Sixty Two

 I just read a previous draft post and it seemed good enough to post! It's funny that I'll do these brain drain diary posts and they seems terrible when I read them...then a year or two later when I re-read them they are seem decent and insightful.

I have been off my game this past 6 months or so. Last August I went on a trip that was so fun I was euphoric for 3 1/2 weeks. Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland (and all those places in Eastern Canada I love). I came back and was supposed to go to Taos, but just not ready to go on another big trip where I'd be eating a lot every day. I did something possibly insane: I had two weeks off before work started back up in Sept. I went out and bought a tiny house in the tiny house village about 20 minutes from where I was living. It felt wrong from the start, but I felt like I had to go through with it. My apartment I'd been living in was turning into an awful place to live...I knew I was going to have to move and wanted something totally new and different (as I have just read from my previous post I AM IN A RUT - and no wonder! I just read some Antarctic posts and no matter how hard I try to accept that they don't want me and I cannot get back, I want that lifestyle again. I want want want it. I just went on a cruise...wait, I need to end this sidebar and get back to my story...) so I saw this beautiful, pristine tiny home and bought it.

Now I'd been looking out there for several years so it wasn't a total impulse decision...what ended up happening is I could not adjust to how far away it was from everything I like to do. I was 9 miles from a grocery store and no restaurants around. Here, I can walk to everything. I can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, am a short bus ride to downtown, and am near EVERYTHING. It was just too strange out there...so not me...I would walk around the "village" and pretend to like it and care about everyone but I couldn't freaking stand being out there. I would drive into town every day and spend all day here and would feel despair if I spent any amount of time out there. The people out there were nice, but there it was like I had moved away from Austin, into some experimental community that just didn't work for me. And when I tried to force myself to be a part of it, I felt very sad, and like the best part of me was being crushed. The part that is urban to the core...that likes a total private and hidden living space...not having to interact with my neighbors if I don't feel like it. I moved into he tiny house in mid September and moved into my Hyde Park apartment on March 1st. So I spent around 5 months out there and every single day I KNEW I would be moving back into town. The apartment I am in is darling, perfect, quiet, in the heart of the best neighborhood (to me)...a neighborhood of old historic homes and funky old student apt. complexes. A neighborhood that I lived in for most of the 80's. This is my 5th address in Hyde Park, and exactly 40 years ago that I first lived in this neighborhood.

Every time I go on a walk here I feel the ghosts of my college years and the time I moved back from NYC. My first Hyde Park address was on 38th and Speedway in an old wooden 4 plex that is no longer there. It was at the height of my punk rock days, my last year at UT, the end of my relationship with Mike and beginning of the one with Steve. So many shows, so much booze, so much crank.

I moved to NYC in Fall of '83 and back to Hyde Park in Jan of '85. I lived at 43rd and Ave B in a tiny room attached to a large old house that I dubbed "hovel". I think the house is still there but my apt. may have been absorbed back into the house. Then I moved to a darling backyard house '86 on 49th and Caswell (that just got bulldozed) and set it up as a darling little cottage that I sewed in and my boyfriend Kenny stayed at most nights. That was a fraught time as I was trying to be a good girl and not go too off the rails with partying. I was jogging and running in races with Kenny, and we had a little domestic bliss thing going on, but then I'd start partying hard and would run off with other boys and live a double life, like I'd been doing in college: the good girl, bad girl thing. When I went full bore with the drinking, I'd find more boys and get into intense relationships with them and hide it from my stable guy at home. Eventually the stable guy thing would fall apart as I would train wreck my life by dumping him for some other dude and start the whole thing over again. I was going down a dark path and by summer of '87 I had decided to move to Nebraska to be with Julie and plan the move to Ireland. I had dumped Kenny for some guy I just saw on a skateboard and he turned out to be a dud. I stopped going to my job, was living at the dope man's house, and decided it was time to vamanos. All my friends had moved away. It was time for me. BUT, I had fallen in love with yet another guy before moving to Nebraska...

I was EUPHORIC in Omaha! It was like when I first moved to Austin (McMurdo, Portland, NYC, back to Austin). It was 4 months of the most insanely wild time with Julie and the Irish pubs downtown. I lived in her basement and did a bunch of stupid jobs and talked to Michael every night on the phone. Julie and I drank a LOT of vodka and she was very upset when I said I was moving back to Austin in November, but she said the good thing about me leaving is that I was turning her into an alcoholic (first hint!). I drove back to Texas in a snowstorm and Michael was waiting for me at the four seasons hotel in Dallas. We had a rapturous reunion and I came back to Austin with my tail between my legs as Julie went through with our dream of moving to Ireland (we had travelled there in '84 and fell in love with Irish boys and drank and screwed our way though the island...and had talked about moving there every day since). I got my first UT job in a horrible basement of a brutalist building and did the 8-5 thing in a windowless room while Julie went to Ireland. 

For the first time in my life I truly felt like I'd let myself down. My mother had thought I was a failure for not getting a job in film upon college graduation, but I moved to NYC which was a huge win for me so I knew I was no failure...with the amount of partying I was doing I knew I was winning, at least in the high functioning category. I would sit outside on my lunch hour and stare at the clouds in the sky dreaming of doing something fabulous with my life. It was 1987-88. It would be 17 years before that fabulous thing happened. In that 17 years would be many boyfriends, a husband and divorce, more boyfriends, many job changes at UT and the State, and in 1992 I quit partying for good. So in 2004, 20 years after that Ireland trip, I deployed to Antarctica, and had a life of joy and meaning beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I had it for 8 seasons, and I don't have it anymore. I just read some Antarctic blog stuff I wrote on my other blog and I ACHE for that life again. I'd give anything for it again.

Yes I am grateful for my sweet little life...but I was not built for a sweet little life.