That time that I was 24...

If I were to go back and edit my old MySpace blog entries to make them more, er, better, then many of them would read like what's below. Polished for a project that didn't wind up going anywhere, here's a little perspective on where I was eight years ago.

[Adapted from] MySpace, 2006

Shortly before I landed my current job, I got a call from a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Pittsburgh. She was thinking about moving to Boston after she graduated and wondered if I’d be up for coming with her.

In the absence of both long-term plans and ambition of any sort, I agreed, and when I accepted this job, I told [my boss] there was a good chance I would be leaving in six months. Because I was moving to Boston.

Well, in the way that things sometimes do, that thing didn’t happen. No one moved to Boston. But in those first few months on the job, when Boston still seemed a possibility, I didn’t figure it was worth my time or my money to seek out a short-term rental situation, and thus it was that I was living with my parents.

My parents and I get along extremely well. My brother is home from college during holidays and some weekends, and though really and truly we are an astonishingly stable, loving, and functional group of people considering how related we are to each other, when the six-month deadline rolled by, there wasn’t an occupant of that house who wasn’t thinking that it might be time for me to venture out on my own.

Shortly thereafter, my mom was at a party at an old friend’s house and the friend happened to live a seven-minute drive from my office and had a one-bedroom guesthouse for rent. It was furnished; cable, internet, and utilities were included; and it was all month-to-month, giving me the much-needed illusion that I would be free to pack up and leave at any point if I found someplace better to be. (It doesn’t matter that I don’t currently have anyplace better to be…only that if I did, hypothetically, sometime in the future, that I could go there without having anything holding me back. This fits my non-committal tendencies quite well.)

Eight years later, still in my kitchen.

And as of today, it is my new home.

Yes, I (at long last) moved over the weekend.

Because I’m emotionally twelve years old, my biggest priority at the moment is figuring out the poster arrangement in the living room and bedroom. To a certain degree, this requires buying new posters to reflect my current pop culture tastes. Can I really live out my day-to-day life in my first all-to-myself living situation and not have a huge Brokeback Mountain poster somewhere in plain sight? No. And I'm saddened that anyone would think that I could.

I do, however, have a large blink -182 poster hanging in the kitchen already. And I think one of my goals in life should be to always have blink-182 in my kitchen, wherever I go. Because why not?

I still have a lot to do before I’m settled, though. Yesterday I took a break from the physically draining task of unpacking and went to see The Last Kiss*, because when in the midst of a major life event (is moving ever not emotionally exhausting?), seeing Zach Braff go through a quarter-life crisis seemed the perfect move.

In the trailer, Zach has this line about “if” one were going to settle down and start a family and be responsible and “grow up,” then he had set himself up perfectly to do so. I decided to see the whole movie based on that “if.” That “if” spoke to me because I’m twenty-four and my friends are deciding on vocations and husbands and I’m hanging blink-182 posters in my kitchen.

As the movie progressed, however, it became distressingly obvious that Zach Braff was not having a quarter-life crisis, he was having a one-third-life crisis, which is an entirely different crisis and not something I can relate to at all.

Zach Braff demonstrates the pain of moving.

Zach managed to work through his big "ifs." My big "ifs," on the other hand, got no consolation whatsoever from what unfolded on screen.

My unsolicited movie review?

I was too young to see that movie.

This morning, I woke up and ate breakfast in an empty kitchen. I drove the seven minutes it now takes me to get to work and I sat down at my desk.

It’s strange; everything here is exactly the same as I left it on Friday, but the rest of my life has been completely turned upside down.


*  The Last Kiss, should you not remember it (and you’re forgiven if you don’t), was Zach Braff’s much-anticipated follow-up to Garden State.