Back on the Air

"I've never really ever found a place that I called home,

I've never stuck around quite long enough to make it..."
Right now, I really don't have the energy to explain my absence. Anyway, there's not really that good of an explanation. Maybe I've just been lazy. I certainly have been avoiding my apartment, which has gone from Chez Ghetto to Chez Furnace in the presence of western exposure and in the absence of central air.

Maybe at some point I will reflect on my various doings of the past half year, but today isn't that day. Why? Because today is Sunday. And Sunday is the day for melancholic, rambling posts that don't really go anywhere but leave you, dear reader, plenty depressed.

Various circumstances (by and large GOOD circumstances) have led me to lately contemplate attempting to find an apartment in the desert. I'm not moving anywhere just yet, but I certainly am gathering information. And in this information-gathering process, I fell in love. I guess you could call it an unrequited love, as I am pretty damned sure I don't share a future with the object of my affection. But I am nonetheless completely, 100%, head-over-heels in love (okay, obsessed).

It's an apartment, a ridiculously undersized, overpriced apartment. The appeal? Hardwood floors, a fireplace, french doors, casement windows, central air, washer and dryer, a huge back porch, cats are allowed. It's got more character than me after I've pounded five shots of goldschlagger. But it's just too much, and I know it. But still I pine.

All weekend, I've been thinking about it. And when I came home on this lonely Sunday, as I began to clean my slum home, I was still thinking about it. And to cheer myself up, I decided that the proper medicine lay in the archives of Crazy Aunt Purl. If anyone could cheer me up, it would be her. And then I started thinking about her, in her cozy little valley home that she has hated for a while...and how she finally decided that now was the right time--in fact the only time--to start living her life and making her rented space into a home. And that got me thinking about my own circumstances--how it seems like I have never stayed in once place for more than a year for a very long time, and why the hell do I keep picking up sticks and going elsewhere? I am never satisfied, I am always looking for a better place. Always picturing myself being happier, more creative and productive, at the next place, not the current abode.
And that got me to the point where I had a Purl-esque revelation. I'm never going to find the one perfect place with lots of character that will inspire me to lead that ideal life. All the hardwood floors and french doors just won't do it. It's going to have to come from me, I am going to have to have the balls and initiative and energy and discipline enough to do it, regardless of where I live. So I need to just latch on to whatever common sense is lurking right now and make sure I don't go completely stupid and lock myself into a place that I can't afford, just to chase the rainbow of the perfect life that is waiting with the perfect place.

There is no perfect. There is just now, and good enough with improvements always being made. I'm going to still look for a place, and eventually move there. I will settle for the basis--central air, and please god a w/d hookup. Maybe a balcony. But I won't pay out the nose for a perfection that just won't come.