I thought I would like this place better if transportation wasn't an issue. It's not an issue anymore and I don't enjoy this area more than before.
I want you to close your eyes and imagine a place that's unfriendly, crowded and expensive. Now if what I just described sounds a lot like any large city, then please, add on the insane sameness of 1950s suburbs coupled with identical looking steel and glass apartment buildings all with the same population of young professionals sporting perfectly made up faces and pencil skirts or pantsuits on the weekday and jogging clothes on the weekend. Add the traffic of the city to these suburbs and you have where I'm living.
Some days are better than others. Some days I can crawl out of bed without having been woken up by heavy stomping and loud creaking of my fat upstairs neighbors and take a pleasant stroll to work, enjoying the fresh air and occasional honks from men driving beatup, fifteen year old vehicles. Some days I can enjoy the bike paths that wind their way into DC and the glorious selection of Thai eateries and that I can get a shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables delivered to my door every week.
Other days, my only haven is this block of an office on the 7th floor with one large window spaning from one side to the other, one half of the office painted bright orange, the other a subdued cool gray. These days I don't mind that I can see my stubbly legs through the glass top of the desk (mostly because I mistake them for goosebumps). These days, I take comfort in the infinite supply of hot cocoa and an infinitely more empty mug sitting in front of me.
It's these days that I wonder if this haven of work is worth my unhappiness outside the office. I wonder why I hated Baltimore so much and why I love it now. Is it the familiarity of a place that I've lived before? Would I hate it if I moved back there again? If I moved here, would I still hate it? Is there anyplace besides the slightly rural town close to two major cities that I'll like as much? Is there anyplace I can call home?
To pass the time, sometimes search the online real estate or rentals. I try to imagine what my life would be like if I could afford a 3 mil loft in downtown Arlington, and then I remember that if I made enough money to afford that, I probably wouldn't be living here. Then I like to imagine what my life would be life in a different city. I'd move to Durham, rent a cute 2 bedroom bungalow for as much as I'm paying for rent now, bike downtown to my job at a cool web design firm, pick up scones from the bakery down the street and cringe whenever someone mentions how awesome Duke is. Or maybe I wait for someone to come back and pick me up out of this dense suburban jungle and take me back to live in my grandmothers house where I'll work out of my grandfather's old office and try my luck at acquiring a green thumb.
And then, once I'm gone, a year or so later I'll be lamenting about the lack of bike paths and thai food and being able to walk to work.
This mixed bag of adventures has placed into a man I could have wrapped around my finger just by opening my mouth. There's a certain charm to knowing that if I tried, I could have just about any man that I wanted. And somehow, I hardly ever care. I am almost twenty three years old. Shouldn't I care more about the way my hair falls in the morning, and how many calls have shown up on my missed list? My mother wants me set up, and I feel like she's relating her own experiences of meeting the person she would marry (my father, of course) around the age that I am now.
I remember long ago that she once told me that twenty three was the happiest year of her life. Even if that thought has changed in the years since, at one point in time, she considered my soon to be age her happiest. It's obvious she wishes the same for me, but I'm not interested. My time will be spent blundering over the falls and laughing when I get bruised. (Yes, apparently I'm a masochist).
Even after going on a few dates, closing the door to my room and cutting out all the noise and the heavy current of the city awakens me more than the prospect of a man. I certainly would have a difficult time living in any non-modern era.
I'm slowly sinking in.
And I have a feeling that when I look back on my time spent in this dense urban surburbia, it will mirror how I felt about my time spent in Baltimore. Nostalgia is always better in hindsight.
The trapped feeling I held onto for eight months has slipped away and I'm taking advantage of the freedom of having four wheels instead of two feet with the slight twinge of polluting the environment. (Although, buses running off-peak emit more than cars.) Shirlington is still only a bike ride away, and Del Ray as well, a ride I'd always be happy to take, but now my circle of living space has expanded into DC. The possibilities of having an actual city within reach means that my own experiences can be endless.
