a meditation on a scatterbrained lady

I feel lost, unproductive. We’ve been moved in for four days and there’s still not enough room to sit in the studio (piled high with boxes) and the bedroom’s in disarray. The kitchen is partially set up as is the living room, where Buggah nearly left me for spray painting the bookcase.

I have forgotten to call my grandmother this week, and I’ve missed the calls of a few friends and an aunt. I forgot a friend’s son’s birthday, and my baby sister turns 16 in a few days and I’m panicked over what to get her, though any gift won’t reach Hawaii in time. I still haven’t looked up my other grandmother here in San Diego. I’ve fallen off the wagon of my Artist’s Way tasks, the reading for a classics book club, and I’ve got a ton of reading for work, which begins in a few days.

Part of the problem is I use the time to screw around, like now, typing away when I should be reading or calling or scrubbing the grime off the cabinets. The other part of the problem is I’m committed to organizing the apartment in the beginning, to save me trouble down the line. I’m beginning with the kitchen: contact paper and cabinet shelving and plastic canisters for the dry goods. And where is that damn Magic Bullet blade? Why won’t my new soap dispenser work?

I know, I know. Don’t sweat the small stuff. But packing, and unpacking, is an exercise in small stuff. The details of your life, insignificant but functional, in the damn soap dispenser spring.

I try to remind myself there’s time. It stretches out in front of you. Take baby steps. Plant the tomato, the cabinets will get done. Oogle over the books, the desk will be cleared. Live, and one day the pillows and roman shades will be stitched.

When I lived in DC, I swapped web work for yoga and meditation classes. Just sitting was hard for me, my mind wandered far, far from my breath. Treat thoughts like passing clouds, my teachers would say. And so I would mentally follow my breath through my nostrils down into my diaphragm and then my attention was bombarded: Did I turn off the iron? Should I defrost the meat? I wonder if that cute number is still available in the boutique next door?

They said this flurry of concern was an indication I was avoiding what I needed to face. Thinking back on it, perhaps it was my dissatisfaction with the city and my job. In contrast, it was so much easier to dwell on the details. If that is true, what am I avoiding now? Am I fighting change, transition? Does the frustration rest in an aching need for home? Am I a prima donna resisting the dirty work?

Nevertheless, one teacher told me something I haven’t forgotten. “You’re never lost,” she said, “you’re always just finding your way back.”

So right now, I’m going to close the computer and open the instructor handbook I came to this Internet cafe to read. I’m going to find my way back. Then I’m going to spend the rest of the day being nice to myself.

the rental gods have answered our prayers

Hallelujah! Buggah and I woke this morning in our new apartment, in our own bed. Our life may still be in boxes, scattered over the living room, but our own life in San Diego is beginning.

We really couldn’t have asked for more. The two-bedroom is large enough that we won’t have to compromise space for tasks. The kitchen is solely for cooking and eating, the living room for entertainment and peace, the office/studio for working and creating, etc. No desk at the foot of the bed, no dining table snuggling up with the couch.

A two-bedroom was the magical thing on the horizon for Buggah and I. “One day,” we’d say. “We’ll get a two bedroom, maybe three …” I had envisioned settling into a smaller place here in San Diego, 600 square feet or less. I actually have great admiration for people, like all those owners and renters on Apartment Therapy, who make every square foot count. Living in a small space requires designing how you’ll live and cutting out the excess.

My fear in living in a larger space is I’ll accrue stuff like a second-hand store, pieces with potential but no stars. I want to be a city dweller who happens to have some space. I want to design my life efficiently, own only things that I’ll use and hang art that I love. I want to move past this futon/wire cage/metal blind decor of being fresh out of college and poor.

In the meantime, however, we’ve going to have to use what we have. I’m painting everything. The book case is being whitewashed. My sister’s dresser will be crackled. The dining table will be stripped.

While we’re waiting for the paint to dry, we can walk to the all-night cafes, restaurants and supermarkets within a block of our apartment. Then there’s Balboa Park, just the kind of escape a city of this size should have. Next stop’s the beach.

While we can thank the rental gods for this abundance, one thing we don’t have is Internet. For days at a time I’ll be radio silent, folks. Over and out.

a real heartbreaker

The housing search has been dismal. Buggah and I felt we were old hand at this, given two long distance moves under our belt with good credit and references to boot. Our only worry had been finding a place that felt like home. We each had different ideas of what that meant. For Buggah, it was modern appliances, a spacious sink and some style. For me, it was an outdoor area for a few plants, a gas stove, room enough for a desk and a chair that I could curl up in and read.

