coming to you live from michigan, where they thankfully have the internet

Here I am.

It's been a long week. We started packing on Sunday. Monday we made the folks at the Salvation Army very, very happy and our garbage man less so. Tuesday we loaded our two cars with my things, save the dishes and my lamps. Wednesday we picked up the truck, filled it, drove it to Whitewater, unloaded it, returned the truck to Madison. Thursday we rested and let our bruises fully ripen. Friday we drove the loaded cars to Michigan and unloaded them, and now it is Monday and the B drove off this morning in a gray drizzly rain, and I find myself in my new apartment.

There's no furniture here except my new mattress, which fits perfectly on the Murphy bed. Cliff is coming later this week with his Volvo full of routers and saws and mahogany-colored stain, and we are going to build me some custom-fit tables and bookshelves. There's a fair amount of room in this apartment, but that would quickly disappear if you jammed it with traditional furniture. Instead, I'm going to line a couple of walls with desk-height tables that can alternately be dining areas, television stands, work desks and places to spread out the 84 student papers I'll find myself commenting on soon enough. But until those tables are built, it's camping out on the bed for me.

Even furniture-less, I love this apartment.

I left this:



and moved into this



and for the first time in a while, it feels like I live in a home. And either that makes complete and total sense to you, or it doesn't. But I love this apartment. I love that it's on a city street, and two blocks in any direction are, alternately, giant historic houses, coffee shops, a halfway house, Chinese restaurants, liquor stores and assorted churches. It's a mile from downtown--a mile lined with restaurants and bars and museums. I love that at night, I can hear car doors slamming and people driving by, slowing as they drive over the speed hump in front of the house.

I love that the signs out front say SPEED HUMP CAUTION.

I love that it's in a 110-year-old house that I share with two other sets of neighbors, some of the friendliest people I have ever met. I love that we all share a big backyard, and my two sets of neighbors own dogs that frequently appear at my back door, looking for pats on the head. I love that I once again live someplace that has two entrances: a front door via the house, and a back door that opens onto a deck with stair access down to the yard. I love that for the first time in the nearly five years that I have owned Truman, I can just let him out by opening a door and he does the rest--no leashes involved, and definitely no standing out in the snow, waiting for him to find exactly the right place to shit.

I love that one set of my neighbors are an older couple and that their wireless network is called sailorsausage. I love that below me are two actors/servers/ students who welcomed me with a table for my deck and directions to the nearest wine store. I love that I can watch the sun set from my deck, and that I have a place to sit out over the next three weeks with my books and laptop and a legal pad full of in-progress lesson plans.

Right now I even love that the floors slope ever so slightly on the way from the front room to the bathroom and that the kitchen smells a little like natural gas and that I have to set up the Mr. Coffee in the bathroom and that I am waiting for my landlord to show up with some new, unbroken blinds. Right now everything feels at least so very familiar, in a way Arbor Hills never did or could.

I of course do not love the fact that the B doesn't live here, but at least we can navigate this new development with the time off that our respective academic jobs afford us.

There's so much about this transition that makes me think of moving to Minnesota, and that in turn makes me feel as if the last year didn't even happen. Already I catch myself thinking Marketing? I worked in marketing? The year in Madison made me feel every day as if I was being squeezed into something that wasn't right. There were times that I'd find myself in the beige box, wishing desperately that we had a patio, afraid that every step on the new beige carpet meant money out of our deposit, sitting on the old Highland couch in my new work clothes and feeling completely out of sorts. I often felt like a fraud or a phony, and I wondered what was wrong with me--why I couldn't just shake it off and get to work and acclimate to that post-graduate corporate life like so many people do. But I never fully did, and although some people might think that moving from a decent place into a shitbox is a step down, I feel good. Really good.

For the first time in a long time, I feel that things are going to be okay.