Moving as much as I have has instilled a pretty unsettled state of being much of the time. I have lived in so many spaces, buildings, on so many different streets in too many different neighborhoods that I guess I am always looking for the thing that feels the best, feels like home. I have tried to manufacture this feeling artificially with every type of aid available, from the prop boyfriend to liven up the space to displaying specific styles, art, etc. This little cave I have constructed here is made of stuff unlike any other place I have staged to be my life. I call it cave because it does remind me of my own little fortress of sorts, impermeable to the outside world except for when I open the windows to gaze out at the church and mountains to the front or neighbors swirled on all sides. Not like city neighbors, given I am pretty sure that in Jersey City I had no less than 50-100 people per block which were technically my neighbors. Here it’s a little more spread out than that, so much so that you rarely actually see people out and about. It’s like the thing of my nightmares that way. I used to have a few serial nightmares I might have written about before, but one of them involved waking up out of bed to walk around my home and my neighborhood, but there were never any people. There was just big bird’s nest (yes, I am talking Sesame Street here) in every room but no people. Anyways yes, off that tangent. Those dreams always involved into worse than that but I am not going there now.

Anyways, back to the castle, I mean cave. I am done, finally with the most arduous part of the whole remodeling thing I do in every apartment I move into. This is another thing I can thank my parents for on top of imparting the know-how to get this stuff done, but also the picky finicky angle of my brain that sees new spaces as different spaces in my head after I move in. I could never imagine wanting to move into something I knew I was unhappy with and just deal with it. This place I am in is admittedly the only one I actually went into physically, but it’s also at least 1000 square feet just upstairs alone. I have windows on every side, with the two biggest west facing. My east facing has an orchid sitting happily there. I am going to turn into an orchid queen and just get a ton of them. But yes, the painting is largely done and I did pay attention to my landlord’s instruction about dark colors and I think reds specifically and painted the kitchen a sky “blue gossamer”, the living room “moon violet” and “flowing water.” Now if they had called these colors, purple necco and moldy concrete I would not have picked them up. My bedroom has “serenity” in it, warm sun. I painted all of the ceilings except the bathroom, office and entry and hallway ceilings so far. But those are considerations for later on as the palette of dog crap gold-brown and army green are now removed to make way for a pretty happy, color-friendly place. White walls seem to never stay white in my presence, but I can admit there are spaces better left alone.

So now what? How about restarting on the projects and things I need to start on. I also have an interview this week with my favorite store ever, one I don’t want to openly discuss here given the public nature of possibly working in some kind of management or supervisory role would basically mean I could never talk about it at all, but let’s just say I spent most of Saturday night sitting on my couch crying because I realized everything I knew and know is getting shaken down to its very foundation and I have had to trade the safety nets of my friends in for the safety nets of family. I know this sounds crazy given one’s natural disposition is to turn to the family when in a time of need but my natural tendency is to turn to friends to make me feel better because they have always been the ones who I trusted to be able to do that. E called me in the midst of my cry fest and said some great things that made all of the difference in the world and I felt immediately comforted, which is exactly what I needed at that time. The guy has been saving me since 2005 I think. He then called me yesterday to check in on me and make sure I had gotten some perspective and even gave me the friend pep talk with his insistence that I was a great person who would make friends as soon as I found a job and started being out in public instead of sequestered in my cave. So the job might make all of the difference, yet it’s in a, yeah, mall. A mall. Whatever. It’s a good company with some other sister stores I dig, so if it’s meant to be, well it is. Otherwise it is still traveling in the direction of just working on the business full time, which is going to require a lot of discipline that I seem to find when I have no time at all to manage anything, squeezing in a few hours here to do this or that. Working full time and having to plan time for everything else is a better prospect entirely than working independently on my stuff because people learn how to totally disrespect you and your time because it is seemingly endless and free. And I am not good with that, really at all.

“No one is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.” Robert Louis Stevenson

-from a book sitting open on my table this morning.