A Homecoming

Up until a few days ago, I was still vacillating over going back to my hometown until my move (thus living with my parents and having to get up at 4:30 every morning for work), or staying where I am and enduring the cost of rent and bills, making it that much harder to save money for my move. Well, that stopped when my old roommate called to tell me about her talk with our old apartment complex.

It seems she and my other roommate went to the office to find out an estimate on charges they’d be giving us, or even if they’d had a chance to check it out. We moved out August 11th, so they should have had plenty of time to see it and make a judgment or two. Well they’d seen it all right, but they didn’t have a price for us yet. It seems that we somehow left the apartment in such bad shape that they haven’t even calculated how much it’s going to cost us. It was one of the worst apartments they’d ever seen, and how dare we leave it that way. My two old roommates were berated by the office manager right in front of everyone, office staff and potential renters alike. She was furious that someone had left a bed broken in one of the rooms (completely not any of us, but the fourth person, whom we did not get along with), and that our oven door was broken. For that issue, we have a work order on file in the office telling them they needed to come fix it, and one of the people in the office expressly told us not to worry about it since they simply didn’t have enough time to get to it before we moved out. Now the office manager is telling us that the oven door is not a routine repair, and that they’ll have to replace the entire appliance (at our expense of course). They even mentioned changing out the carpet in the common areas (which I understand but don’t like), and all the bedrooms (which they said they were doing pretty much because they felt like it. My carpet was spotless, and I am proud of it. Screw them).

Well, once I was told about them mentioning payment plans, I knew it was time to pack up yet again and do anything to save some money. The office told us we would have our bill within 30 days, but I’m not waiting until then to get out of here. I’m hoping to leave by this coming weekend, before the semester starts again. So that means the coming week will be filled to the brim with packing and sorting once more. I plan on using this week (and the coming semester before my move) to purge my belongings and pare it down to, if not the bare necessities, my more basic needs and wants. It will be a long hard time toughing it out in my podunk hometown (without Internet, by the way), but I’ll survive. I always do. The hardest thing will be leaving my friends here, but if I can’t survive a 45 minute separation, how will I move across country?

Well, that’s my most up to date plan for now. Work will have to adjust to me not being able to close at all, but I know they’ll be fine. And on the plus side, I’ll have lots of opportunities to get some overtime. I just have to remember, I’m doing this all for my future, for my potential happiness at starting a new life in a new place. I’m scared shitless sometimes, but I’ll make it through.

-Liridon

Home Sweet Home?

Well, it’s almost 11:00pm on Sunday night.  I’ve been back in Oklahoma for twelve hours now.  Super happy fun time for me, as you can guess.

I went to Connecticut over this past week, and despite the fact the I had to get up at 2:45 (central time) to catch my flight this morning, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it.  First of all, I was surprised at just how much I liked it up there.  The last time I went to see my brother and sister-in-law was two years ago, and I remember having the impression that there were too many highways and not enough things to do near by.  It seemed like everywhere we went was at least twenty minutes away.  Now I kind of see that as a blessing.  My brother and his wife live in a fairly quiet neighborhood in Bristol, but so many things are just ten or twenty minutes away.  You get the serenity (at least some level of it) and the advantages of city life at the same time.  They’re a half hour from Hartford, there’s plenty of shopping and restaurants around, and (big for me right now) a branch of the University of Connecticut is only fifteen minutes away.  By the end of the week, I was trying to figure out how to get my stuff up there.

So while I was up shootin the breeze and hanging out, I visited two graduate departments at UConn (social work, and public policy).  While I pretty much knew what to expect with the social work department, I found that my hour long meeting with one of the administrators of the department of public policy to be very encouraging and even enlightening.  We discussed the classes in detail, the philosophy of the department, trends in what current students were studying.  I told her that I was thinking about working with gays and lesbians, either in a civil rights avenue or a counseling method, and she was on board with that.  After that meeting, I started wishing I could take courses there and get my masters in public administration, and take enough courses to be certified as a licensed counselor as well.  I’d something that’s near my brother since I’ll be staying with them until I find a place, so maybe I’ll looking into some other surround schools.  I’ve also thought about a dual degree with public administration and social work, but who knows if that’ll pan out.

If someone were to ask me what I did on my week long trip, I’m not sure what I’d tell them.  For the most part I just hung out with my brother and sister-in-law and piddled around town.  We went to the movies, out to eat, to the mall for a bit, to different shopping areas, and even to a Titanic exhibit in Hartford.  I guess the biggest thing we did was go to New York City on Saturday to spend the day, but that’s only a small part of why I had a good time.  The longer I stayed there, the more I came to like the area and the possibilities that it could hold for me.  There’s museums, restaurants, shopping, new people, new ideas, bigger cities (come on, New York and Boston are only a relative hop and skip away)…  Even French Canada is accessible, as I found during one of my meetings.

But now comes the hard part.  How do I make the final decision to get my ass up there and, more pragmatically, how do I find the means to get all my stuff up there without it costing an arm and a leg?  Do I buy a car here and haul it myself, or do I get a U-Haul?  Leave a lot of stuff behind, or take everything I own (which is my first inclination since I’m somewhat of a pack rat)?  And what about my friends here?  While I was up there I had these wonderful visions of me inviting some friends up to see my new apartment and to let me show them around the area, maybe go to New York for a day…  But at night, when I had more time to think, I wondered about the things I would miss out on here, and how hard it’s going to be for me to make new friends.  I’ve had the same friends since high school, some of them since middle school.

But I won’t let myself dwell on stuff like that.  I’m trying to stay positive.  My sister-in-law is very optimistic about all this and is really excited about me moving up there, so I’ll try to channel her for a while.  Anyway, it’s getting kind of hard for me type anymore because I’m getting so groggy…  Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow.  I’m always thinking of something to write, even if I don’t post as often as I’d like to.

-Liridon