Tuesday, July 17, 2007

moving

I have arranged movers, a full fifteen days before I have to be out of here. This makes me very happy because ordinarily I don't do this whole Planning and Organization thing very well at all. Now all I have to do is get everything boxed up before the movers turn up. I've almost started.

I don't think it's really sunk in that I'm leaving University of Basketball Town, which has been home for more than a quarter of my life. I was sixteen when I came here for the first time -- my It's Academic coach was a U. of Basketball graduate and we were going to a tournament in Next City Over, with lots of time left over to explore. Well, I was a sheltered kid from the suburbs, and it was my first time on my own in a real college town in all its quirky glory, and I bought a copy of Rolling Stone from 1975 in one of the used book shops and had Indian food for the first time, and thought, "This is the kind of place where I want to live." And so it was. That particular bookshop is long gone, and I know now that there are many better places to get Indian food around here, but I was right about the part that mattered.

New SLAC is in a much smaller town -- one with a certain amount of historic charm and a real honest-to-God soda fountain, so I'm sure there will be compensations. But then, I went to undergrad in a town that is pretty much synonymous with historic charm, and the truth is that there isn't much to do there (it was better in my day, when we had a cool art-house movie theater right off campus, but even that has turned into a business targeting the tourist crowd). We found stuff to do, as I'm sure the kids at New SLAC probably do -- much of it illegal or downright loony (grits wrestling in a kiddie wading pool, anyone?), but professors don't get invited to that sort of thing.

Um. Not really sure where this post is going, except that writing it is a nice alternative to putting things in boxes, but anyway, I hope I like the new place as much as I like where I live now.

4 comments:

heu mihi said...

I hear ya, sister!

17 days till I start the move, myself.

Sisyphus said...

Good luck with the putting of things into boxes! (Is that like the Society for {Putting Things on Top of Other Things?)

And, pray tell, when do we get the dish (heh heh) on grits-wrestling in kiddie pools?

Somehow I feel that undergrad at a big urban place actually made me _more_, rather than _less_, sheltered.

Fretful Porpentine said...

And, pray tell, when do we get the dish (heh heh) on grits-wrestling in kiddie pools?

Well, we had this student-run coffeehouse. Great little place, but it was funded by a grant from the administration that was supposed to encourage alcohol-free student activities, and the coffeehouse was so not one of them. Or if it was, on occasion, it was usually because people were getting stoned instead.

Anyway, we were trying to come up with ideas for Coffeehouse Events other than the usual open mike night stuff, and somebody dreamed up ... Grits Wrestling. I didn't try it myself, having few clothes I was willing to sacrifice and no particular talent for wrestling, but apparently grits are fun to wrestle in, much like Jell-o.

It turns out that the coffeehouse is still there and has its own LiveJournal community, and I'm proud to see that they still have grits wrestling. An enduring tradition, it seems.

Sisyphus said...

Who knew that grits wrestling felt like jello wrestling .... or that jello wrestling felt good?

(Thinking of the movie version of The Who's Tommy and getting a little squicked out...)