One thing Facebook actually seems good for (good might be too giving. Adequate for is probably closer) is the memories.
Now, some days are going to be better than others. I post a lot of pictures of my cats, because the internet says that’s the only way it can be powered without consuming our very souls. But our boy, Dante, passed away a couple years back now, so I find myself still dealing with a hovering grief when I see him. Oh, I love that I get to see his beautiful face and fur and remember all the good times, sure. But losing a pet is a constant kick to the gut. We don’t have kids, so I have no way of comparing it, but it was a creature and friend and companion who relied on me to give them the best life I could manage, and you always wind up second-guessing at the end if you did things right.
But that’s not what today was, so excuse me as I try to fight back tearing up for a second.
Today was the two year anniversary mark of when we publicly announced that Erin and I (and our other cat Gidget) were moving out of the house we’d had in California for the last ten years, and out of California completely, which we’d both been in for just over 22 years I think (average). That my parents had purchased a place for us in Michigan.
The two posts about it had a lot of comments and good wishes. One of them hit around 160, but a lot of that is just my friends and family and us, we like to talk shit. So things digress into silliness pretty quickly. But a lot of it was kind of big news. Most of the people I knew at the time, and still more people that I know now, came from my being in California. I spent what was the second half of my life there, moving out on a whim when I was 22 or 23. So moving out when I was 46, just nearing 47, I was very much as Californian and I was a Michigander. Probably more, because so much of my growing into who I was took place out there. I was, for the most part, on my own. Not discounting my friends who became my second family (and more like my first) taking me in, taking care of me, being loving and caring and awesome people. But many or basically all the decisions I made were mine to make. I was a pretty sheltered kid, by choice mind you, but I wasn’t outgoing or adventurous until well into my teen years. Which maybe culminated in me feeling like I needed to move all the way across the country to figure out what I wanted to make of my life.
So we’re about two weeks from the anniversary of the move date itself. But it’s enough of a call back for me to try to evaluate how it’s been. I think any time a huge change like that comes about, you go into it expecting great things. At least hoping for them.
And, yeah, some things are better.
But I wouldn’t say that the two years has brought me closer to feeling like “we’re making it,” and that was a big part of leaving Sonoma County. We were underwater on a mortgage for the entire ten years we were in that house. Financially we always struggled. Personally, the last several years were higher and higher stress for me. My unemployment stint happened in that house. But we also got married in that same year, so it wasn’t terrible. Just devastating in how it threw me off on what I believed about myself. And I came out stronger and happier in a much better job, a much better career. But that job I had to leave when we moved. And out here… I’m in what feels like the retail job of I.T. Which is odd, because I worked what was actually retail I.T. at the job I was laid off from. But this is more the policies of retail, the management structure and bumbling and chasing numbers and obscure and often moving goals being the focus as much or more as client satisfaction. Pay is lower, which I expected going to Michigan from California. But advancement is almost non-existent. I’ve been in I.T. proper for seven years now, and the years in the retail version brings me to around 15+. I am experienced, I am hard-working, I am motivated to help people. I am honest and caring. Both those things actually seem like a detriment a lot more of the time than they should.
Obviously with my recent post, money is still an issue and possibly always going to be an issue for us. We’re notoriously bad at not spending when we should be saving. Erin also took a huge hit to her pay scale, working at less than half she made hourly at her last job, and working part time hours as well. But it was my hope that moving here that she would be able to work less and focus on her artwork, and on that end, yes, it’s a big improvement. She’s done so much since we got here. She got her first (of not multiple) gallery showing. Strangely enough, a place in California. She sells tons of commissions pretty regularly now. She’s done some merch, which I think will start to take off eventually when she hones in on what she wants to do with it more. In every way, she is a successful artist. It’s not a replacement for her needing to work a “normal” job yet. But it seems to be heading there.
So if I go off of how the move has fared for my wife, it’s easy to see that it was the right decision.
She is also much happier in the house we live in now (upsettingly still owned by my parents because we haven’t gotten stable enough to buy it from them yet). It’s smaller but a couple hundred square feet, but not in a way that we ever notice. The yard on the other hand is huge. Two to three times larger than we had out there, possibly more. We are a bit close to the street, but have no view of neighbors to either side of us. In California, a lot of our style homes are practically window-to-window. One of the things that killed me there was that California is beloved because of its climate, and how beautiful it was outside so much of the year (that has certainly changed over the last few years though, in a dangerous way). But without yard space, you barely got to enjoy it. Sure, you could drive to a park or to the ocean or to the redwoods. But that’s not anything I enjoy doing. In fact, my over twenty years in California and I still never once set food in the ocean. I’m not even afraid of water. I loved swimming as a kid. But open water and beaches are completely against my nature. As are crowds. I like home, I like private, I like quiet unless I choose to make things noisy. And then I like not having someone close enough to complain about my noise.
