The Current State of My Life
May. 8th, 2018 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerwengreenSo, as a quick epilogue to my last three years' worth of insane obsession: done doing emotionscape posts.
I met two people late last year that helped me finally break immersion from all that and get over it. One is a woman who keeps strongly hinting that she wants to date me, and seems to think we're more familiar and closer to each other than I do. My reaction to her has been to back away and keep my distance in pretty much exactly the same way you kept backing away from me the whole time I was fixated on you. It's been an interesting perspective flip. I get it now. You're not interested and never were, you were just being polite as best as you could while I was being insane at you. I'm sorry. I've stopped. I won't bother you again.
The other is an extremely attractive guy, who was also attracted to me for at least a month or two. We hung out a few times. Unfortunately he's half my age, and we don't have all that much in common besides yoga, so as awesome as he is, I can't really see anything working out seriously in the long run, and I think by now he's come to the same conclusion. Having him around to obsess about for a few months was extremely helpful, however, and I've finally reached an equilibrium point where I don't have to obsess about anyone again.
And on that note, I want to shift the purpose of this whole blog space back to me talking about me.
My current life can be separated out into three broad categories: past, present, and future.
First, some future.
It's a few months before I move to New Zealand. Since the last time I wrote about it here, I got rejected from that job in Wellington, and accepted into a PhD program at the University of Auckland. The place I'll be moving is actually Nelson, however, which is a small Bloomington-sized tourist town at the north end of the south island, more or less right across from Wellington. It's known for being sunny. It has beaches and mountains all next to each other. Christchurch is the closest big city (5 hours to drive, vs. a lengthy ferry to Wellington even though the latter is geographically closer), but it's only an hour or so to fly anywhere, including Auckland.
At this point I'm done with student visa paperwork and just waiting to hear back whether the NZ government approves. Once that part is confirmed, probably in late May, I'll spring into action on planning the actual move - what to take with me, whether there's going to be maritime shipping involved, buying the plane ticket, arranging for somewhere to live, etc.
The answers I got back when I asked what I should take with me was, more or less, "nothing." Unfortunately I can't actually do that. I've been a packrat all my life, and I'm definitely not going to be able to part with all of it. I'm also dimly aware that people in New Zealand buy things from the U.S. commonly enough that there's a shipping company that specializes in shipping stuff they've bought to them, while letting them pay domestic shipping in the U.S. It's also apparently common for visitors from there to go to outlet malls and stock up their suitcases as part of their work travel (according to my sister, who has work colleagues from there). And I'm definitely not going to leave my board games behind; not everything is as cheap and readily available outside the U.S. as in it.
So the options are to leave everything here in storage (unlikely), take everything with me, or do some of both.
The cheapest local storage I've found is a 5x5 or 5x10 for $30/month. I can probably reduce my stuff down to fit into a 5x10. So, 36 months of that plus taxes, tips, fees, charges, movers, miscellaneous costs, etc., probably looking at $1500 for three years of storage. Then, add on top of that all the stuff I'd have to buy again that I didn't take with me, which I figure maybe another $1000, so $2500 or so with the "leave it all here" plan.
The "take it all with me" plan means that I'd have to get a 10-ft U-Haul and drive everything to Los Angeles, because that's where all the shippers ship things to New Zealand. Me doing it myself is about $850 (for the U-Haul; not counting gas and lodging and food...), getting anyone else to do it would be both slower and more expensive. Then the actual shipping is in the range of $3000 for the amount of stuff I currently have. If I can winnow things down enough to take up less volume, it might potentially be less than storing, but it would be pretty severe winnowing things down.
The way I figure it at the moment, I should proceed on the "take it all with me" plan because it's a lot more motivating to get rid of stuff that way. Local storage has a minimum, and it doesn't get cheaper to take up less storage space after a certain point. I can fit multiple pieces of furniture in with the boxes in a 5x10.
What would be really useful is if someone has a house fire and loses everything in late July or early August, so I can just hand over everything I own that's remotely still useable. More likely, I'll try to sell the furniture to grad students. It kind of sucks that Mobile doesn't have a Freecycle community. There's one in Baldwin county, but that's kind of far from west Mobile.
The stuff in question that's taking a really long time to get rid of is not the furniture or other big stuff. It's mostly boxes of paper-based things, dating back to the late 1980s. I have to look at every single piece of paper to make sure I don't want it anymore, and also check whether it needs to be shredded. There's nostalgia items, and then there's longterm financially important items. So far it all still looks overwhelming and endless to me, but I took a picture of what I still have to go through a couple days ago, and it's actually only half of what I had when I started. I've been chipping away at it, half a box at a time, since late December. I figure I have two more months to get through the rest. Whatever I still have by the end of July is going to have to either come with me or go into local storage.
