The Great Unsettling, Broken by Keys, Crafting Elbow Room
As detailed in my last post, we recently moved out of the apartment we had been in for over twenty years. I knew that it was going to be crazy, and it was every bit as daunting as I expected, but it seems that I naively underestimated the time it would take to get back into my old routines and feel a sense of being truly settled. The new place is only about a mile away from the old place, so geographically, I thought it was barely a blip, but it turns out that one mile makes a much bigger difference than I realized. It means a new grocery store (the grocery store was its own mini-saga, more on that in a moment), a new gym, a new hair salon, new (and longer) walking routes to everything, and a constant, low-grade sense of general disorientation. The mere completion of unpacking, putting things away, and arranging furniture does not, as it turns out, automatically imbue one with a sense of being comfortable and fully at home. The apartment is really nice, but to me, it still feels a bit akin to living in a hotel, and we continue to find oddities and quirks of the physical space that we have to adapt to. According to the Clifton Strength Finders test that I took recently, adaptability is one of my key superpowers, so I am little disappointed that the perfectly-settled feeling I yearn for still eludes me. Then again, it hasn’t even been three full weeks, so I need to remind myself to be patient. Everyone is telling me it takes time. Everyone is correct.
I was doing fine, running on the fumes of adrenaline and decidedly not falling apart, until last week when the grocery store situation and the multiple-keys situation merged in a perfect storm of annoyance, and I broke. I burst into tears in the kitchen, sobbing about how everything is all off, and I can’t just run the garbage out on my way to work anymore because it needs a key, like everything else in the building, and whereas before I had two keys, now there are six keys, and I don’t know which one goes where and I keep forgetting the one I need to actually get into the building, and the new grocery store has terrible rotting lettuce and I have to cross a major intersection to get there and I can’t find anything because it’s too big and too stupidly laid out. Mr. Typist instantly sprang into husbandly fix-it mode and we worked through the key situation pretty quickly. Grocery-wise, ultimately, I decided to sign up for a membership at PCC, a local organic co-op, which I did not want to do because I think of myself as very pedestrian and I don’t like anything that smacks of food snobbery. I also finally caved and joined LA Fitness, another place I didn’t want to join because of the proliferation of models and meatheads that swarm the place. So now I’m that person who shops at PCC and goes to LA Fitness. And you know what? LA Fitness is a super- nice, modern facility with a great pool, and it turns out that organic meat is a hundred times better quality than whatever factory-farm crap I was buying all those years at the old store. It’s all good, man. (The co-op is also amazingly affordable.)
The other thing that’s good is my new crafting table/diamond painting space. It’s nothing fancy, in fact it’s basically just a chunk from a huge old American-made desk from the seventies that was part of Mr. Typist’s computer desk set up. It had been housing an ancient, clunky printer in the old place, and while talking through our moving strategy, we hit on the “no-duh” solution to my diamond-painting space dilemma—we would ditch the dinosaur printer, and I would take that particular piece of desk as my crafting table. It’s working out marvelously! It’s set up right next to the window, the light is glorious, and it’s super-solid. I can really spread out. I was losing my diamond-painting mojo, being previously cramped on a rickety card table and having to stack everything precariously and hope I didn’t move my knee the wrong way and cause a fiasco. With this new/old table, my progress on the monster that is the 110,000-drill Bathroom in Paris painting has been exponential. If I keep it up, I may actually complete it before the end of the summer. Here’s what my new rig looks like:
The table is also going to be a great work space for framing projects, setting up punch-needle embroidery, sewing and all manner of crafty goodness that is dancing in my head, so I’m thrilled.
The settling will come when the settling comes. It’s not a thing that can be forced, and anyway, it’s likely a bit overrated. It is possible to be too settled, as I was probably was before. There is nothing wrong with an occasional shock to the system to snap one of out of ennui.
—Kristen McHenry