Getting Oriented.

I swear I'm going to talk about my tattoos this week.

Seriously.

I just don't have the pictures right now. I feel bad because I've been saying I was going to do it for a month now.


First things first.

This weekend, three days stretched into two weeks.

My orientation for school was Friday, so one of my roommates (G-Raffe) and I drove down to Modesto Thursday night after I got off work. Our other roommate (Button) has been staying there with a couple friends for the last month and a half or so. We crashed on their couch.

I got four hours of sleep, got up at seven, and went to my orientation at eight.

Not that I wanted to go to orientation. I just wanted to sign up for classes. Which you're not allowed to do unless you go to orientation. And pay the $75 to attend orientation.

There was a warning that if we didn't get there by eight we'd be locked out. Yet they forced us to watch a slideshow with pictures of clubs and Katy Perry songs until nine.

Then they talked. Then they made us play games. Then they took us on a tour. Then we had to listen to them talk for another hour and a half before they fed us.

Lunch was close to an hour and a half long with tables set up in direct sunlight only.

I am white. (On the outside; internally I really identify more as Native American. My skin just doesn't really agree.)

By one I was red. And white. My dress had a square neckline. Now my cleavage is all weird.



My armpit is super sexy. Almost as great as my strapline.

After lunch we finally got to meet with our academic advisors and register for classes. I finished early, got my student id early, and still didn't get out of orientation until almost three.

I was grumpy, to say the least.

Since Button was at work, G-Raffe and I met a friend at his house and he made us dinner, which was quite delicious. It had been incredibly hot all day, so after dessert we sat around the edge of the pool in his backyard and soaked our feet in the water.

I went to check the time on my phone and didn’t understand why I couldn’t read the screen when I pressed the button. Then I realized a snail had wandered up onto my phone. It was kind of adorable, waving its little antennae at me.

I washed my phone immediately after.

We picked Button up from work and went over to Target, where we purchased a ton of cleaning supplies for our house.

Button got up super early and went to work at seven Saturday morning. We picked him up at eleven and went to the bank, then went to sign the lease on our awesome townhouse. We were able to start moving some of his things after two. Then we went to Home Depot to rent the flatbed truck in order to move the larger things. Their computers were down, so we had to go rent the truck from Lowe’s. We ended up not moving the furniture, so it just made moving the boxes faster and easier.

Driving the Lowe’s flatbed truck with three people in the cab and the back full of stuff is a lot different than driving my little Honda Fit. I felt like I would never be able to get my speed up, and as soon as I started to a stoplight turned red and I had to slow down really fast. Luckily, nothing fell out of the back. We must have done a good job packing. Maybe.

After returning the truck we tried to look at a few appliances. We realized how late it was and G-Raffe and I made the decision that it would be better to stay the night than to drive back as late as we were probably going to have to as tired as we were. This also enabled us to help Button out with a couple more things before we left Sunday. And we had a floor pizza and slumber party.

I’m kind of glad we ended up staying, even if we did have to sleep on the floor with hardly any blankets or pillows. Now we can say we spent the first night in our house together.

I feel like I’m trapped between two worlds for now. One is the world in which I currently live and the other is the world awaiting me in Modesto. The world in Modesto is ready for me to enter it (and in a lot of ways I’m ready to go) and the world here is somewhere between pushing me out of it and suffocating me so I can never leave.

I finally started packing yesterday.

I’ve never really taken my time to pack. Every time I’ve had to move since becoming an adult has been rushed. And when I moved into my old apartment I was able to make a bunch of trips. When I moved out I pretty much shoved everything into my mom’s CRV and a trailer and fled.

This time I’m moving four hours away and I have to take furniture and everything. I have to actually go through the crap that I’ve accumulated over the last three years of living here. And the crap from before that, as well.

That being said, between knowing my financial situation, knowing where I’m going to live, and knowing what my classes will be, I’m surprisingly less stressed than I’ve been in months.