It's the end of the summer and those few months adding up to a year are closing in. I will have been here a year at the end of October and I know I'm getting restless. The energy spent acquiring a job, dropping a life, moving two and a half hours away was both tough and exhilarating. Shortly thereafter, the doldrums of life set in, and no matter how much I try to shake my life up, there's only so much I can do without shaking everything out. The unrelenting apathy of adulthood was something I was never expecting. And here it is.
I've been having odd sleeping schedules recently. I can go a few days of midnight to seven-thirty (ok, it's probably eight), one or two in the morning until eight, and then one day when I'll feel some sort of exhaustion and lie down at 7:30. And when I have enough time to dream, I've been dreaming about him. He's always someone different, but with that same spark that I loved so deeply. The only person I've loved, and the only person that has encouraged me to be ever more than I am. There's something odd about the way I last talked to him, how I knew that if I saw him I would know that instant that any affection I had for Will was false, that I was living some life just because it was the thing to do, it was comfortable, I liked him, we got along. But beyond that, there wasn't anything there. We were friends, really good, exclusive friends, but we didn't have that thing that Tim and I had.
Nothing I'm doing now is all that comfortable, besides designing. And I'm caught wondering if I'm dreaming about him because I'm lonely or because there was something there that I left behind.
When I left my parent's house, I was alone and the house was quiet, but at the same time, it wasn't. It was like the place was calling me, closing around me, beckoning me back home. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, if your home suddenly isn't your home anymore, would you ever find a new place to call home? Would there ever be a place where I could feel comfortable again?
It seems that once you step foot outside of the county line, all hope for bikes and pedestrians are lost. Arlington county puts focus on walkable and bike-able areas since it is more of an urban setting and even has two websites: WalkArlington and BikeArlington. All of the converted trails, dedicated bike lanes and sharrows make biking around for errands, transport and fun a lot more convenient. There are still a few areas that could use work, specifically some parts of the Columbia Pike area, which hopefully the county will begin to address as they make improvements to the area. Overall, however, rides around Arlington County are pretty damned easy.
Which is why I hardly ever venture outside the county line on my bike, save for when I bike to work, except to visit Alexandria on the east side of 395. It makes doing errands a bit difficult. Take, for example, a simple drive to Trader Joes, located merely two or three miles away from where I work and live. In theory, the location is more convenient than where I previously lived in Baltimore where the nearest one was fifteen minutes by car, or in Elkton where it was over thirty minutes away. You'd think I'd be there all the time given the proximity, but when considering my mode of transportation, that isn't always the case.
Living at the intersection between two major roads, Rt 7 and Columbia Pike, Trader Joes is difficult to get to on foot or bike. I tend to avoid these types of roads, highways with strip malls up and down the lengths, speed limits topping 50 mph and in some cases, four lanes on each side with no bike paths. In fact, Google maps lists the bike path near Trader Joes on Columbia Pike as being on the sidewalk. As a somewhat experienced biker, I have a rightful apprehension about biking on such busy roads and on the sidewalks.
In addition to these problems, the intersection of these two roads is built as an over/under pass and clover leaf combination, a type of crossing that only really benefits those in cars, but effectively cuts off free foot and bike traffic. The amount of space clover leafs take up is astounding. As a partly urban area, I'd expect these areas to be a loss in possible real estate. And with more and more people giving up their cars and turning to bikes and public transportation, I'm surprised to see blocks like these still existing without and alternatives.
Overall, it's apparent that we still very much live in a car-centric society, even in a metropolitan area. Catering to more and more cars obviously isn't the answer, as building more roads does little to ease congestion. However, we're stuck with it for now. I can just hope that lawmakers will be a bit more open-minded in the future when these sorts of areas come into consideration. More people want to be able to walk around their community. They want to be able to walk to the grocery store, to walk to their favorite spots, to take their kids out with them and to have safe and accessible ways to do this.
I don't think anyone ever really knows how to come to terms with death. I've been listening at lot to Blue Spotted Tail off the new Fleet Foxes album, with that ringing line "Why is life made only for to end? / Why must I do all this waiting then?" Indeed, why must I? I constantly thought of my life as a waiting game throughout school, waiting for the next year to end, waiting to graduate, waiting for more freedom, waiting for my life to start and here it comes slipping past, the fleeting enigma.
