lemon.

A very long way of saying… I’m moving.

Oh hey there. Long time no chat. Yeah, that’s my bad. You see, almost every night, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I mentally go over things on my to do list. Things that have been there for too long and I can’t muster up the energy to actually accomplish (PLEASE let MLK Day be a day o’ accomplishment in the Lemon household.. please?), and in addition, I think of people I need to email and all the things I’ve meant to write about on tumblr. I lay in bed at night and mentally draft tumblr posts. Yeah.

But then, I wake up. And I have this thing called a job, and these other things called responsibilities and friends and stuff to do and I never actually have the time to write anything down. I’ve mentally drafted a 2011 in summary post several times, but now we’re over two weeks into the new year and a navel-grazing recollection post about last year seems vaguely, well, lame. Plus, fittingly, I blogged very, very little in 2011. So yeah. Here I am, after midnight on a three-day weekend, having just watched hours of the Golden Globes and football and having spent the day trekking around the city in 15-degree weather, in the name of apartment hunting. So rather than lay in bed, I’m going to finally write a post.

And done.

…

Nah, I kid. But what I will write about is of course ME. Story-time!

When I graduated from college what seems like a million years ago, but was actually almost eight (!!), all I wanted to do was move to Washington, DC. I loved that city. I’d spent two summers there and it was exactly where I wanted to be. I found an apartment, or rather, a sad little room in an unglamorous house in Arlington, and hitched my Honda Civic to a star and blah blah blah. I soon got a job in politics (oh the glamour of the 2004 presidential election), found a better house, and I was on top of the 22-year-old world. What could go wrong?

Nothing went “wrong,” so to speak, and that makes it all the more confusing that a year later, I up and interviewed for a job in a city I’d never even contemplated, where I knew virtually no one, where the cost of living was insane. And when I got that job, I did something a little shocking: I took it. 

I feel like the thing about New York is… everyone is like, hardcore psyched to live here. Like they can’t imagine living anywhere else. But I wasn’t psyched. DC was my New York. It was where I wanted to be. I looked at New York as this cool city for other people. It wasn’t me. 

So why did I even take this job? To be perfectly honest, I flipped a coin. Sounds trivial, I know but my honest-to-God strategy for major decision making has long been a coin flip because in the moment the coin lands, you know how you really feel. Your instant reaction tells you what you really want. I had made two pro lists, one for each city, and DC’s was significantly longer than New York’s. I had friends, a car, several Targets within driving distance. Keys to success and happiness, you know. But when I flipped that coin and it too said DC, I knew instantly I would always wonder. So I moved to New York.

Obviously, six and a half years later, it’s gone ok. Oh, there have been DAYS. But overall, it’s the most pleasantly surprised I’ve ever been.

But back to 2005. Once I accepted the (what turned out to be insanely shitty) job, I had three weeks to sell my car and figure out a move and apartment hunt in the craziest real estate market in the country. It was, to put it lightly, fucking stressful. My super-DC-BFF escorted me on an overnight trip to the city to apartment hunt. In 20 hours, we looked at three apartments and I took the first one. I had to find a roommate after one bailed and found someone I’d never met off Craigslist. That turned out ok. If you’re ever out drinking with me, ask me about the time my roommate was naked on my couch.

But the apartment was a true New York experience. It was a fifth floor walk-up and the rooms were railroaded so I had to walk through the roommate’s room to get to the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. And the kitchen, well, it was tight. But the place was cheap and conveniently located and because I am criminally lazy (we’ve addressed this), I lived there for almost five years with three roommates, including Mere. That apartment was the site of some legendary times, including the founding of our tumblrs from the living room couch.

Anyhow, this is a long-winded way of saying that my first New York apartment was kind of a shithole, but many great memories were made there and I truly lucked into it and had basically no search. Feel free to hate me, it was still a fifth floor walk-up.

In 2010, because I wasn’t having a crazy enough year, I stumbled into my current apartment, was wooed by the amazing kitchen, and decided to complicate my life by moving. So I moved. And I whined about it a LOT on tumblr (I refuse to link here). You would’ve thought no one had ever moved in the history of the earth, the way I carried on. Sorry about that, y’all. I’m really whiney when… well, a lot.

Anyhow, for a year and a half, I’ve had an amazing kitchen in a pretty great apartment. Plus, I’ve lived alone, which has provided an obscene amount of late night snacking, peeing with the bathroom door open, wandering around naked, and being as messy as I like. It’s really been as great as everyone says. Everyone should try it, provided they don’t live in New York and can actually afford it.

While in apartment one, I met The Boy. He put up with the move to apartment two, mostly because he wanted me to not live in squalor anymore (I kid), and somewhere along the way, we’ve become one of those couples who is actually really happy. Like, the opposite of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries.

Slight digression: if we were friends in real life and we went to dinner to catch up, you’d ask how things are with The Boy and inevitably, the conversation would turn to what degree of serious we are. Have we talked about marriage? Have we talked about our future? Have we talked about what we’re looking for? These conversations have always stressed me out because I dislike the generalizations and comparison that inevitably and perhaps unintentionally take place. It’s no one’s fault, I get that, but it does feel a little scripted, like there are certain milestones we should reach by a certain number of months together. Is there a chart somewhere for that?

Although I am almost never serious or thoughtful or sincere in my posts here (I’m much better funny), one thing I do want to sincerely share is that The Boy and I have decided to move in together. 

And I’m scared. Shitless.

I should clarify. I’m not scared because I think this is in any way wrong or not the right decisions at the right time… this decision has been a year in the making. I feel good about this decision and The Boy does as well. I’m excited to be in the same place physically, and I have been looking forward to this for some time. My nerves mostly come from never having done this before. Yes, I’m 30 and I’ve never lived with a dude. (A romantical dude, I’ve had guy roommates.)

Anyhow, I feel like my nerves mostly come from this all being new territory and that there must be some like, unwritten list of rules for living with a paramour and I’m not going to know them and oh my god, how embarrassing. So, that being said, does anyone (of the five people who have made it this far, and hey - thanks for reading!) have any words of wisdom for me?

TL;DR version: I’m moving in with my boyfriend. Which resulted in 15-degree apartment hunting today, ugh. But I’m scared! Tell me what I need to know. (I mean, I already know about the match in the bathroom thing, so what else?)