The dog ate my . . .

So I've been AWOL for almost a month now and feel like apologizing to the ether. Sorry there, ether. I totally meant to fill your technovoid with my musings, but instead, as Beloved Fiance's mentioned, there's been some things going on.

Like moving. I know hating moving is like hating genocide or like the Coalition Against Sexual Violence (where's the Coalition for Sexual Violence?), but really, much like genocide and sexual violence, moving is totally terrible. There's a hard-core get-things done Zen-like trance that I can reach in the middle, but mostly I find myself thinking "All right. That's it. It's all going in the trash and I'm renouncing material possessions. Just a few t-shirts and a bowl and a spork. That should do me fine. And some sneakers. And maybe a book or two. And these barrettes. And that record. And this other book. . . " Sometimes it strikes me as a symbol of all that's wrong with the consumerist first world that we actually have a genre of television devoted to watching people throw away belongings they know longer use. We have a subset of television victims with whom we are all supposed to sympathize become they own too many possessions. This being only a couple generations removed from the Depression. But then, thinking back to every non-first-world home I've visited, I remember that the folks there are just as tchotke-happy as we, just like they like to eat as much as we do -- we can just afford more food and more knickknacks. We take it to excess not because we're worse people, but because we can.

And speaking of materialism, BF and I are mid-way on our attempt at home-ownership. There's still all kinds of papers to be signed and mortages to be discussed, and nothing will be final until "The Closing" (sounds like a science fiction series or a Mormon ritual, don't it?) but we're getting there. And I really hope we make it. We've learned enough from the past month of house-buying shenanigans to know that if this house doesn't work out, we might just get an apartment and start looking in the winter, but it's been an educational crash course in real estate. And bargaining. And coming face-to-face with your dream self and having to have that awful reckoning where you realize that you don't become the good version of yourself through shopping. It's "if I buy these pants, I'll do yoga every day" times 10,000. So I've been reeling back and forth between
"and we'll have dinner parties and I'll write every day and clean every other day and garden and do pottery and adopt stray pets and bake bread" and "Oh h-e-double-hockey-sticks, I could barely keep a one-bedroom apartment clean(ish) and generally operational, what are we thinking?" But I still think it could be awesome. And I really hope it works out.

And finally, speaking of adopting pets, we've been housesitting for the past 11 days and the house includes two very friendly, highly slobberific dogs who have a tendency to wake up at 5:30 in the AM demanding all kinds of highly urgent things. Side A: Early mornings are truly beautiful, and all that stuff in poems about birds and dew -- turns out it's true. Side B: Good Lord, I miss bed.