moving – Page 2 – Sconnie Molly

Chapter 1, Week 1

We’re here and it’s taken me a few days to gather my thoughts, I guess.

Moving day itself was a predictable shitshow, but all three of us survived the plane ride, despite Isis’s very clear displeasure. Actually “moving in” to our apartment wasn’t terribly difficult since all we had was a few suitcases (okay fine, 5) and an air mattress. All of our stuff is supposed to arrive (🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻) on Tuesday. At that point, I think it’ll start feeling a little more like home. A totally empty, echo-y living room doesn’t do much for the hygge vibes.

We’ve had a fun time exploring this week. We visited Discovery Park and Alki Beach and procured library cards and gone to two, yes two, movies (BlackKklansman and Crazy Rich Asians) and tomorrow night we’re going to go to a Seattle Storm game (WNBA) to satisfy my inner 10-year-old who so loved the fact that a women’s professional basketball league was finally being created. Who cares if the SuperSonics franchise moved to Oklahoma – we’ve got the Storm, baby.

(BlackKlansman was really really good but if we’re comparing Jordan Peele movies, I think Get Out is superior. Crazy Rich Asians was a lot of fun and it was refreshing to see a non-idiotic but also non-emo romcom in theaters again – God, it feels like it’s been forever – but I know from my Twitter feed that Awkwafina’s “blaccent” rubbed some people the wrong way. That’s really not my argument to have, though. And the whole character of Awkwafina’s brother, how his whole deal was just being really creepy towards Rachel, Constance Wu’s character? What the hell was that? Everything is at least a little problematic these days.)

Anyway. I really love Queen Anne. I’m glad we chose this spot.

Today we largely got around downtown/Capitol Hill/QA without using Google maps 😎 which I think is quite the victory. Downtown is still pretty confusing in spots but it helps that the theater we have chosen as our own is right across the street from the hotel we stayed at on two different trips – so we’re pretty familiar with the area.

I’m a little homesick, but not terribly so yet. I say yet because I know at some point it’s going to hit me hard and I’m very much not looking forward to that. FaceTime and Snapchat have helped a lot, actually. I need to get more Snapchat-proficient. I’ve actually been wearing Wisconsin-themed clothes all week because that’s just what I packed, totally unintentionally. I’m still checking Madison.com every day. I’m not forgetting where home actually really is.

I need all the ASMR I can get

We’re back from India and about a week away from moving so, as you can imagine, I am very FHEJSDAKJDOIWEJRIOEWJDWAKFNKAJFDOASJD:OWAK.

India India India. It was wonderful to be with our family, and it was very special to be able to mark the anniversary of V’s dad’s passing with so many loved ones. But being an introvert in India is a little bit of a 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife situation, if the spoons are people, and the knife is solitude. It’s like being an alcoholic in Utah. This place ain’t meant for you. There’s nothing wrong with you and there’s nothing wrong with the place, but it’s not meant to be. Which is not to say that I don’t love going; I do. But it’s one of the reasons we will never ever live there.

I was observing a lot of white couples at the airport on the day we left and getting inexplicably annoyed like I always do. Skinny girls in plain tank tops with colorful harem pants and messy hair and dirty chappals. I think they come for yoga, but that’s just an educated guess. Why do they bother me? I guess I think that they treat India like a product. But what’s really wrong with them visiting and enjoying the culture? It’s pretty ballsy to go to India on your own, without knowing anybody or knowing any of the languages. I wouldn’t do it. If V wasn’t in my life, India would barely be on my radar beyond its geopolitical significance. India is fucking intense. It’s loud and stressful and smelly and sometimes dangerous and often dirty and hot and crowded and, as aforementioned, inhospitable to introverts. People are very very kind, generous, and friendly on an individual level but strangers are indifferent at best, hostile at worst. It always takes me a day or two to remember not to smile at anyone I don’t know. I’m an American and a Midwesterner to boot – smiling (by which I mostly mean tepid no-teeth smiles) is like breathing. The watchman will let me in and maybe grunt hello but he will NOT smile, will NOT ask how I am, and if I do either one, it’s an “invitation” rather than my cultural habit.

