New Home

Find me now at Vacationland.

Onward, Upward

Things have gotten better. Considerably better. I haven't had any more days where I've just wanted to stay in bed listening to The Band, armed only with a carton of ice cream and a bucket of vodka. My real life has started. School is in session. I have people to talk to. I have work to do. I have things that tell me this will all start to feel normal very, very shortly.

There are moments when I catch myself thinking that all of this--the move, the new job, the whole idea of getting what I want--seems strange but wonderful. There were times over the past year where I thought this life was impossible, that I was doomed to live in my bedroom in my father's house for the rest of my life. There were times I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to heave myself out of the adjunct world, that my friends would all go on to bigger and better things without me, that I would be left behind as the one who didn't do so well for herself.

But it's okay now. And even though I might have held on to a secret terror that I might be living in my father's house for a few more years, I know now (just as I knew then, but was in too cranky a state most of the time to admit out loud) that the last year was very important for me. Not only did it knock me down a couple of pegs from my grad school high, but it also grounded me, reminded me what was important, put me back in my family circle.

Last year was like a free pass. I had no rent, very few bills, and the ability to run around with my oldest friends, with my family. It was time for me to take stock, to remember what is most important in life. It was like a spa visit: I rested, I rejuvenated, I filled myself with all the best that Buffalo has to offer.

I think I was given last year just so I will never forget where I come from and how important the place and people were (and are) to making me who I am.

My year at home gave me a new kind of steadiness. When I came back to New York in August of '06, nothing about my insides was solid. I was a wobbling mess of emotions. I didn't know where I was going, how I was going to get there, and what I was going to do without all the people I left behind in the Midwest. But I learned. I had time to come down, to take several deep breaths, to realize it's all going to be okay.

I understand now. I understand why that year was important, and I am here to admit once and for all that, even though I complained and whined and moaned, living in my old room for a year wasn't that bad. At times it was even fun. Being in the house in the middle of the country, where the crickets and frogs sang their songs at midnight, was the best little vacation I could've asked for. There isn't any other place that smells as green and lush and beautiful as my home, and I often caught myself standing out on the porch as the sun set and breathing deep, deep, deeper than I ever had before.

But it's time for my new life now, and I'm ready. I'm in the place I've been dreaming about for years. And because I'm in a new place, and because I've got a new home, I've made a new blog so this one can stand on its own, so I can page through it remember the year that set my head on straight, that got me ready for everything that's coming next.

From now on, you can find me here, at Vacationland.

Today Is a Tough Day

Today is not a good day. Today is a tough day. Today is the type of day where I find it incredibly difficult to remain upright and out of bed. Today is the type of day where all I want to do is draw the curtains, put in a CD by The Band, and drink Absolut Peach from the bottle with a long straw.

Did I have these kinds of days when I moved to Minnesota? It's tough to say. A move is so busy, and down-time that isn't devoted to cleaning or rearranging or unpacking is hard to come by, so my diary from the time after my move to the Midwest is kind of sketchy. Most of it revolves around me thinking one of the older TAs was cute, cute, oh so cute. There are a few days when I wrote a snippet about it being hard, about it being a little tough, and about being worried I might not make friends, but those kinds of entries weren't around for long.

This time I feel sort of wrecked. I feel exhausted and wrung-out, like there's very little left to me that hasn't evaporated into the coastal air. I miss my family, I miss my friends, and I miss my boyfriend, who was good enough to come spend the first week in Maine with me. That might have made it harder, watching him go, watching him get on an airplane, then having to turn around and drive back to the new place alone. For real this time.

Everything here is beautiful. The weather, the flowers, the sky. I recognize that, but all I want is a dark room and my not-yet-hooked-up-to-cable TV showing fuzzy network channels and their midday soap operas.

Moving is an awful, awful thing.

