Learning to fly

It will be phenomenally great to get to Seattle in September and finally have a place of my own. More important, it will be delightful to be able to be living in a city for long enough to make it worth my while to get nice and settled in and to have all my worldy possessions (of which there are definitely too many) in one place, and to allow myself to get situated.

The past five years have been kind of taxing in that regard. Even though I lived in the same dorm for four years, I didn't spend a single summer there, and I moved between rooms. That still might not have been so bad had I not had to move everything in and out at the beginning and end of each school year. It really makes it difficult to bring myself to get totally moved in, to go to great lengths to make the place feel like home. Nonetheless, I did just that each year, with the traditional pre-Fall Quarter ritual of covering my door and walls with posters, flags and other uniquely me decor.

This year, despite being in Chicago, I went through the whole process yet again. Or rather, I got to move into an apartment and deal with all the special furnishing that entailed. On some level I should regret not having planned this in advance so I could've left lots of things in town and had stuff to get me started. But then, there really wasn't too much that I would've found useful in an apartment (dorm fridge, anyone?), and much of what would be nice to have I re-inherited from Colleen anyway. And I'd only find myself in the position of having more junk that needed transporting back to the West Coast before this autumn.

Which brings me to tomorrow. I'm flying home for a long weekend and taking advantage of the opportunity to unload lots of books and other things I won't need for my remaining three months in Chicago. Plus, I'm bringing home plenty of laundry so I won't have to pay six bucks to wash it all at the local launder-bar. It's still not easy, since I'm going to be relying on the CTA to get to the airport, and I'm a bit concerned about juggling a large rolling suitcase, a big duffel bag sans shoulder strap, a rolling tote and a backpack, all by myself. Fortunately, Joe will go with me at least as far as the Blue Line, so I should only have to manage from when I disembark the train beneath the airport and when I wind my way up the elevators and down the moving walkways to the departure level of the terminal. And if I'm extraordinarily lucky, I'll find an unattended luggage cart along the way to facilitate the process.

It might well prove worth the minor investment to just ship so much of this stuff, or to take a cab. But it also seems to me wasteful not to see how much of my included luggage allowance I can use up for this purpose. In an ideal world I wouldn't have to ship anything, which is what I amazingly managed when I moved back home after graduation last summer. Of course, then I had the benefit of having several people traveling back to California with me, so I dispersed my myriad junk in several people's luggage. The only thing we had to pay to ship was a large poster tube, and that cost less than $5. Pretty nice, eh?

But, I swung that only because I slowly started to move things back home beginning at Winter Break of my sophomore year. My books trickled in over three years, and I did a pretty good job of being minimalist in what I brought back to school with me each time. A favorite trick was to bring home two suitcases and leave the contents of one at home, which I then filled with foodstuffs to take back to school.

The upshot of all this is that it's really a hassle trying to get stuff back and forth without spending a lot of money on shipping and/or having the benefit of car transportation from my door to the curb of the airport terminal. Which is why it will be all the nicer to move to Seattle and at last not have to worry about it. Hell, assuming I have affordable laundry facilities on hand, I can probably get away with only taking carry-ons whenever I go back home for breaks and such. And that'll be sweet.