Crudite platter.
For those who haven’t heard yet, I proposed to Vanessa late on April 18th at the Revival Tour stop in Hollywood. The entire Revival Tour gang was awesome for letting me interrupt their set, and the (largely positive) response from the crowd was something I’d never expected. In some small way, it restored my faith in the humanity of Los Angeles county.
Further instilling some faith was the amazing number of congratulatory tweets I got from people, as well as one guy who reached out to say he happened to have been recording the song. Later I found another video on YouTube. I’m not posting the video of the guy who reached out (because it’s not publicly available), but here’s one from the awesome Rodney S. and another one I found on YouTube. (After the jump)
As Vanessa and I prepare for our move, we’re starting to go through all our stuff and thin out our packing duties. Which means, we’ve got a bunch of stuff that’ll go to donations, but we’re letting our friends get first crack. Full list after the jump.
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Mayflower, the moving company, is supposed to be here around noon to give me an estimate on how much it would cost to move us to Syracuse.
Moving: card catalog, my desk, Marshall JTM 60 head with matching 4×10 cab, Vanessa’s grandmother’s desk, the captain’s chair, 3-drawer cubby, a lamp from Target, two bookshelves, linens, knick-knacks, between 500 and 800 books, the machine-used-to-watch-soccer, and a media cabinet.
Not moving: damn near everything else.
Moving necessarily requires a reassessment of your belongings. We’ve only been in Long Beach for about two years, but somehow, all we have all this stuff now. When I lived in Humboldt, I had a futon, a tv, and rotting desk. That was it. I lived there for three years. Somehow, after moving to Long Beach, we suddenly started acquiring all this stuff: chairs and dining room tables and sofas and 5 nightstands / end tables, four bookshelves, a microwave cart.
We try not to let our things define us; I am not my car and my car is not me. But it’s sort of inevitable. I have “possessions” which require as much care as my girlfriend and our cat and my coffee table. I can’t just dump it in the street — I need to find a space for it. So as I’m moving I get to watch myself and my tangential-self spatially expand and contract as it travels from Long Beach to moving truck(s) to donation centers to friends’ houses to some yet-unknown space in Syracuse. In a very real way, it’s like cutting off a limb and attaching it to a hot air balloon.
I’m happy to say that by April 1st, Vanessa (my partner)) and I will be officially accepting our respective offers of admission to Syracuse University. She’ll be going for a Masters in Library Science, and I’ll be entering their Ph.D. program in English (18th-century literature). We’ll be heading out there on March 29 for some orientation and meet-n-greet things, and hopefully to check out a few neighborhoods that we might want to move to. Since we’ll already be across the country, we’re swinging through the DC / Northern Virginia area for a little while to hang out with my folks and see how my newly-retired father is holding up.
As such, these coming months will be our last in California for a lil while. We expect to be moving East sometime in mid-July. If anyone wants some free and/or cheap furniture, let me know — we’re donating or throwing most of it out. I’ll also be giving up my Galaxy season tickets to two lucky winners (with a parking pass!).
Syracuse and UC Davis have both gotten back to me with positive and semi-positive responses. Syracuse offered me actual admission, which was not only mind-blowing but also called me and so far three or four professors (including Erin Mackie!) have emailed me with congrats and hellos and things of that sort. UC Davis has placed me on the waitlist-pending-funding, which I realize means my chances are slim. A number of other schools I applied to got back to me “with regrets,” but that was expected.
It’s all going quite fast, and it hit me yesterday when my LA Galaxy season tickets showed up — this is almost certainly my last few months in Los Angeles county. It’s getting to be stressful; coordinating school choices with my partner so that we don’t end up living 5 hours apart (or commuting 2.5 hours to school) is unreal. We were very lucky to both get into CSULB’s Master’s program, but now schools that I want to go to don’t offer a degree in what she wants to do (Library Science, emphasis on preservation and special collections) and the programs she wants to go to don’t offer a PhD for me. Those that collapse nicely are difficult schools for either of us to get into (Hi there, Chapel Hill). To top it off, it seems like most of the schools my partner’s applied to don’t even have deadlines until long after I have to give an answer to my schools, so it’s all getting a bit chaotic over here.
10 9 (see footnote) more applications are still “alive” and out in the wild under committee review, so I suppose there’s nothing I can do but sit back and wait.
Footnote: While writing this I got word that Rutgers has denied me admission. I think that was kind of high on our list of “maybe we could both go here.” Doh!
Judith Butler quicky: http://arcdirector.blogspot.com/2012/02/occupy-as-form-judith-butler.html
Two schools have gotten back to me so far, both “with regrets,” but I suppose I should be expecting a vast majority of those responses. Nevertheless, holding out for a positive response.
This contract continues to eat up far more of my time than I’d like, and progress has been slow. That said, I think we’ll be close to an early alpha release by March or so. One of the more exciting things is that this has been my first professional project where I’m using SASS. And, of course, that the entire reasoning behind the startup is to help multiply charitable donations. This makes me feel much less guilty about not donating to KCRW this year.