Don’t get me wrong, there are no shortage of apartments in San Diego. However, many are your typical complex-style places with wall-to-wall carpet, little or no light, and no personality whatsoever. Being an older city, there’s also a plethora of older homes—Victorians broken into studios and one-bedrooms, old factories converted into stunning, mixed-use buildings, and the occasional run-down apartments with beautiful trim and negligent landlords.

I fell in love with a few, particularly one with abundant light, hardwood floors and exposed brick. I loved feeling urban again, only blocks away from business districts with that young, hip charm and Balboa Park a click away. I began picking out paint colors, planning how we’d place the furniture. It is my obsession du jour. We filled out the applications. Onsite managers and current tenants loved us, once asking us for help in “selling” us as tenants to their bosses. But then the applications passed into the hands of property management companies to whom we were only names and numbers. One didn’t even check my credit and references because I don’t begin work until the end of the month.

“A real heartbreaker,” one manager told me. “They’ve decided to go with another tenant. I really tried, Alicia.”

When your world is so small, as mine is now, everything is monumental, melodramatic. We said, There goes our cool, urban living-thing. We’ll be stuck sponging off my sister for weeks and weeks more. I was so melancholy, only Happy Hour at TGIF could fix it.

But tomorrow is another day, right Scarlett? We widened the playing field. Complexes and carpet were game. We’ll give more expensive places a chance. We also learned from our previous failures. Steer clear of management companies. We want to know our landlords and allow our landlords to see we’re dependable young folk. Semantics matter. I’m not a grad student who will be teaching and tutoring. I’m an instructor and tutor at the university while completing my graduate studies. Then I prayed to the rental gods.

I read that once you stop resisting, you allow life to take it’s course, to lead the way for you. Wu wei, baby. We found two apartments we loved, and guess what? They’re in complexes with wall-to-wall carpet. They’re older, with great trim and gas stoves and landscaping. Tenants are long term and grow tomatoes and have set up grills on the grounds. One is a few blocks from Hillcrest, and the other only a block from North Park.

We’ve applied for the latter. Buggah is utterly in love, it is a two-bedroom for one-bedroom rent. I worried about how we’d fill the space, given the U-Haul wasn’t even full. But an extra room will allow me an office, Buggah a studio and enough space for the people we love (because you’re coming to visit us, even if you don’t know it yet).

We shook the landlord’s hand, and he called us this morning to tell us our previous landlord had great things to say about us. There’s one couple who has priority before us, but their application may not be complete, he said, and he’d like to give us the apartment. We’ll know tomorrow morning.

So cross your fingers for us. In the meantime, life’s not so bad. It’s wonderful to see my sister and nephew. I fixed my sewing machine and am dreaming of fabric. My sister and I are picking out seeds for the fall garden we’ll plant at her house and tonight Buggah and I will make them dinner. I may still be homeless, but I’m starting to feel at home.

hitch?

Finally, I’m on the mend from the move. I have shaved my legs and eaten a homemade meal. I plan on drinking green tea and eating broccoli for a week just to recover from all that Arby’s and pizza and potato chip munching in the hours and hours in the U-Haul cab.

Ask me and I’ll wax angrily about moving. How it’s the worst thing next to nuclear war and that going through your life in order to discard it is somehow perverse. Impalement seems minor versus having to clean the grime off of the top of the refrigerator. Note to self: contact paper, contact paper, contact paper.

When we left our apartment with our 10-foot U-Haul towing our little car, we thought we were on our way; the worst was over. It was 8 or so, we figured we’d get to San Diego by the end of the work day. We’d enjoy a bottle of wine, slip into my sister’s jacuzzi. Say “Welcome to San Diego,” as we toasted each other. “We are now Southern California residents!”

In L.A., however, the hitch “bolted” to the U-Haul truck decided it needed to be liberated from bondage. The right side fell onto the tarmac, screeching against the I-5. We pulled over and discovered that it was two measly bolts on the hitch’s left side that remained, the only thing that kept our car from reeling back into oncoming rush hour traffic. We both shudder to think about the danger this could have caused to ourselves, others, and our car.

