Familiar, Not Comfortable

On the day after my birthday, when I finally woke up, woozy and nauseous, I chatted with my friends and had a hummus spinach omelette. My new friend Joe packed up his cooking wares and brought them back down to apartment 3A, the suite I lived in last year. I helped him carry his mason jars and whatever French coffee thing, and walked into my old space.

It was so clean and orderly, I forgot I used to live there. The walls are white and the floor is white, so without the grime I bring and attract to every apartment, the suite looks sterile and feels worse. I look at the refrigerator and am transplanted back to a year ago, with half-formed, half-true memories. The feeling is familiar, but not comfortable, like when I visited the my first room in New York for a lockout and it was unlofted, and colorful with all these stupid ass posters of bowties. It was my home, but it was in a dorm, so now it's someone else's.

And that's the strangest thing about working in student housing, it's structured to be ephemeral. I'm lucky (or unlucky) to have a place to stay, but it's temporary and so is everyone around me. I'm Matthew McConaughey. There are faces throughout the university that I recognize (fortunately and unfortunately), but there will be another batch of a thousand, all with their quirks and part-time jobs and aspirations to make a lot of difference. I'll do what I can, and I'll do more next year, for sure. I want to do a better job with residence life. Building a community is tricky work, and I haven't done enough this year.

Oh, by the way, I took that job in "Idling." I'm not idling, I'm busting my ass this semester, even if I'm watching a lot of Avatar and Dr. Who on the side. I'm in grad school, in the Julian J. Studley Graduate Program for International Affairs (recent name change) and I work in a freshman dorm in the East Village. Probs going to Turkey this summer, if I scrounge the money for it, and I'm interning at the UN. I was SO worried about idling and falling into traps, but I shouldn't worry. Worry shades members of my family terribly. We look so rotted and grave when we worry.

I'm fine. I'm busy, but I'm fine. I should update this more. I should update you more, but I get so distracted, you know how it is, yani, yani. I was worried I was doing nothing, going nowhere fast but my birthday is a nice reminder that I'm doing tons and wobbly time doesn't care at all for my worries. It'll just keep pumping.

My old apartment is someone else's, and I found some old underwear from someone who lived in my current space before me. Time's going to keep going, and my home will keep moving. It goes that way, and it should so nostalgia doesn't keep us static and stationary.