Sycamore

#1-5:

1.  5.5 years of living in the same place (the entirety of my post-college life) with (roughly) the same peope makes living alone kind of a shock.  There’s some good things - it feels kind of like a vacation, you’ve got a lot more space to yourself, and you never have to schedule time alone around when people are home.

2.  You have a lot more stuff than you realize.  A lot more.

3.  Boxes are suprisingly hard to come by in Los Angeles.  Most companies try to recoup some costs by taking all the boxes they receive and compacting them for recycling.  The best places to look: the back of Starbucks, drug stores, and (surprisingly) flower shops.

4.  Cardboard is a weird animal.  I got a strange allergic reaction one time where my lip swelled up after handling boxes.  But only part of my lip, it was really strange.  Went away rather quickly, but still a little unsettling.  Cardboard also has odd smells.

5.  The way you feel alone is different than you’d expect.  I thought I’d really want people around, the kind of white noise you get in coffee shops and when you live with several people.  Instead, I miss television.  Not because I want to watch a bunch of daytime TV - even though I would love to have some random sitcom rerun playing while I organize my books.  Really, live television has this effect where you feel like you’re connected to the outside world.  And that’s what I’m missing, oddly enough.  Watching TV, or listening to the radio, is a small but pervasive way of feeling like you’re a part of the world outside your door.  I didn’t notice that until I moved to a place without a television.

There’s upsides to this, of course.  You’re a bit more productive, depending on the day.  There’s less temptation to buy into the worldly perspective that TV consistently pitches under the radar.  Time alone, where it is just you makes for better thinking, more reflection.  Come to think of it, it’s not much but upsides, even though you don’t feel a constant, background connection to the outside world.  Weird to think how much television has influenced our/my culture.