I am still living with boxes in my space. I have an office now that is twice the size of what I had at the old home. Granted, I lived with boxes there too. I gave up my office for a period of time for one of my best friends to come live with us (which was such a small thing to do for her. And she is who invited me to come live with her when I moved to California to start). I like having a “space” but I don’t always know what to do with it beyond setting up a desk and a computer. And here, a TV and a pulpit. I have bookshelves that need filling and organizing and expanding really because they can only hold so much of my shit. I’d like a sofa or daybed up here to relax with the cats. We have three now, and Gidget had pretty much relegated herself to the living room since the new kitten arrived. But she’ll come up to the office sometimes, and I think a place to cuddle up together would entice her more.
Erin has a perfect art space that I had picked out for her when we were first looking at this house online. I’d actually thought she would have two spaces, there’s a kitchen nook I imagined she would paint in because it has a big window and I didn’t realize how much our stuff needed to stretch beyond the two cabinets our kitchen has. Now that we moved our cart of shelves into the kitchen proper, we put a table in the nook as well as our deep freezer to utilize it better. But Erin’s alcove in the living room with her huge art desk has been incredible for her. She had a separate office from mine at the old place, and I put a small TV on her old desk, and I thought it would get a lot of use. But she actually tended to sit and draw on the sofa in the living room. Maybe because it was more open, or maybe because it’s where the larger TV sat. I don’t know. But when she said the upstairs was going to be my space (our upstairs in one big open space. It’s like a second bedroom but there’s no door to it, just the stairway down) I knew that she was going back to the sofa and the ottoman if we didn’t work out a new system. She gets to do both, because shortly after getting here I invested in an iPad Pro for her since I saw so many artists doing miraculous things on them and felt it would be something she’d benefit from. So she sketches on that on the couch, then moves to the desk to point (or sew or sculpt or whatever new thing she wants to try that week).
That she accomplishes so much and that I don’t, I know, is totally on me. I’m getting more focused now in the last couple of weeks. But there’s still things I could be doing. It’s been a few months since I’ve podcasted, I don’t know if or when that’s coming back, but I’ve got a lot of space and equipment dedicated to it up here. I could change things and make it more comfortable for other efforts if I chose to. I just have to convince myself that it would be okay to do. And nothing can’t be changed back, or it’s not like I couldn’t find a new happy medium to share the space. But that’s part of it I guess. In the two years of coming out here, I’ve had two long-ish breaks from the podcasting. We started the show (one of them) five years ago. While nothing has been said about it, it’s possible that it’s just reached its end. I hope not, but I wouldn’t be angry or anything. I still enjoy the act of podcasting, but its pretty obvious if you’d watched us the last few years (and, come on, no, you weren’t watching us. Very few people did. But the ones who did… My favorite people) that we were doing it more because we liked hanging out with each other and our guests than it had anything to do with putting together a “show” for an audience. No illusions held there.
The other major part of being here is being close to my family. I get to see them about once a week, which is vastly superior to how it was when I was two days’ drive away (even a flight worked out to a whole day’s journey essentially). I saw them, at best, once every two-to-four years in the time I was out there. So weekly with my parents is, and should be, great.
But that’s my mom and stepdad (and a couple of my nephews). So much of the rest of my family and friends I still haven’t been able to visit at all. I have seen Levi twice since moving here, which is almost as many times as we ever saw each other before I moved back. But I’ve only been out to see my dad and stepmom once. My eldest younger brother wasn’t even there for that trip, so it’s been about four years since I saw him last I think. Not any closer to seeing the friends or places I grew up with. We’re on the other side of the state from where I grew up, so it’s a three hour drive to “home,” and I haven’t honestly looked into even trying to attempt it. Being back in Michigan, I still feel very distant from it as I knew it growing up. And sure, this year in particular has done a number on all forms of seeing loved ones or traveling, so I can’t take that too personally. But I had a year before 2020, and the only time I spent with my extended family honestly was for my grandfather’s funeral just after I got here.
When it comes to leaving California, packing up, and making the trek back to Michigan, it’s still not a sure thing if it was the best move or not. For me. And that’s supposing I need to make a chart or some other way to measure to compare the two. They’re just different places, and different phases of my life. I would love to be able to look at it and say, “Of course, this was easily the best decision we could have made.” And it’s probably true. But it’s still challenging, in new ways, of course. But in the same old ways too. And it’s worse in some ways because out in California I felt like I was only a burden for us. Here we really are taking a lot from my parents in how generous they’ve been with us. Getting some of that under control would go a long way, I think, to make me feel better. But it wouldn’t be everything, right? I still have the stress. I still have the feeling like I’m not accomplishing enough personally or creatively. I still question if I’m giving Erin everything she needs to find her happiness. If my cats are getting their best and healthiest lives.
Maybe that’s too much to expect to change in just two years. Especially when one of them is this one. But it does feel like what I need to figure out. I thought I’d be closer to that by now. I think I can only console myself that I don’t believe I’d be any closer to figuring it out in California.