I try to keep telling myself that somehow, everything is eternal. Even in the laws of science, one thing changes into another and nothing is truly gone forever. However, I'm not sure what comfort all of that is. My grandfather devoted his life to science. As an engineer, there were far too many books on his bookshelf that passed right over my head. Everything from nuclear physics to electronics, even some books in Russian. All these things that made him so much more intelligent than the rest of us. I don't think I ever really knew how much he knew until I scoured those bookshelves. He could fix anything. If some sort of electronic broke, you would take it to him and he'd tinker with it for a while and magically it would be new again.
Naturally, I took his camera, and as I sat in the glass house, you could feel some sort of spark from that place was gone. Every time I think of him, I imagine peering around the door into his office and having him be there. But he's not. All that's there now is an empty chair and the remnants of a long life lived.
As I was driving to the hospice, the last time I saw him, I felt overwhelmed with such pain. Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as it did then, leaping out of my chest as it boiled up threatening to burst from within me. I knew that if I did not go to see him as I passed through Baltimore, I'd regret it, knowing that he'd be gone sooner than all of us were ready. In just two months, the golf-balled sized tumor in his brain swallowed him, and now he's gone. Somewhere, I can only pray, and I do. I pray for him every day and I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if there is something to all of this, but I have to hope that there is. Why is life made only for to end? There just has to be something more.
The day I got into my first car accident (which I will fully admit was my fault because I am an upstanding citizen of truth and honor) was also the day that I found out my Grandfather had a brain tumor. Almost unexpectedly, I had gone from a family never touched by cancer to a family right in the middle of it. It felt as sudden and damaging as my car accident, like this disease had seeped into the crevasses of my life too, infecting my daily motions with the anxiety and carelessness that came along with it.
My long-term college boyfriend had two grandparents die in the time I spent with him. Within the span of about a year, two of his mentors and heads of the family were gone, and there he was five hundred miles away at school, not able to cherish the time he had left with them. (Instead it was a heavy course-load and school counselors). His words of his grandfather still echo in my head, especially now: "No more snow shovels." A simple act, one which his grandfather enjoyed, he would not be able to enjoy any longer as he knew he would not be around to do such a thing come the winter.
My own grandfather's 'snow shoveling' would definitely have to be the cultivation of hot peppers. When my family and I visited him the Sunday after, my grandmother made a remark that brought this back in my mind: "But who's going to take care of all those peppers?" He usually grew a whole big flat of seedlings in the spring, an familiarity that's very absent now. In the late summer, there would be so many hot peppers he'd be stinking up the whole house making his sauce (of which you would only need a small coating of a pinky to set your mouth on fire). There's a picture of my uncle standing behind his kitchen counter, the whole thing pilled high with peppers of various kinds and colors, a sight which will now be much more muted.
The strength of a person is defined by their ability to react in a composed manner in times of distress. After time, we all find a way to cope.
I can smell that someone's cooking up a batch of hotdoggies on my walk home from work. Not that I'd be able to tell where it's coming from in a canyon of seventeen-story apartment buildings, but the smell immediately conjures up imaginary memories of my mother and her sisters giggling like the school-girls they, well, were.
A weenie roast.
I'm constantly battered by the (false) thought that my life would be insanely better if I had a balcony. Or that all of my problems would suddenly disappeared if I lived in a house. Grandmothers would invite me over for barbecues where I could kiss the cheeks of neighbors babies and lounge in tiny plastic furniture sipping a chilled alcoholic beverage while shifting my chair every fifteen minutes as the sun cut across the sky.
I don't really know my neighbors. Maybe it's because the only time I venture outside my door is when I run out of non-cheap, slightly local beer and Trader Joe's Tuscan Panne and, of course, on my daily walk to work and back. But I don't really run into my neighbors either.
