Things You Learn In 372 Days
Uprooting your entire life and moving it to another coast teaches you a few things - both about yourself and your new hometown.
Let's review them in a semi-random, self-important manner, shall we?
Six Months And Sixteen Days Later - A Review
I moved to L.A. on March 1st. If this were a normal job (and I like to treat my career as a business) I'd have to sit down and do a review right about now.
Let's have a look.
Wifi Is Where The Home Is
And with that note, I think the entries in my "Move" category are officially at an end. Once you're hooked up to the Net on a convenient and reliable basis, you've landed. Right?
Granted, I still have a bedroom full of boxes and I haven't hung half my clothes, but let's be honest: that's the way I lived back in Minnesota.
Home Is Where The Wifi Is
...and right now, home is the Amelia Earhart Branch Library in North Hollywood.
I have all the essential utilities hooked up: gas, electric, Playstation. The only thing missing is broadband.
Two Days And Five States Later
...and we're in Green River, Utah.
We got the rental truck expertly packed by Joe & Paul (with the generous help of Pete, Robben, and Aric) and the car loaded on the trailer by 1pm on Sunday.
By 10pm we had burned our way across Iowa and found ourselves in the glorified truckstop that is Kearney, Nebraska.
A Fond Farewell
I was nervous about the show last night. I had a very specific vision of how I wanted things to be structured and presented.
That's not the best approach when you have no rehearsal and no budget.
But thanks to the gracious generosity of my friends, it came together exactly as I imagined.
When Your Mother Boxes All The Bowls
...you have to eat out of the dog dish.
That minor inconvenience aside, I would be hopelessly behind if my parents weren't semi-retired. They've been up every other day packing, sorting, trashing and cleaning. It's really been a blessing.
Especially since I (somewhat unwisely) signed myself up to all kinds of non-move related things this past week.
If I'm A Packrat, Then Old Bills Are Cheese
So I spent the weekend going through boxes of stuff to store, pack, donate, and throw out.
My brother and I went through several boxes of old mail. Things like telephone bills from 1990, old pay stubs from my job in college, and cancelled checks. Thousands and THOUSANDS of dollars in cancelled checks. (And that's not because I had three old checks for a thousand dollars in there. The average amount was more like $46.50)
You would not BELIEVE the number of things that have your social security number on them! It was a full-time shredding operation for the both of us.
Preparations for Landing
There are few things more beautiful than flying into LA at night. Brightly dotted tentacles of civilization undulate up from the pitch black ocean of desert below. Eventually they congeal into a horizon-spanning amoeboid of streetlights -- continually twisting, splitting, and dividing along to the pulse of headlights on its asphalt arteries.
It's simultaneously familiar and incomprehensible.
My mission for the week: to find an apartment and sign a lease.
Fate
If I was supposed to stay in Minneapolis, my life would be a lot more complicated right now.
This whole move thing is proving too easy to do (knock on wood).
I'm beginning to think there is a reason for that.
-Tom, who's tempted to start quoting The Matrix ...because I am a giant dork.