Going through all the ancient relics of my past has been emotionally challenging. I've been having a lot more dreams lately that are about people, places, and things from 20-30 years ago, that I haven't dreamed about in decades. There's also lots of popup memories every time I see something that reminds me of past people, places, things, and situations. The going has been slow for that reason too.
The way I'm planning to fund this whole move, incidentally, is by selling my car. I can't take it with me even if I wanted to pay for it; they drive on the other side of the road there. It's worth $15k at the moment, and with that much I'd be able to pay off what I still owe and also pay for the move. There will just be some inconvenient points during the move process without having a car.
I am also trying to take as few things as possible that run on electricity, because the plug outlets are different there. Also, wood is a special concern for New Zealand customs, so I need to get rid of as much wooden stuff as possible (which is depressing because I have a really good big wooden cutting board, a really nice bamboo bath mat, and I'll have to sell my drum).
Meanwhile, while obsessing about both the past and the future by doing all that, I also still have to live in the present. That means keeping up with basic household chores, making sure I eat and sleep and exercise enough, keeping up with a fairly hefty social life (mostly drums, anime, or board games), and work. It's weirdly hard to shift my focus to basic life and living when I'm ruminating about how to get rid of my stuff. And sadly, the work that I'm officially getting paid to do tends to slip down to the bottom of the priority list way too often. I do need to put serious time into it, because I kind of need to continue getting paid for as long as possible.
I'm still supposed to get as much done on that database for the fisheries people as possible. I told them it wasn't going to be finished before I leave, but there's still stuff I can do. They seemed generally okay with this (at least they haven't decided to cancel the whole contract). Meanwhile, the Huge Chunk of Funds is really truly seriously going to start arriving in October - which is a month after I've left, because of course that's when it would actually appear. Also, one of the two grants that I thought was rejected ... hasn't been. It's just been in limbo. With my luck, it'll be announced as funded right after I've left too.
I guess that pretty much sums up where I am at the moment, in a super rambly, roundabout way. Short version: I'm extremely focused on getting rid of my stuff at the moment.
I met two people late last year that helped me finally break immersion from all that and get over it. One is a woman who keeps strongly hinting that she wants to date me, and seems to think we're more familiar and closer to each other than I do. My reaction to her has been to back away and keep my distance in pretty much exactly the same way you kept backing away from me the whole time I was fixated on you. It's been an interesting perspective flip. I get it now. You're not interested and never were, you were just being polite as best as you could while I was being insane at you. I'm sorry. I've stopped. I won't bother you again.
The other is an extremely attractive guy, who was also attracted to me for at least a month or two. We hung out a few times. Unfortunately he's half my age, and we don't have all that much in common besides yoga, so as awesome as he is, I can't really see anything working out seriously in the long run, and I think by now he's come to the same conclusion. Having him around to obsess about for a few months was extremely helpful, however, and I've finally reached an equilibrium point where I don't have to obsess about anyone again.
And on that note, I want to shift the purpose of this whole blog space back to me talking about me.
My current life can be separated out into three broad categories: past, present, and future.
First, some future.
It's a few months before I move to New Zealand. Since the last time I wrote about it here, I got rejected from that job in Wellington, and accepted into a PhD program at the University of Auckland. The place I'll be moving is actually Nelson, however, which is a small Bloomington-sized tourist town at the north end of the south island, more or less right across from Wellington. It's known for being sunny. It has beaches and mountains all next to each other. Christchurch is the closest big city (5 hours to drive, vs. a lengthy ferry to Wellington even though the latter is geographically closer), but it's only an hour or so to fly anywhere, including Auckland.
At this point I'm done with student visa paperwork and just waiting to hear back whether the NZ government approves. Once that part is confirmed, probably in late May, I'll spring into action on planning the actual move - what to take with me, whether there's going to be maritime shipping involved, buying the plane ticket, arranging for somewhere to live, etc.
The answers I got back when I asked what I should take with me was, more or less, "nothing." Unfortunately I can't actually do that. I've been a packrat all my life, and I'm definitely not going to be able to part with all of it. I'm also dimly aware that people in New Zealand buy things from the U.S. commonly enough that there's a shipping company that specializes in shipping stuff they've bought to them, while letting them pay domestic shipping in the U.S. It's also apparently common for visitors from there to go to outlet malls and stock up their suitcases as part of their work travel (according to my sister, who has work colleagues from there). And I'm definitely not going to leave my board games behind; not everything is as cheap and readily available outside the U.S. as in it.
