Sticky

You're right: I should have updated sooner. I mean, it's not like I'm actually doing much in Houston. I go to work, and then most of my evenings are kind of spent bumming around. I'll get dinner once or twice a week, go to the gym, but there's been plenty of time to update.

I'm glad I didn't, though. I wouldn't have wanted to be hasty about anything I wrote, hasty about assumptions or susceptible to falling into moods that might pass.

I've been down in Houston for about six weeks now, and the humidity is already warning me that I'm going to be a greasy, sweaty mess for at least half the year as long as I live here. Memories of three years in Florida, including my first two years of high school, swim in the back of my mind when I wake up and it's sort of mildly cloudy and damp. Tonight I came back from the gym and found a mosquito sitting on the outside wall of my apartment; thankfully, it wasn't nearly as big as the mosquitoes in Alabama, that sticky place I spent my senior year of high school.

Tonight I also finally started hanging pictures on my wall. It's to make my little apartment feel more like home and less a place I happen to sleep when I'm at work, ticking away hours between trips to Fort Worth.

I left Fort Worth after four years, the longest I've ever consecutively lived anywhere. The city was good to me—it gave me an education in college, when I was there for school but left at every chance to go home and be with Topper. It gave me a job, a career start, a place to let Topper live with the pony, an epicenter where my friends and eventually family would be. It gave me the love of my life (Dutch's burger, in case you were wondering . . . oh, and my guy, too). It gave me a place to really work on growing up.

The most peculiar thing about this move is that I'm going back. I've written before about how going back to places I've once lived is an extremely rare opportunity, which makes me often feel like my past is imaginary. I'm going back to Fort Worth frequently on weekends—my family, my friends, my soulmate (Topper) and the love of my life are all there. It's four hours up the road. I have a car, I have cash, I can return.

And it's almost as strange as never returning.

Every time I'm driving north on the highway that leads toward downtown Fort Worth, I have to check my mental state. Am I happy? Am I relaxed? Am I unnerved? Do I realize I don't live here any more? It doesn't matter that I'm not gone long enough to miss much, that I read the newspapers every day and most of my life is still there: I am not there. Not really. I am just a visitor.

I really like most of what I've seen of Houston so far. I'll delve more into my work, my neighborhood, all that stuff in the future, but I still haven't realized it's home. Maybe I'll somehow keep deluding myself that Fort Worth is still home, or maybe it's that place that I'll call home from now on. People will ask, Where are you from? and I'll answer, Fort Worth. Right now, I just say, I moved from Fort Worth. I don't claim it yet. But it looks like maybe I can, maybe I will.

It's hard to tell.

First Of The Last

Tomorrow is my last day at work.

This is, I guess, my first grown-up job, which doesn't include having back-up income from student loans or nannying or something like that. My freelancing when I first got out of grad school was pretty fun, except for the whole barely-able-to-pay-rent-why-does-the-daily-only-pay-once-a-month-this-is-bullshit part, and when I quit that I basically called the metro editor and told him I got an offer of a full-time job. He told me I should take it. I told him I had.

So tomorrow, really, is the first of what I'm sure will be many (hopefully not too many) last days of work. I've already turned in all my stories, already contacted all my favorite PR people to tell them how much they've helped me over the years and how I only know like three phone numbers by heart (one is Dan, two others are PR people), and so if I end up in a car accident and they can't find my phone and they need an emergency contact and Dan's not around, I'm calling them. Tomorrow I'm basically going in to finalize a list of contacts and story ideas for my editors and to pick up items and drink beer.

I'm still processing this whole thing, the whole "holy shit, I'm moving to Houston" thing, but I'm feeling calm now. My work here will be done. I'll have a week off. I'll go with Dan to the North American Handmade Bike Show the weekend before my first day, and then I'll be going back and forth until I can move everything with the much, much-appreciated help of my parents. I went down over the weekend and found an apartment, and I'll be signing the lease and getting keys and paying for a place that includes all bills, and you know what that means in Texas: I can crank my AC down to 62 in the summer and not have to pay extra. Bonus points for also being able to not feel the guilt for slowly killing the planet one fake Fahrenheit at a time, since I won't have to pay more for it.

Today I cut out of work an hour early and checked in on a fossil site near the office, since it hadn't rained in a while and I figured the creek bed would be nearly dry. I wandered around picking up sea urchins and snail shells for an hour and a half, because clearly I need more rocks before I move halfway across the state. I just realized yesterday that I could perhaps find more recently deceased (or live) sea urchins or snails near my new home, since Galveston will be nearby. I've often been close to the shore -- D.C., Boston, Florida's Fort Walton Beach -- but it will just be so different after living in Cowtown for four years, which is Texas prairie.

I guess I mean that to say that yes, it's all going to be a big change. But some things don't change. It will still be Texas, and one thing I've learned about this state is that it does have the power to continually surprise me. I look forward to the next surprises, and I'm crossing my fingers for lots of pleasant ones.

Remember That Time?

Remember when I said I was going to do the NPR Three-Minute Fiction contest? Well, I did write it, actually. I just forgot to send it in. It was a bit of a whirlwind weekend--it's been a bit of a whirlwind several weeks, actually, but more on that in a moment--and so it completely slipped my mind to send it in. You probably don't believe me when I said I did finish it in time, but it is 599 words (one under the 600-word limit!) and I posted it on my other site, Journalism's Dark Secret, for all you who are not creepers and who are actually friends. Yeah, it's totally randomly thrown in, and if you read preceding posts, it makes ZERO sense, since that's where I put Nanowrimo stuff, but just go with it. Right? Right.

Right: So I took a new job and I'll be moving to Houston in like two weeks. I'm trying not to think about it, because denial is a pleasant state right now, since I have no place to live down there and I know three people in the whole damn city (and work with one, so that's nice) and my room here in Fort Worth is such a damn fucking disaster that the thought of packing makes me feel slightly hive-y.

I've been in Fort Worth as an adult (read: post grad school) for four years now, and I feel good about the change. On the other hand, I feel sad and miserable and terrified. Dan will start looking for a position down there, but he'll be up here, and we'll be doing that whole long-distance thing while trying to finish planning a wedding. (We have it all planned. We just . . . well, we haven't actually executed most of it. We're working on it.)

The horses will stay up here and will probably be moving down at a later date, once I find an apartment and get some paychecks and all that good stuff. They're at an excellent full-board barn, so they'll be looked after nicely, but still--moving Topper is always an experience, and I mean "experience" the same way people say someone is "interesting," which is never in a good way.

So many of my friends are here in Fort Worth, as are my parents and sister and Dan's parents and a few siblings (after one comes back from Stanford and discounting another who is in the Army). My Horned Frogs and TCU are here. My favorite burgers and pizza are here. My favorite seafood is still outside DC or on the Emerald Coast, but I've learned to live with these challenges.

Growing up moving around a lot, I got fairly adept at getting shit to happen, making living situations work and moving on. I expect it will take a bit longer now to make friends and settle in--I'm really looking forward to working with everyone at the new place (more info to come), but I also think I'll be on the younger side again, so may not be in the same stage of hanging-out-abilities as coworkers, so that might mean it's slower to make friends. How do you make friends as an adult? Through friends of friends is mostly what I've seen. However, only knowing a few people in Houston, I don't know how well that will work out there. We'll see.

Anyway, I'm excited. This will be good. Don't expect any updates soon, but if I am updating, leave me a comment telling me to shut to fuck up and GO PACK. Because seriously, this place is a disaster.