways, one more suited to me and less designed around other people's plans (see also: benefits of not dating anyone for years on end.) Also, I'm living the day-to-day life of one concerned with the world of small children. Suddenly the eventuality of having my own kids doesn't seem that far off, and moreover, I don't WANT it to be that far off. I'm making my choices about where to move with a deliberate eye to staying there, to having it be The Eventual Babies' home; as well as how happy any given place will make me right now.
And then there I was, visiting my once-and-current friend, Meg, and being hit like a ton of bricks with the realization that if I can't ever be from Decatur, I want my children to be. That now, finally, a decade on, I am no longer the new kid there- that my friends, among those they've known all their lives, want me in the picture. That these are the people I want as friend-family, now and indefinitely.
It's lovely to belong to somewhere, to a place that can belong to me. It's amazing to feel strongly that I might stay someplace forever. It's also symptomatic of every capital-I Issue I have that this is so important to me, but nothing makes me happier and more comfortable than permanence. And there's finally someplace that I want to be permanent.
Still and all, this break is good for no one. The other day, when asked what game he'd like to play, Big G said mournfully, "I want to play Going to School." Being home all the time means he and I trounce thoroughly upon each others' last nerves by the end of the day, and we're constantly scrambling for activities to tire him out that fit into the meager 2ish hours a day that don't conflict with Little G's naps.
But we were getting along; we were doing fine. August was survivable. But now? Now there are RATS.
Allow me to describe my views on rats, for the uninitiated. I find them, and mice, and basically all rodents living in the wild completely terrifying. (I am strangely unaffected by gerbils and such, and even rats in cages. Because when they're in cages, you know where they are! They can't sneak up on you!) My phobia is such that once, confronted with a rat, I leapt atop a beer keg and refused to get down. Also, once I convinced myself that mice can't climb stairs, and to this day I think this hilariously erroneous belief was the only thing holding my sanity in check during The Winter of The Gayest Mod Ever Mouse Invasion.
And now, my employers' quiet, classy, perfectly lovely little street has rats. The neighbor guy has killed six; G&G's dad has seen several just hanging around, and today I saw my first one. It was basically the size of a rhinoceros and had a scaly tail and have I mentioned, guys, that I fucking. Hate. RATS.? And that the rat was just hanging out in the bank of ivy right by where I park my car, less than a foot from where I typically stand loading Little G into her car seat?
Also, Little G is suffering from a mysterious rash, and Big G is beginning to realize that, no, his sister won't be going anywhere, and yes, he truly DOES have to share his toys with her, and he is not fond of this reality.
We're all great. Greaaaaat.
27 days till September.
But for whatever reason, the idea of NOT buying frozen goods was not one I was willing to entertain. I would be eating sodium-rich macaroni for dinner, come hell or high water. So I attempted to call my mom and sister, hoping one of them might have a few dollars lying around the house that I could mooch. No luck there. So I drove back home, grabbed my change jar (which only had a few weeks worth of change in it) and went back to Ingles; where I threw my change in the Coinstar, got my voucher for $11.41, and proceeded to the checkout with $11.29 worth of Sick Food.
It's not even that it's so demoralizing to pay for groceries with a voucher from the coin-counter, but at least it would have felt a bit nobler to be buying, I don't know, rice and beans or tampons. Something that, if not essential, is at least kind of frugal and reflective of one's experience as a person who pays for groceries with pocket change. Something you really NEED enough to endure everyone's knowledge that you are broke as shit.
Fortunately, of course, I'm not really broke as shit. If I'd remembered my wallet, I'd have had a good dozen ways of paying for eleven bucks worth of crap food. And it was only reminding myself of that truth that kept me on the hilarious end of indignity, vs. the genuinely upset with my own dumbassery end.
I'm not sure right now whether work tomorrow is going to happen or not. At the moment my fever is down thanks to Advil, but I kind of suspect that if Advil is the only thing standing between me and 102 degrees, I maybe shouldn't be hanging out with small people who like to filch sips of my beverages and gnaw on my hands. We'll see.