I think I’ve had about enough travel for 2018. After the move, other than coming home for the holidays, I think we will stay put for a little while. Which means you should come visit me!

What I’m reading:

Haven’t finished The H-Spot quite yet but I’ve also started Educated by Tara Westover, which is truly fascinating. It’s a memoir of a girl who grew up in a sort of survivalist/antigovernment Mormon family in Idaho, without any formal schooling throughout her childhood.

What I’m watching:

I discovered a new way to calm my nerves during takeoff on a plane: watching Bob Ross videos! It seems so obvious now I don’t know how I didn’t think of it sooner. Watching him paint is really ASMR heaven and the perfect calming antidote for flying anxiety.

What I’m fuming about:

I’m trying to ignore the outside world as much as possible this week amid all the moving preparations. I’m sure there’s a lot to be angry about but I don’t have the bandwidth for it right now. So today let’s try a different list-

What I’m anxious about:

handling Isis in the airport and on the flight itself and in the Uber to our new apartment
living for an undetermined amount of time without the vast majority of our belongings since the moving truck will arrive in Seattle anywhere from like 7-14 days after we do
finding a new primary care doctor and psychiatrist
being lonely/homesick

Next time I’ll write a list of what I’m excited about – because I am excited! – but we’ll leave it here today.

Not-sure-if-zckh1c

July is always weird

My home currently does not look like a place where two semi-sloppy people live and eat and sleep and play and bathe, but rather a place carefully and meticulously staged to remove any semblance of personality in order to entice the largest number of prospective buyers. Because that’s what we’re tryna do here. It’s been a weird week.

In my haste to get the house picture-perfect for listing photos, I misplaced my to-do list notebook. Couldn’t find it for two days, aka a goddamn eternity in to-do list time. Tonight, discovered I had (totally intentionally) put it in the microwave. Out of sight out of mind!!!!

Anyway – I am going to miss this house a lot. We looked at sooo many before finally getting an accepted offer on this one. So many other offers had fallen through or been rejected. But as always, things worked out like they were supposed to; this was the right house for us. It has its quirks and imperfections and scars, some of which we’ve grown to love and others we merely tolerate. We learned that owning a corner lot in a snowy state is double the work. We learned that outdoor maintenance is not, in fact, optional. We learned that some neighbors take their own lawns very very seriously and God help you if your lawn begins to threaten theirs with “weed creep”. And that those neighbors will report you to the city in a heartbeat if your arbor vitae branches begin to bend over the sidewalk under the municipally-mandated 7 foot clearance.

It’s been a trip.

One thing I will NOT miss about this house is how so many of the electrical outlets and light switch plates are not installed levelly. I swear at least two thirds of them are crooked AF, making hanging stuff in their vicinity quite a challenge because it will end up looking off even if it is perfectly level.

I’ve been wanting to write but lacking inspiration, hence this pretty dull post.

What I’m Reading:

“The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness” by Jill Filipovic. I’m not very far into it yet but the premise – that society should make the happiness of women an explicit goal – is an interesting one for which I’m very curious to see the case made. It sounds kind of preposterous when you put it like that…but I’m betting Filipovic will make s pretty convincing argument.

What I’m Watching:

My Hero Academia

Twitter thread on it.

What I’m fuming about:

Look, the list is a mile long like always, but I don’t feel like getting into the geopolitical muck today. I will limit my fumes to 1) the utterly Kafkaesque absurdity that is Indian travel bureaucracy, and 2) the fact that teleportation does not yet exist and my cat and I have to endure 4.5 hours of air travel when we move to Seattle and I’m SO WORRIED ABOUT HER YOU GUYS SHE’S KIND OF OLD AND WHAT ABOUT THE AIR PRESSURE AND IS SHE GOING TO PUKE EVERYWHERE AND/OR MEOW INCESSANTLY AND DEAR GOD WHAT IF SHE POOPS OR PEES? More critically WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO CALL HER WHILE TRAVELING BECAUSE IT SURE AS SHIT CAN’T BE HER REAL NAME.

One or both of us is going to need to be highly medicated for that trip.

Why are you reading this, go watch Nanette.

