I went to Alaska and then I came back. I'm still a little bit spooked over the whole thing. Like the shadow of Alaska is still hiding somewhere in the back of my brain. I felt more like I belonged there when I went home this year than I have any other year. And my cousin told me that he's moving back in May. He hasn't lived in the Valley (the Matanuska-Susitna Valley is the area where I grew up) in a long, long time. He went to school in Fairbanks and then moved to California. And he would choose Alaska over California?
These are the bonds that tie. There's a flavor to my home that's hardwired into the back of my brain. And something inside of me tells me that someday I'll be moving back there. I'll pull a migration, a spawning, a return to the homeland. And what then? What then?
Anyway, that has nothing to do with what I was actually going to talk about. I've been researching apartments again. Or houses. Or duplexes. Places to live, anyway. And I'm not sure what we're going to do.
Honestly, I'm not sure what anyone's going to do. If Rob stays, he'll need a room. But he might be moving back to his homeland, following the same migration pattern that I might one day take. And if Shelby doesn't get to buy Julie's house, she'll only live there until March and then she'll land back here. But what if she follows up on her plans to move to Minnesota? If she doesn't find a good enough job, I think that's what's going to happen. She'll leave. And Ruben. He figures into the grand scheme, too. He doesn't even know if he's going to move, but he hates his apartment. And his landlord keeps threatening eviction because his roommate doesn't keep up with the rent. But he doesn't have a car, so it would need to be somewhere in downtown or west Lansing because he needs to have easy access to work. As you can see, there are a lot of loose threads. The fabric of our lives is fraying at the edges. And I'm fighting to find a housing situation that can accomodate the whole mess.
So that's that. Plus, it's New Year's Day. The first day of a new year. The time when I start constantly writing the wrong dates on checks. You gotta love that. But there are things that everybody thinks about on the first day of a new year. It's a fresh start. A time to start things over and try to figure out how to fix the parts of your life that have run aground.
My biggest New Year's resolution is to lose some weight. I have a plan in the works that should facilitate this. And I feel positively about it. So that'll be good. I also want a new car. But I don't know when/if that will happen. And there are other things, endless other things. Like I want to write more, I want to keep my bedroom cleaner, I want to find a second job and make more money. I want a real bed. But those are all auxillary goals. The big one is the weight loss. So I'll stop at that.
I'll stop with this too, because... I don't have anything else to say. And that's the best reason in the world.