It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me at all to hear that the move to California has been difficult for me. If you read some of the back posts on this blog, you'll probably find me bemoaning my fate in one way or another in a lot of them. I hope that I don't come across as too whiny or negative in them, but the cross-country move to a city I'd never been to has been way harder than even I imagined it would be. I have some ideas about why this is true.
First, I still don't really have a job. I have a couple of part-time gigs, including the Bay Area Anthropology Examiner job I mentioned in the previous post (go to my page! Read my articles!), but none of them bring in enough money to live on. The girlfriend does, in fact, have a full-time job (with benefits! Yay, health insurance!), which means that we're probably not in any danger of living on the street anytime soon, but she hates the job. Really hates it. Comes home every day saying how much she hates it. But she can't quit it. How would we live if she did? It is one of the most frustrating things in the world to not be able to pull my own weight with household expenses and it's even worse because she doesn't even like the job.
Now, my girlfriend is an amazing woman and so she has been amazing about me not having a real job. I know that she wishes I did have one and I know that she's jealous that I get to stay home all day with the cats, but she is wonderful and supportive and understanding. I couldn't ask for anyone better, and that's the truth. So that makes things a little better.
The second thing that is really hard about this is how lonely it is. We don't really have any friends. Or, rather, we have two friends who live in Walnut Creek and a few more scattered throughout the Bay Area, but we don't have very many and they're mostly not available to hang out with. This is a completely different situation than any I have experienced my entire life. In college and grad school, I had bunches of friends. So many, in grad school in particular, that I would sometimes find myself with 3 or 4 options as to what to do on any given night. The girlfriend used to have to force me to stay home and hang out with her. Now, a busy weekend is seeing one friend. I haven't been to a party in months.
We haven't exactly been busting our butts to try to find new friends, I'll admit that, but I also think it's just way harder to find them out in the real world. In grad school, we were constantly surrounded by people who more-or-less shared our worldview, interests, and commitment to learning. Out of an academic context, those people have to be sought out, and the pool of people we interact with on a regular basis is much, much smaller. By the time the girlfriend gets home in the evenings, she's mostly too beat to want to go out and we can't really afford to do it on a regular basis, either. And so we aren't really meeting people and we are continuing to be pretty lonely.
This is not a woe-is-me moment, although it may sound like one. It took me a long time to understand why I was so miserable, so now I can start doing something about it. I am trying to make a little money doing freelance writing (if you know anyone who's looking for a writer, editor, or proofreader, send them my way!) and I'm finally getting a few students to tutor, so I'm feeling a little bit better. And, if I haven't said it loudly enough yet, my girlfriend really is the best in the world, which makes everything much better. With any luck, I'll have better news soon. Fingers crossed.
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