love, hate, glowing Santas, and the rurburbs
Just under a month ago I moved in with my mom. Yes, I admit it. Me, a grown adult who owns my very own sectional sofa and enough tupperware to accommodate a small family of four ... I moved in with my mom. I downsized from a two bedroom spacious apartment five minutes from work to a room filled with a bed and not much else, twenty minutes from work. Sounds pretty nonsensical, doesn't it? Why in the world would I move from a great apartment to a small bedroom from which I must emerge 40 minutes earlier in the morning so that I can share kitchen time with my mom and still make it out the door in time for my drive in to the city?Well, (since you asked) I'll tell you why. Because I'm a grown adult who owns my very own sectional sofa and enough tupperware to accommodate a small family of four ... and I have the bills to prove it. And also because I'm a grown adult who is planning a semi-big location and/or career change sometime soon, and I need to save some money so that I can actually follow through with my plans.
Don't get me wrong, things with mom aren't bad. I don't feel like moving back home has caused me to regress from my 27 years of living in this crazy world. In some ways, it's a relief to know that I don't have to worry about life being quite so cool anymore. This probably won't make much sense, but my apartment before was just so great and I loved it so much that I almost felt guilty about it. I felt a little prideful, because I was just so content in my apartment with all my stuff. So, sure, the move has been a big transition ... but it's a good transition. I feel like I'm returning to my roots or something deep like that. Like I am sloughing off all the stupid layers of independence and self-importance and being reminded of the person I never really was, and the person I want to be. A person just traveling light through this world, carrying as little as I need to get by. And I like it.
In the next few months I may make another move ... it all depends on if a certain job is offered to me. If it is, I look forward to moving with less junk holding me down -- less to pack, less to unpack, and less to hold and stare at as I ponder if I will ever really need it, or if I can safely toss it out and not feel any regret.
By now you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with love, hate, glowing Santas, or the rurburbs (whatever those are). Well, I guess I didn't go into too much detail on the neighborhood in which my mom lives. It's a rural suburban area -- I coined a name the other day, and this is the first time I'm sharing it with anyone ... I live in the rurburbs. Sort of like a rural area, in that there are cows and yards with barns ... but also like the suburbs, where the houses all tend to look the same and people actually turn and look when a muffler-less car is driving down the street (a familiar, almost comforting sound in the city). This is not really an area in which I would ever choose to live. I feel like these people just need to decide if they want the country of if they want the safe conformity of the suburbs. Make a decision already. You can't park your rusty pickup truck next to your shiny new red Beetle and expect it to be accepted without someone kicking up a fuss. And I'm the one kicking up the fuss.
When I walk my dogs in the morning on the streets near my mom's house, I feel like all the good suburban housewives are looking at me with my big baggy sweat pants and my hiking boots and my hair that's still a little messy from just having gotten out of bed, and they can see through it all. They know I'm from the city and that I hate their little glowing Santas that populate their front yards. They know I laugh at the way the people in the neighborhood almost seem to coordinate which blinking lights they will hang on which part of their house and what color bulbs they will use this year. To some, this may be just a normal part of suburban life ... to me, it's a spectacle of the unoriginality of people.
Maybe it's not as big of a deal as I'm making it. After all, there are nice things about living out where I am now. When I take my dogs for our late-night walks at midnight or later, I don't have to worry about running into some dangerous criminal walking the streets ... because there's NO ONE walking the streets. All of the houses are dark, and the only sounds I hear are the clicking of my dogs' nails on the clean asphalt streets. I can walk down the middle of the busiest one lane road and not worry about getting hit by a car. It's a little eerie, but it's a nice kind of eerie, I guess. I wouldn't really say I love this feature, but I do like it a lot (so I guess the title of this post should really be "like, hate, glowing Santas, and the rurburbs", but I'm not changing it now).
Quite the profound post today -- sorry about that. I just feel like I have been inundated lately with reindeer with nodding heads and giant snowmen tipping their hats at me as I stumble by with my dogs and grumble about the sadness of it all. And I know that those reindeer and snowmen will soon be gone, and maybe I'll even lament their absence ... but for now I'm stuck in the rurburbs with glowing Santas and quiet streets.
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