I moved to San Luis Obispo last October with high hopes and a determination to get out and try living somewhere new and fascinating, somewhere I had been very few times before. Moving to a new place is something that most of us have done. It's easy enough. You take all your crap, pack your car until it's skimming the tops of the wheels, slowly move down the highway to your new home, unpack your crap, find out your crap is not going to fit into your new place, try and decide whether to get rid of your milk frother or your popsicle making kit because both won't fit, stuff your new closet's nooks and crannies with random objects, shut the door and hope none of your new friends that you will meet will open it, and breathe a sigh of relief that the moving part is over with. Then comes the hardest part. Meeting new people. The only other time I've moved away from the Sierras was the time I tried to be a university student at USD in the middle of San Diego. College's make it very easy for newcomers to meet and greet by planning group activities such as making you pick up other people's trash, that they shouldn't have dropped on the ground in the first place, for hours with no food or water until you're all hangry (Definition of Hangry) and upset and annoyed with each other to the point that you feel like you've become brothers and sisters within a few hours of meeting each other. It also helps that you all live together in one big "house", sharing each other's germs and food and boyfriends.
I was confident that it would be just as easy this time, especially since my boyfriend, Steve, was moving with me, a surefire friend. Our studio was on the side of Johnson, which was a busy "neighborhood" street that looked more like a freeway around 5 PM when everyone got off work. Our cat Kyle ran away the minute we got there, scared out of his wits after coming down from the mountains. Our neighbors were mostly older, retired folk, who grumbled at the idea of a younger couple moving into the studio on the end. I'm certain Steve's loud, modified engine in his car didn't win us any bonus points either. Back in August we had gone to San Luis to look for a place to live and we had chosen the worst time to do so. We had two days to find someplace to live before going back to work. They were two days of frantic searching. Everything decent had already been nabbed by Cal Poly college kids, so most of we looked at in our price range resembled a cockroach infested hotel room with moldy ceilings or meth labs with scary disassembled stovetops and black windows. When we returned the keys of one such place, the realtor asked what I thought of it. I told her it looked like a definite fixer upper. She responded with, "Yeah, It's more for someone who owns a dog and likes to surf." I'm still trying to figure where she got that stereotype from and if it had ended up being true. So when we came across the studio on Johnson Street, it was a "wemustliveherebecauseeverywhereelsesucks" situation. The landlord seemed a bit hesitant at first to rent two young people this beautiful studio sitting on the end of the row of these beautiful vitruvian houses. The landlord boasted about the solar heating system, the well insulated walls to keep out the car noise on the freeway (Johnson St.) three steps from our front door, and the water heater that heats water as needed ( DO NOT HAVE/LIVE SOMEWHERE THAT HAS ONE OF THESE INSTALLED, THEY BURN YOUR SKIN OFF!). I couldn't stop smiling, finally a decent place! Who cares that it's at the very tippy top/over our price range, it's a place to live and it's awesome! Steve wasn't smiling quite as big, being more practical, but I had already made up my mind. This was where we were going to live! A few months later, when we realized half our stuff wasn't going to fit inside this must have studio apartment, sweat dripping down the side of my forehead from numerous trips up and down the stairs carrying heavy boxes full of my "Ihavetohaveit"crap, our landlord explaining that our overpriced rent payment was due in a week, I was thinking to myself, "IS this where we are going to live?"
to be continued.
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