But school starts soon. Tomorrow we start department meetings, so I'll have people to talk to then. I'll have social interaction and sound. I've been missing sound. It's been so quiet here in between phone calls. But there will be sound again soon, and this weekend my father rolls into town with his fiancee and a load of things that didn't fit in my car. There will be lobster then, I hope, and a trip to the coast where I will stand on some craggy rocks and breathe in the salt and wind and remember one of the reasons I wanted this so badly in the first place.

No Moose Yet...

But I have seen these things:

Ready to See Some Moose

Well, this is it. I have packed, I have loaded the car, I have bruised myself in every way possible while packing and loading. I guess that means I'm ready to go.

Today will be a whirlwind. I'm going to bake some cupcakes, attend a family reunion, go to a soccer game, say goodbye to the girls and Josh, and then I'm going to take some Tylenol PM and attempt to fall asleep early because the Boy From Work and I have to be on the road by 4:30 AM just so we get into town tomorrow in time to sign my lease and get my key.

The next week will be filled with furniture-shopping and apartment-decorating. There will be updates, of course, and there is a new blog on the horizon. I just think this blog and my year back in Buffalo should stand on its own, should remain in its own place, just like the original Where's My Sponge Candy blog that recorded my three years of graduate school. I'd like this year and all its ups and downs to stay right here, right in its own nook, looping like it was some song about drinking and hockey and love gone wrong written by The Lowest of the Low.

And for now, here I go.

Crossing That One off My Life's To-Do List

This weekend I slept in my car. I slept in my car like a bum, a crazy person, an aspiring actress who packs her things and heads to Hollywood to get a job at In and Out Burger while praying that she'll make it big someday, oh, someday.

I didn't sleep in the car alone. I slept in the car with my mother. We were in Maine, in a parking lot of a hotel that attracts truckers, and we were there because of an online reservation that went awry.

We went to look at apartments this weekend. It was going to be an easy enough trip--start out on Friday, get there late, sleep, do a whirlwind apartment-viewing on Saturday and possibly Sunday morning, then drive home and be done with it. My mother made the hotel reservation because she lives in a place that has fast internet, unlike out here in the country where we connect to the internet at a maddening 24k.

When we arrived in our hotel in Maine the man behind the counter looked at us strangely. "I don't have any record of your reservation," he said.

My mother told me to go out to the car and get her receipt, which she'd printed off and brought with her.

And I did. On my way back inside, I unfolded the piece of paper and saw that my mother had accidentally made the reservation for next weekend, not this one.

It was 11:45 PM. We'd just spent the last ten hours driving, and two of those hours were marred by us screaming Pussies! Pussies! PUSSIES! at the people of Massachusetts who turned on their blinkers and would not go above 45 mph during a thunderstorm that was terrific, yes, but did not warrant that kind of emergency driving. That had made us tired. Reading that my mother had botched the reservations made me even more tired. And so I trudged back inside and handed over the piece of paper.

My mother was not pleased with herself, but, like a logical person, she figured everything would be okay. All we needed to do was make a reservation in the here and now, get ourselves a room, and pass out.

The man behind the counter informed us he had no rooms. In fact, no one in town had rooms. He'd called around and everything was booked. And not just for tonight. Tomorrow, too.

"Sorry," he said. He shrugged and went back to shuffling papers so he could avoid a potential scene.

However, my mother and I are not scene makers. We merely went back outside and sat in the car. On my way out, I'd nabbed a few maps, and I started calling 411 for hotel information in cities that were close. Everything was booked, though, and one of the girls I got on the phone told me the unfortunate news: everything-everything was booked.

"I've been on the phone trying to find people rooms all night," she said. "There's nothing out there. All the hotels in the state are full. Actually, everything from Portsmouth, New Hampshire up to Bangor is full. I'm so sorry. There's nothing we can do."

Apparently we had picked a very popular weekend to come to Maine. Apparently half of America had decided to plop itself on the coast for those two days I needed to find an apartment.

