It's u-Haul season in my neighborhood. Orange and white trucks and trailers are parked everywhere. Some with the words PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND painted on them, and then a map so we dumb Americans can figure out where the hell Price Edward Island is (somewhere between Maine and the Arctic Circle). Others proclaim that Florida is THE MANATEE STATE. And there's one with a giant nasty spider on it that might have words, but I'm too grossed out to look at long enough to read.
Last Friday I would have seen fewer beds in a mattress store. Friday was the BIG move in day for the college students and they've been trickling in ever since. But my apartments offer the option of furnished units if you're willing to pay more and you don't really care that most of the furniture belonged to someone else. Apparently the last thing to be delivered into these furnished units was the bed. A parade of three guys, hired to life and tote for the day, walking from the club house with full mattresses held over their heads/backs trotted past my window again and again. The frames they delivered with a truck.
In all of this, I continue to write, to work on cleaning and organizing my apartment to (a) make it my own little haven, (b) make me feel proud of my space, (c) benefit my mental health. Every so often I dread moving even though I have a lease for the next 12 months. I hate moving when you've just gotten things they way you've wanted them. However the water quality here is for shit. There's so much sediment in the water that my dishwasher is coated with orange, my shower curtain is tinted the same shade, and my Brita pitcher dies every month instead of every two months like it's supposed to. But hey, at least it's a cute apartment.
I've been doing a lot of who am I? what do I want? thinking the past month or two. I've come up with some answers that surprised myself. Some were a long time coming, some weren't. I then got around to the question of so if that's me, how do I want to present myself? is that how I've been presenting myself?
Take this blog, for example. A couple years ago, I recrafted my identity to be all about being a grad student in a writing program. I really wanted to be literary back then. Now I'm much more concerned with being an interesting person/writer than being let into the "literary writers" club. Oh, I'll keep writing, but I'm much more concerned with being interesting than being literary.
I also redid my bio on the side bar and I'm about to redo my bio on the About page. It was all about where I went to school and what I did that added clout to my literaryness. Yawn. Then I read the big fat Bio-writing lie (via). Now it is much more entertaining.
And then the cat who had been sleeping on my desk rolled over and would have fallen to the ground if not for the fact that she reached out her claws into my conveniently placed thigh. Guess that's as good a sign as any that I should end the post.