So the options are to leave everything here in storage (unlikely), take everything with me, or do some of both.
The cheapest local storage I've found is a 5x5 or 5x10 for $30/month. I can probably reduce my stuff down to fit into a 5x10. So, 36 months of that plus taxes, tips, fees, charges, movers, miscellaneous costs, etc., probably looking at $1500 for three years of storage. Then, add on top of that all the stuff I'd have to buy again that I didn't take with me, which I figure maybe another $1000, so $2500 or so with the "leave it all here" plan.
The "take it all with me" plan means that I'd have to get a 10-ft U-Haul and drive everything to Los Angeles, because that's where all the shippers ship things to New Zealand. Me doing it myself is about $850 (for the U-Haul; not counting gas and lodging and food...), getting anyone else to do it would be both slower and more expensive. Then the actual shipping is in the range of $3000 for the amount of stuff I currently have. If I can winnow things down enough to take up less volume, it might potentially be less than storing, but it would be pretty severe winnowing things down.
The way I figure it at the moment, I should proceed on the "take it all with me" plan because it's a lot more motivating to get rid of stuff that way. Local storage has a minimum, and it doesn't get cheaper to take up less storage space after a certain point. I can fit multiple pieces of furniture in with the boxes in a 5x10.
What would be really useful is if someone has a house fire and loses everything in late July or early August, so I can just hand over everything I own that's remotely still useable. More likely, I'll try to sell the furniture to grad students. It kind of sucks that Mobile doesn't have a Freecycle community. There's one in Baldwin county, but that's kind of far from west Mobile.
The stuff in question that's taking a really long time to get rid of is not the furniture or other big stuff. It's mostly boxes of paper-based things, dating back to the late 1980s. I have to look at every single piece of paper to make sure I don't want it anymore, and also check whether it needs to be shredded. There's nostalgia items, and then there's longterm financially important items. So far it all still looks overwhelming and endless to me, but I took a picture of what I still have to go through a couple days ago, and it's actually only half of what I had when I started. I've been chipping away at it, half a box at a time, since late December. I figure I have two more months to get through the rest. Whatever I still have by the end of July is going to have to either come with me or go into local storage.
Going through all the ancient relics of my past has been emotionally challenging. I've been having a lot more dreams lately that are about people, places, and things from 20-30 years ago, that I haven't dreamed about in decades. There's also lots of popup memories every time I see something that reminds me of past people, places, things, and situations. The going has been slow for that reason too.
The way I'm planning to fund this whole move, incidentally, is by selling my car. I can't take it with me even if I wanted to pay for it; they drive on the other side of the road there. It's worth $15k at the moment, and with that much I'd be able to pay off what I still owe and also pay for the move. There will just be some inconvenient points during the move process without having a car.
I am also trying to take as few things as possible that run on electricity, because the plug outlets are different there. Also, wood is a special concern for New Zealand customs, so I need to get rid of as much wooden stuff as possible (which is depressing because I have a really good big wooden cutting board, a really nice bamboo bath mat, and I'll have to sell my drum).
Meanwhile, while obsessing about both the past and the future by doing all that, I also still have to live in the present. That means keeping up with basic household chores, making sure I eat and sleep and exercise enough, keeping up with a fairly hefty social life (mostly drums, anime, or board games), and work. It's weirdly hard to shift my focus to basic life and living when I'm ruminating about how to get rid of my stuff. And sadly, the work that I'm officially getting paid to do tends to slip down to the bottom of the priority list way too often. I do need to put serious time into it, because I kind of need to continue getting paid for as long as possible.
I'm still supposed to get as much done on that database for the fisheries people as possible. I told them it wasn't going to be finished before I leave, but there's still stuff I can do. They seemed generally okay with this (at least they haven't decided to cancel the whole contract). Meanwhile, the Huge Chunk of Funds is really truly seriously going to start arriving in October - which is a month after I've left, because of course that's when it would actually appear. Also, one of the two grants that I thought was rejected ... hasn't been. It's just been in limbo. With my luck, it'll be announced as funded right after I've left too.
I guess that pretty much sums up where I am at the moment, in a super rambly, roundabout way. Short version: I'm extremely focused on getting rid of my stuff at the moment.