This is the first time I've ever been in a situation where I could actually become a hermit and do just fine sitting alone reading my monthly subscription to 'Hermiting Made Simple'. It's the first time I've ever been tossed into the next step of life and not forcibly thrown into a group where we see who can come up with the best lies to icebreakers that'll make us seem more interesting, intelligent and fulfilled. Honestly, I kind of miss it. Working at making friends from nothing is quite difficult.
There's no handbook on how to make yourself seem more 'approachable' or 'full of life' or just full of empty adjectives. There's nothing that tells you where the somewhat awkwardly average people go to have fun without getting hit on by creepy dudes ten years older with suspicious accents.
How do you get a bunch of people all doing the commuting > work > commuting > dinner > netflix > sleep + a bit of introversion (maybe more than a bit) to find each other? I'll let you know when I find out, but I'll be damned if I'm going to miss a barbecue.
It struck me as odd last night on my walk home from work as to why we all build up great amounts of stress over events, people, things we really can't control. The traffic, which will forever be condensed like a pack of sardines unless you're swimming upstream at midnight. Or how we spend our time, always inevitably late to everything. And a personal favorite for me, immediately getting that tense sensation in my shoulders as my car carries me over that hill, right before I set eyes on my apartment building: whether or not I can park my car somewhere.
You see, she's a beauty. She really is. So I hate to take her out on these roads resembling old, grumbly men, arguing over who gets the business section of the post while failing to realize that they're both growing holes. They'll tear her up, no doubt. I hate to take her out in the snow because she's a bit fickle as well. Doesn't like the wintry mix beneath her tires. So I take it upon myself to slip around and get a meager amount of exercise walking to and from work most days. Partly so I don't have to drive in the snow and mostly so I don't have to worry about where I'm going to park her.
Yet, on those days when I do leave her be to sleep while I trudge along, I end up worrying more about the other drivers. Yes, the ones that will potentially hit me, not unlike last night on my walk back from work.
You see, yesterday I wrongly assumed that since the tea-leaf readers we call meteorologists said it would be close to fifty degrees outside, that would mean that it would be warm enough to wear a light coat. Yet, invariably, every time I set foot outside the back door of my modest nine-story office building, it always seems to be colder than I wished, and certainly colder than in the morning. And as I stood shivering at the corner of the intersection, watching the traffic lights to see when it was my turn (because, of course, the dimwitted county decided to install pedestrian indicators only on one side of the street), I heard a honking.
It was coming from the direction I was headed, a right turn lane, one whose traffic would have to yield to me as I crossed. A bus sat idling in the lane, obviously waiting for its turn as two lanes of turning traffic delayed the continuation of its journey. So when the light finally changed and I half walked, half trotted across the highway, the bus having gone before me, I came very close to two cars nearly running me down.
I suppose it would have been my fault if there had not been a sign for that right line clearly indicating that not yielding to pedestrians would result in a fine. However, the rage and anxiousness of these drivers had prevented them from seeing this sign, and ultimately, seeing me until I was right in front of them.
I uttered an "Umm…?", raising my eyebrows in disappointment and half amazement as the car slammed on it's break, and then sighing, I said "thank you…" not really in thanks that they hadn't tumbled over me, but more that they should've known better.
And I wasn't the only one crossing the street at that moment, although I did happen to be the first and did receive the superlative for most likely to become a pancake. But what irks me the most is that it'll take the same amount of time to reach a destination if the driver is calm or if they are annoyed, anxious, pissed-off, or angry. Adding that extra stress doesn't help in the least, but makes situations much more worse. Mythbusters even proved that you waste more gas when you're angry or annoyed than when you're calm. So why not take an extra moment to calm down a bit, keep your eyes on the road and let the chips fall where they may (and preferably not the people).
I've been thinking a lot about Fight Club recently. Ever since my trip to the giant behemoth of swedish interiors, I've been thinking about it. Little neat rows of picture frames of various sizes. Built in bookshelves painted bright blue and white. Having a roommate that nags you about buying things doesn't necessarily help. But really, all I started with was a hand-me-down bed and a chair my mother and grandfather built me. The first things I put in my new room were pictures on nails already in the walls.