The U-Haul folks were incredulous. The hitch? You mean the tow dolly? No, the hitch, we kept saying. Your hitch that you bolted on. For a company that touts itself to be the “No. 1 Mover” in America, I was galled at the inability of its staff to deal with the situation in an adequate and timely manner. Only five hours later did help arrive to unbolt the last screw on the hitch and take the tow dolley with them. We had to repeatedly call for updates, and got the run around. Beyond the 800-number I began calling local U-Haul contractors in L.A. I spoke to Dawn, who said he had yet to hear about our accident reported two hours before. The 800 guys called back, said We’re going to call Dawn. We just talked to Dawn, we said. And so it went. And so it went.

Our friends in L.A. were our saving grace. Only ten minutes away from the accident, they took us in sweaty and dirty and moody. They gave us wine and fed us. I would break into Stevie Wonder if I could. It was that good to see them.

We wearily arrived in San Diego around 1 a.m., slipped onto my sister’s fine mattress and slept and slept and slept. We began circling housing ads the next day together over coffee and tea. Our next place has to be good, because we’re not moving any time soon.

homeless

While making a collage some weeks ago, I had cut out an advertisement for homelessness featuring Jon Bon Jovi. “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” the copy read, also the name of a Bon Jovi song. It had appealed to me on the brink of moving. Of course I could go home, I told myself. Even a decade free from the rock, I still long for “home” with a sort of rose-colored sickness only felt by those who are still seeking. When I speak, I interchangeably use the word “home” to mean where-I’m-from and where-I-live.

I have written a lot about Hawaii and that’s what I thought about when the scissors sliced around the advertisement, but I think what I meant was a place-that’s-mine. Yes, I idealize nomad-hood, people who are so quick to come and go, whose belongings are few and their adventures vast. But in reality, I’m a creature of habit, there is nothing I love more than a couch I can read on, a bed that cradles me on hot summer days, and a kitchen where I’m queen. When I was in Hawaii, that’s what I longed for, my own piece of rented space (and earth) here in California.

When it came time to glue the collage together, my “Home” reminder had miraculously disappeared among scraps of paper. I even looked under the sofa. I guess I can’t go home, at least not to San Jose.

So, this is where we lived for three years. It is where I learned to garden, where I began to cook, where I rekindled my love affair with the sunshine after so many years out East, where I learned to love Buggah and myself with forgiveness. In San Jose, I allowed myself to heal against former trespasses, I opened myself to guidance and found it, to friendship and found it. I bought my first car, which we drove down to Santa Cruz and took silly photos in the boardwalk photo booth and Buggah shamelessly beat me at air hockey. I drank a lot of wine, around my kitchen table and in wine tasting rooms in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We drove up to the city for concerts and clam chowder and Ghiradelli’s. We walked Backesto Park a million times, we sang awful karaoke at 7 Bamboo.

Here, I was lucky. We were lucky. And we were grateful.

a gracious reprieve

I have written recently about memory, and now that I am moving, I feel as if I’m stockpiling details. It is always sad to see the haven you’ve created unravel: the bare walls, the belongings in boxes, the items sold and given away. This is not a passing moment; it’s a chapter closing. Who I was and became here in these three years will influence who I will be in all the years to come, and so on. Will it matter then, what pan I used to cook the pancakes? Will it matter if I don’t remember how big the shower was, or that I bought the outdoor deck lights for Buggah and I’s first dinner in our new home in our new city?

Today, I came across a photo of Buggah, taken five years ago in an attic. It was in those days that I began to realize we should share the rent and our lives. He had to stoop in that cavernous room. We kept each other warm during the winters, drank a lot of wine and huddled home up the creaky, bare stairs. There was a hornet’s nest under the Adirondack chair on the farmhouse porch, and the insects buzzed in through the broken screen in the summer.

We moved onto flooded basements, city apartments that overlooked rooftops, and now, a granny flat with a garden. Each home has represented something important to me, though they’ve all been different stages of maturity, I suppose. Love and courage, failure and disappointment, and faith. In that order.

While packing my desk, I came across a W.S. Merwin poem that I’ve lugged with me all these years, tattered and folded. I can’t manage to throw it away.

Have you seen my memory
minus the fancy words
have you looked in the cases
where I kept my mind

Then I took a break from work and packing, to read in the bare room. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is beautiful.

