Friday, July 01, 2005

holy crap, I am leaving this place in 30 hours

Man, I saw two of my good friends for the last time until Christmas today. It's insane.

Packing for college isn't like packing to go see your grandparents. Especially if you're going far away. I'm not just putting three days of clothing and a Gameboy in a totebag so I can listen to my parents argue for a three-hour drive to DeSoto. I'm stuffing a full set of luggage with a big enamel pot, a tea kettle, a coffee grinder. I'm getting ready to live in my own kitchen and worry about all that shit myself. The fact that it's a little unnerving is overwhelmed by the great feeling I have when I think about grinding my own coffee beans every day and getting the orange juice out of the fridge that I earn through my own job (I hope the other guys don't like pulpy OJ or something so I can be the only one that'll drink it). I've got cups and bowls and utensils and as ironic as it sounds with me attending a culinary institution, I'm packing my own Wusthof cutlery, though I'm going to closely guard it. I kind of hope I can just find a big (or little) wooden slab somewhere so I don't have to use this godawful plastic cutting board for the occasions I cook at home. And despite that I could have my mother ship it to me, my old ratty canvas trench is folded up on top of it all. It's too much of a veritable companion to me for me to just leave it behind in a box. It doesn't even have any of the original buttons on anymore, just the golden ones I've sewn on. To make airport security a little more pleasant I'm taking that tweed jacket whether I need it on the plane or not. I've found that the most convenient thing to do when you step through that crap is to literally put everything metallic you can strip off you into that little box or into your jacket pockets so you can actually walk through without them negatively charging you with a plastic wand.

I'm taking my 35mm Mamiya for some scenic photography, or to just take snapshots of weird urban shit like I did in D.C. I hear Pittsburgh is beautiful and I've seen pictures of the Rivers in winter that look stunning. I hope to get a digital camera one of these days so I can make my blog more visual, because I want to share my new home with everyone from Texas but I don't expect to have time to scan a bunch of glossy photos on a flatbed. I'll try and blog a lot, too, as much as I do now once I establish where I can go for easy internet access, but there'll likely be at least a week of silence from my journal. I'll make another post tomorrow before I disassemble my computer for my mom to bubble-wrap. Thank god a I got a flat panel. I'd hate to have a CRT sent to me via UPS and be looking at a warped parallelogram when I turn on my compy. Those things decalibrate real easily.

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