But sometimes, in between browsing craigslist for cheap deals on gently used furniture and thinking about ikea hacks, I wonder if my ikea catalogue is going to drift into the bathroom and we're going to pan around the apartment. Two 4x4 Expedit bookshelves converted into wine storage, $39.99 each. Etc, etc. So that when I walk home and crash through the door, I will think to myself: "At least I have that couch. If anything happens then at least I have it."
When I was in college, the meaning of life was to graduate with a degree in something (anything, my mother told me) and find a job where I would work from eight to five every day, come home to my dog/cat/computer and make some delicious dinner while hiding myself behind the thick door of my apartment occasionally venturing out for food (groceries, beer, the unfrequent takeout). At least if anything happened, I'd have that degree and some job experience.
It's nice to have goals, but I think after a while, a goal of decorating your apartment gets superficial. There's only so much space that things can fill in a non-physical way. Some people try to fill that space with something spiritual, some people fill it with a dog or a cat. But really, I think it's more about filling that space with meaningful people and creating something ingenious. Without people to share your joys, life is much less... alive.
As a 20-something, I must admit, there's something that's been really bothering me. People are complaining about something so plan and obviously makes logical sense to me. Obviously, I don't share the same hatred for this object as most people my age.
I know, I hate to admit it and I don't know how to do so without sounding all haute and pretentious, but here it is: I caved and ordered a duvet cover.
No really, it wasn't much of a caving move but more of a, logical assumption of 'Who would ever want to sleep underneath a down comforter that gets all dirty after a while?'. Eww, gross yellowish tinges to white down fluffy comforters of bliss is a huge turn off. Who want's to clean their down comforter all the time when it hardly fits in a washing machine and clearly comes with a label that says something about only putting in commercial washers. (Not that anyone knows what that means. What's the difference between a regular washer and a commercial one?)
Anyway, of course it makes more sense to simply take off the cover and toss it in the wash with some of your dirty clothes. Maybe that's why it's so 'grown up'. (Although really, after what you did last weekend, wouldn't you want to wash your sheets?)
So my grandmother plops down on the grass with her arms stretched out wide, surrounded by rows of gravestones and says, "This is it."
Is that it?
Somehow, you figure that someone would notice what an incredible leap it is from your daily activity being 6 +/- hours in a classroom setting to 8 +/- hours in a workplace setting. But really, this leap is simple. It's from one desk to another, bigger one where you may or may not do things you are interested in. Honestly, work was pretty much what I expected it to be. Do some things that may or may not make sense with those talents that a liberal arts degree did not help me with at all, make some money while cringing at the tiny amount that shows up in a small bank account where more than half of it goes to cover expenses.
Somehow, I'm ok with being pretty much normal. Maybe that's because unlike the majority of my friends, I actually have a salaried job under a year out of college. (Only one other friend can say the same.) Maybe it's because I decided what I liked to do and actually make a career out of it (web design), while the majority of my friends are still in the midst of an identity-crisis and are racking up more debt by going to graduate school for something they may or may not be interested in.
Instead of the leap between school and work that's a difficult adjustment, it's a social leap and a question of 'What now?'. In the proverbial checklist of life I've already gotten to tick off high school diploma, college degree, landed my first job, and moved to a big city. But after that, things on the list become a little muddled, like someone went to the bar and used it as a napkin/coaster and that middle part before 'find someone you actually want to marry and not simply because you want to get married' gets distorted both through the fog of one too many drinks and as a casualty of condensation (no, I'm lying, it's actually just a bit of spilled, sticky vodka and something). Not that I've actually been to a bar and had a vodka and something in quite some time.
In one way, the years before college graduation were easy in terms of life goals. There were set out guidelines. College graduation had a date that was set and you either made it with most of the class or your didn't and spent a bit of time catching up. Except that now, no one sets far off dates for you. No one makes it clear what's next. Instead, you're left in a bit of a strange place. Somewhat comfortably thinking about how you should probably start that IRA next month and wondering 'what next?'
And all this time, through having my first adult roommate and making my first purchase from Ikea, I can't help but think of Fight Club. Where is the substance when you're living in a strip-mall city?
"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."