We did apartment-hunting in Seattle over the weekend and it was fun, exhausting, surreal, weird. We had a rental car for the weekend and driving into the city from the airport, V mentioned that one reason it felt so odd is that we hardly ever drive ourselves around when we’re in a different city…if we’re visiting family, obviously they drive, and if we’re on vacation we Uber or take public transportation. Maneuvering our way to the hotel and then to a drugstore and then back to the hotel was…an adventure in and of itself. Their downtown has a lot of one-way streets, like Madison’s, but on a larger scale. I don’t think we’ll drive too much once we move unless we really have to. The apartments we looked at (10 in all) were all shiny and mostly new and amenity-filled and clearly very much catering to our particular demographic. I’m already feeling some guilt associated with being one of Those People in Seattle.

Honestly, all I really want is for us to find a good apartment in a good area and for us and our kitty to make it there unscathed and adjust as smoothly as possible. And uh, a job would be nice too…or at least steadier freelance work. I’ve got to start hustling, that’s the only way freelancers make it. I’m still anxious about everything, but I am also starting to feel more like this is very much the right thing for us right now, and that it will be good. If it turns out not to be, it’s not undoable. I always like knowing I have an emergency exit plan, even if I won’t need it.

seattle meme — *looking forward to figuring out what the Spokane part even means*

I had my last appointment with my psychiatrist yesterday, the same one I’ve been seeing for twelve years. TWELVE YEARS, man. I came to her when I was 20, fresh off a terrible breakup and not sleeping and feeling miserable. She helped me see that the breakup was actually quite a good thing. She guided me through many subsequent years of experimenting with different medications to treat my anxiety and depression. She was a constant in my life when I badly needed stability. She did talk therapy with me even though that’s not really what she normally does and normally she meets with younger adolescents but she kept me all these years anyway. Yesterday we talked about the upcoming move and about how I’ve changed since we first met. She said she could see that I’ve become a lot more calm and peaceful. Which I would partly attribute to medication, and partly to internal work I’ve done, and partly to the people around me who help me stay sane. But really…I wish every person in the world had access to this kind of care, and it bums me out that mental health still isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.

If I ever do write a book, she’s going to be prominently named in my Acknowledgments.

What I’m Reading:

I’m in the middle of “There There” by Tommy Orange, which has been getting praise every which way lately from people whose tastes I respect. I think I’m doing it wrong though – I like it so far, but I’m reading it on my Kindle, and that method of reading makes it difficult to go back and refresh one’s memory about who’s who and what happened when. In a story like this with intertwined characters, that is challenging. And I’ve been reading it in such small random intervals. For this book, I think a hard copy would have been a lot better.

What I’m Watching:

Uh, duh: Nanette. You’ve heard about Nanette, right? OK so it’s a Netflix stand-up special from an Australian comedy named Hannah Gadsby. I love a good stand-up, and Hannah is definitely funny, but this is unlike any other stand-up I’ve ever seen. She mixes humor with some really fucking raw and powerful personal stories about growing up as a lesbian in a conservative region of Australia. It’s a sorely needed perspective and brilliantly put together. Her pain is so visceral and visible. You wonder how anyone could hate her for being “different”. Homophobia really is a mindfuck and LGBT folks themselves are not immune to internalizing it the way we all have; Hannah suffered from it very much, “soaking in self-hate”. Anyway. I highly highly encourage you to watch it, all of it.

nanette

I miss Queer Eye so much. I need constant new episodes. Following the guys on Instagram is fun and all but I need MORE.

What I’m fuming about:

Oh, the usual. I haven’t read up very much yet on new SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh but from what I know, it’s pretty much as bad or worse as we feared it would be.
White people are on a hell of a roll lately being idiotic and racist. (I guess by “lately” I mean that lately a lot of it has been caught on video.) There was #PermitPatty, there was #BBQBecky, then #PoolPatrolPaul. Now today I learned of this dude who harassed a woman in a park for wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rican flag. (He was clearly not aware that Puerto Rico is part of the US.) There are cops *right there*, and the woman repeatedly asks them for assistance, only to be essentially ignored. The guy was almost certainly drunk and she had every reason to be fearful. One of the things he said was “you’re not gonna change us”. Which felt pretty chilling to me.