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Archive for August, 2010

August 27, 2010

Here We Go

Well, it’s finally happening. It’s nearly a month behind schedule, but it’s happening. Next Tuesday, the 31st, I will be falling asleep in the city of Chicago, IL. I’ve got an apartment leased, rent in the mail, and rental car reserved. Here we go.

Monday morning, I’ll pick up an SUV from Avis, drive it home, load it up with all of the stuff that I’ll be taking with me up north, and probably try to take a nap. Then around 9:00 or 10:00 Monday night, I’ll set off for the wild north. It’s about a 15 hour drive, so I’ll probably see the Chicago skyline crest the horizon around noon on Tuesday.

Lord willing, I’ll pick up the apartment keys, spend half an hour hauling all the stuff from the car to the apartment, then drive a mile downtown to Avis, drop the car off, and spend 15 minutes walking back to my new home.

The apartment I’m leasing is a total of 325 square feet. For perspective, that’s about 18.5′ x 18.5′, or a mid-sized living room. It’s a bed, office desk, bathroom, closet, small dining table and corner kitchen. I don’t even know where I’m going to set my piano up. I’m on the third floor, and I’ve got a small window that looks north over a parking lot and Division St.

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August 25, 2010

How Fortunate

You know, fortune cookies would be a lot more believable if you got a bad one every now and then. Nothing horrifically doom and gloom, mind you. Just the occasional “You’re going to incur some unexpected expenses.” or “Good friends are indispensable; too bad one of yours is about to split.” Otherwise, all you need to do to improve your circumstance is to order out for Chinese.

Similarly, you need to have some rough patches to appreciate the good. If there were no bad times, there wouldn’t be any good times, either. They’d just be… times. Its a difficult thing to acknowledge and embrace when you’re in the middle of a rough patch, though.

On the other side of things, though, when things are going well, the last thing I want to do is think about bad times. But it’s just as important to remember where you’ve been as it is to look forward to what’s ahead. You need to look back on the less than stellar times and appreciate them and how far you’ve come since.

I’m in a pretty good place right now, and the most palpable way for me to appreciate it in the midst is to remember when it wasn’t quite like this. If I only think about the here and now, I might not even realize how good I have it until I’ve moved on. And sometimes, that little mental acknowledgment is enough to promote a “time” to a “good time”.

Let them roll.

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August 3, 2010

Now What?

I remember saying about a month ago that once I had wrapped up my job at Pursuant and moved out of my apartment, it would be pretty smooth sailing from that point on.

Oh young, naive Cabeeb.

For two months or longer, I had been working towards a defined, dated goal. That was to have left my job and moved out of my apartment by the time my lease was up on July 18th. That was my first destination on the larger journey up to Chicago, and I’d been working towards it since since mid-May. It was extremely stressful, but it gave some definition to my purpose. Even if everything else was a giant whirlwind, that end goal was unwavering.

Now that stage has finally wrapped up. I exited Pursuant stage-left, crammed 90% of my possessions into a 5′ x 15′ padlocked room, and moved into a temporarily vacant bedroom in my parents’ house. That all took place in one of the most hectic 4 day periods I can remember, but it was done.

Yet the week following that milestone saw me depressed and overwhelmed. Somehow, having no deadlines hanging over my head was just as stressful as the previous weeks of several simultaneously culminating. The stress was of a different nature, of course, but it was just as potent and crippling.

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