Worrying: A Lifestyle

So far, it's been pretty mixed in Santa Cruz. On the one hand, I've got the program and my friends, on the other, money and the future. When we got here I spent the first three + months worrying about Becky finding work*, then in winter I was just concerned with finding a master's paper topic, now I'm on to worrying about me finding work.

It's pretty hard to be broke in this town, much harder than it was in Oregon. We spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month just staying fed, and that's TJ's groceries and never going out. We had the fabled porch-couch in Eugene, and a free-as-cheap solution to the perennial "what are we doing tonight" question was "have a BBQ and sit on the porch-couch." Here, we sit and watch movies on a laptop and drink cheap gin and 2-buck chuck. It would all be terribly bohème if there was a little more, I don't know, crazy carefree romance to the experience, but for some reason the literary precedent loses something in the translation to actually worrying about the rent.

The other thing is the claustrophobia...it's not just living in a tiny apartment w/ two people and a monstrous lagomorph. Santa Cruz itself is packed-in like an Italian city, with little windy streets and close-together buildings. There's only one place to go for a walk from our building (down W. Cliff), which is a fantastic walk but which would be well-served by having alternatives. I miss the ability to use walking as real transportation and I miss rent being in the three-digits rather than the four.

So: sellin' some books. Hopin' the temp agency finds something for me. Doin' the robot on streetcorners for cash.

* Becky, it should be noted, never freaked out about the job hunt. She and I trade off on who-freaks-out-about-what, and lately it's been all me.