And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

not so sad

I am not so sad as it may seem in these non-kitchen posts. In fact, this morning I had a The Hours moment, a passing instance of satisfaction: I felt good about San Diego, my next apartment and the color I will paint it, the next phase of my life and all the books it will entail. I felt good about all the people in my life, bright moments in ordinary days. And I feel grateful that I have the time for so many moments I would have missed.

Emotions are such lonely endeavors, though I always feel the need to share them. Forgive me my introspection. Lets laugh together sometime, catch moments like butterflies.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness … and [she] is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize that it was happiness. . . . There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

-From Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, as printed in the New York Times

goodbye to all that

So I am officially unemployed. Friends and family have called to congratulate me, even my landlord approved of my decision and didn’t seem to worry about the rent. Only my grandmother protested, saying, “How are you going to pay your bills??” Someone has to be the pragmatist.

Nearly three years ago, during the first night over drinks with a new colleague, I had said the job was, more or less, my dream job. I wanted to get back in the trenches, I wanted to see ordinary people do extraordinary things. I wanted, in my small way, to contribute. I wanted to learn. I wasn’t fresh out of college, but green enough.

It was only the hours that wore on me. Nights and weekends became inescapable. Some weeks were emotionally wearing. Some nights I broke down in my car. Some days I took it out on Buggah.

Yet like any collective, grueling experience, a community formed among my colleagues and I. Unlike actors preparing for opening night, hell week was every week. We fell into a rhythm in the office, a cacophony of venting and teasing, laughter that got us scolded, and the sort of mutual respect among colleagues who depend on each other. We celebrated birthdays and births and holidays. Being new to San Jose, they were my friends; they championed me on my new path. I’m not sure I’ll be willing to work that hard again, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find a cubicle I liked as much.

At my last job in Washington, a co-worker gave me a box of chocolates and a card. It was a token of friendship, which we’ve carried on over the years and on two coasts. I was so touched by that gesture, and was equally affected by the kindness of my more recent departure. One colleague decorated our holiday tree with an Aloha theme, my boss made me a lei of tea bags and her typical sayings (my favorite: “You can’t write them all, Alicia”), a beautiful tote with Day of the Dead art, and a ring the reads “well-behaved women / rarely make history,” among others.

So we ate local food, and listened to live Hawaiian music. I love you like a mango … Drop baby, drop baby, drop, drop `cause I’m hungry. I like mangoes. I like songs about mangoes. And to make it even more local-Filipino-like, we sang karaoke in San Jose’s best dive. We drank whiskey, sang Prince (like it was 1999) and danced to Shakira (’cause my hips don’t lie). Life could be worse.

I slept in the next day. No work. No worries.

blog-o-rama

I love reading blogs and other random places in the web-universe that I visit to feed my obsessions. For example, I’ve never met her, but I like her insights about books. And this guy talks about writing, too. As I embark on my own writing journey, I learn that my MFA efforts may be indulgent. Regardless, I can still entice my creativity every week of the year.

There’s a lot more titillating food porn in the blog world, too. For example, there’s the local newspaper’s award-winning food section, or this sleek-design site of a San Francisco foodie. It made me want to buy her book, and check out her other mighty endeavor. Further north, there’s more recipe goodness. Then, there’s everything you need to know about walking the wok. When it’s time for pretty pictures and desserts, this has got me smitten. Then there’s a woman after my own heart, a spam aficionado.

A few friends have started blogs, too, a personal history of sorts, and I’m thrilled. We can record life as we live it. We can get lost in the vastness of outer-web-space, but the words are there and they matter, somehow.

If you’ve got too many to keep up with, I find trusty Bloglines does the trick.

the closing door

At work, I’ve been the farewell party planner. I’m note sure why. Perhaps it was always just easy to be the one to send out the invite and to call the restaurant. So many people have left, we’ve had goodbye burnout. No more karaoke. No more cards to sign.

But this time it’s my turn. One more week and then I’m free. I’m finding it bittersweet, overwhelming. What becomes of a worker bee that’s no longer working? What becomes of a writer no longer on the payroll to bang her head against the screen?

So here I am, at the crossroads of this great transition. Back to Hawaii, back to school, back to not working all the time. I imagine there will be hours I will not know what to do with myself, and there will be hours that I am grateful for. I’ll chronicle them here, from my obsessions in the garden and kitchen, to my woes at writing and being poor again. May following my heart lead me somewhere. May one door close to open another.