"What are we going to do?" my mother asked. She's not one for these types of gray areas. She gets nerved up about traveling, about having things go wrong.

I didn't know what we were going to do. What was there to do? I had a sudden vision of my mother and I sitting at a corner booth in Denny's until 9 AM when we were meeting the real estate girl. We would drink an awful lot of coffee. We would eat an awful lot of pie. We would show up for our appointment looking grizzled and smelling of late-night fried food.

I didn't know what we were going to do about sleep that night, but I did know that we needed something for the next night. I pulled out of the hotel parking lot and drove to another hotel parking lot, one that was likely to have some kind of wireless internet I could filch.

And that's exactly what I did. I stole some WiFi and hooked up to Orbitz, found that there were only two available rooms left in the entire town, and those were at the EconoLodge, which my mother and I scoffed at when making our original reservations. But now it was a different story. I wanted to kiss the owners of the EconoLodge for somehow having a room that I could reserve for the next night so I wouldn't have to spend two nights without a bed.

But after we made that reservation it became very clear that we had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and absolutely no options.

"We're going to have to sleep in the car," my mother said. "We're vagrants!"

And that's exactly what we did, and that's exactly what we were.

I pulled into another hotel parking lot, one that was home to several big rigs that had parked for the night. We drove around several times, trying to find a spot that was nearish the lights (to discourage any and all shanking that might occur by crazed murderers who were roving the Maine streets at night) and simultaneously away from the lights (so we could attempt to sleep like normal people). After we found a spot, my mother and I rearranged the luggage so we could recline our seats all the way back (thank you for that small mercy, Honda Civic). I struggled into my pajama bottoms and wadded up a t-shirt for a pillow. I used a hoodie for a blanket. I stretched out as best I could but found that--because I am so tall--my feet dangled at an awkward position, and I could never get them comfortable. This would be what kept me up most of the night. My mother, however, had brought herself a sleeping pill because she knew that her drinking caffeine to stay awake for the drive would screw with her attempt to fall asleep after the drive was over. She took that sleeping pill and was down for the count within the first hour. It took me much, much longer.

The next morning we were faced with the biggest challenge: somehow making ourselves look presentable to the people who had the power to rent me an apartment, and do this despite having spent the night in the car and despite having not showered.

That was when we went to Denny's. We stuffed clothes and makeup and hair things into a bag and sneaked into the bathroom as quickly as we could. My mother had serious qualms about what the other Denny's customers would think about two ladies who went into the bathroom with a bag full of things and came out with new clothes on a few minutes later. "They're going to think we're homeless," she said.

"We're going to buy breakfast," I told her. "Homeless people can't afford to buy breakfast. No one will think anything of it."

I did, however, feel pretty skeevy and gross and guilty as I washed my face in the Denny's bathroom sink.

No one really noticed us, though, and we did get big breakfasts (with extra bacon for our troubles). And the rest of the time in Maine was pretty decent. I toured several apartments I liked but found one I fell in love with and got quite giddy over as soon as I stepped inside. We're just waiting for the credit and background checks to go through before I am approved and before I can load up some cars and make the big move.

And I feel a little less stressed now, a little less on edge now that things have been put in motion. And I'm starting to compile a list of things I really like about Maine, and that list makes me feel a little less stressed, too. On top of that list is, of course, the proximity to the ocean and the fact that grocery stores in Maine have full-blown liquor aisles and full-blown wine aisles. That's right--grocery stores in Maine sell bottles of Absolut Peach alongside produce, deli meats, and cheese. Thank you, Maine. Thank you.

The Best News

Today I got the best news, the official word: I am going to be the newest full-time hire at a small community college in Maine. The next few weeks are going to be a flurry of packing, apartment-hunting, and furniture-buying.

But right now I have to pack my car and get on the road. There's a wedding in West Virginia, and I'm fixin' to park myself by the open bar and celebrate with all sorts of grad school friends.