Zoe Faye

Escape

I want to go on more adventures.  Maybe this summer we will have more adventures. If we can afford them.  It will be nice to not be broke and hopelessly job-hunting this year.  Even if I have to wake up at 7 almost all the time.

I want to go to the zoo, which is happening after the wedding, I’m pretty sure.  I want to go to King’s Island and the really awesome Japanese market I keep hearing about. And the two-story Barnes & Noble.  So I guess I want to go to Ohio, haha. Also, I would really like to go back to Santa Monica.

Or maybe to a beach on the East Coast. I haven’t seen the Atlantic Ocean yet.

Levi and I are hoping to visit my family in California sometime later this summer. I’m really hoping we can go to the beach again, because it was wonderful. Visiting my family will be even better this year, because this week they have found a new house of their very own to move into. Well, technically not their very own. They are renting it. But they have been living with my mom’s parents ever since I left for college (almost 5 years now), which has not been fun at all, so I’m sure it feels like their very own enough.

I am so very happy for them to have found a good house and a delightful-sounding landlady.  Good things have been happening for them lately, and it’s about time.  So much has been really lame for them the past few years, and I have felt so bad not being able to help in any way. I have also felt a little guilty not being stuck in all the lameness with them.  I got out of Bakersfield after high school, and save for a couple of long summers and seasonal visits, I haven’t really lived there since. And I don’t plan to. I keep saying if I move back to the West Coast, it will be to the Northwest. Southern California is too hot in the summer.

Though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it sometimes.  I guess that’s what visits are for.

(Pictures from Levi’s camera, during our trip to Santa Monica Pier, May 2011)

Surprising Simplicity

Even though I am pretty convinced the universe won’t let anyone get out of Weddingland without some difficulty, some things are still allowed to be simple.

Like the actually getting married part. Surprisingly easy.  Get license. Get it signed. Send it back.  You’re married!  All for under $50. And applying for the license itself was pretty simple too.  We had a very vague idea of what documents we needed to bring with us.  The county clerk’s website has been under construction since we got engaged.  The lack of websites around here is rather frustrating.  But we asked around and ended up going in with more than we needed to identify ourselves and prove we live here.

Also, the courthouse has a mini airport security type deal set up at the entrance, except you don’t have to take your shoes off. The buckles on my boots set the metal detector off, but Levi’s suspenders and Pacman belt buckle didn’t. Weird.

I like it when things are simple. I also like it when things work themselves out nicely.  Like our matching clothes. We told our party to just wear blue dresses/ties. Any kind of blue. And we are wearing a nice green color that Levi calls jade. It started with my wedding sweater, a cropped cardigan I ordered from Forever 21. I ended up finding sneakers in the same color; then we found Levi a tie and pocket square that matched me. We ordered all these things online, knowing the colors might be distorted by pictures and computer screens. But when each item arrived, we compared them. The color has a different name on everything we got. Sea Green. Jade. Waterfall. But it all seems to match perfectly.

I think it’s a good sign.

The Vexing Venue

So this week, we almost had a crisis concerning our chosen venue, a picnic shelter in a really nice community park.  A little over a month ago, Levi had called to reserve the shelter we wanted, a large one near the lake. Well, a couple of days ago, he caught me at the end of my lunch break at work to tell me that when he went to pay for our reservation, he learned that the Park Reservation People wrote down our date as March 11th instead of May (when it was past March 11th at the time of the call—come on, Park People!) and someone else now had our shelter.

Fantastic. Now what?

We chose the park because it was nice and easy. It has tables and seating. It has a playground. It already looks nice, so minimal decorating on our part. It has a roof over the tables and seating in case it rains.  And it’s VERY inexpensive, which is important to a couple of broke college kids.

But I have been learning that nothing about weddings is ever simple. The universe just doesn’t allow it.

We talked it over very quickly (I had ten minutes of lunch left).  Apparently the park people had not been very helpful or apologetic for their mistake. Well.  I suggested we get another available shelter at the same park. We had a couple of other options in the backs of our minds, but we really wanted to be at the park.  I bought him an Arctic Lemonade and reminded him of Cave Johnson’s advice for when life gives you lemons. He went back to the park people, and I went back to work.

For the next couple of hours, I cleaned the cafe and argued with the Park People in my head. I told them we called to reserve the shelter about a month ago, and had already been inviting people to our park wedding, thinking we had a venue.  I insisted they had made a mistake, and asked them how they were going to fix it. In my head, they made an ignorant comment about how weddings are usually on Saturdays.  I reminded them that I was having mine on a Friday. They asked why I had waited so long to reserve a shelter.  I pointed out that we called a little over a month in advance, and kindly reminded them that this was their mistake, and asked them not to project the blame onto me.

Internal Zoe handles these things much better. If I had really been talking to them, I probably would have ended up crying, or something embarrassing like that.

As I got off work, I got a text from Levi saying they gave us a smaller shelter, no charge.  That’s more like it, Park People.  I guess my internal argument really got to them.

The Arduous Apartment Search

We decided too late that we wanted to stay in our current apartment, which we love. So we will have to move. Again.

Ugh. I hate moving. Especially in the summertime. It will be July which means sweaty and gross. We always move in July.

Worse than moving itself is trying to find a place to live. When you’re moving, at least you know where you’re going.  When you’re searching for a new place, uncertainty hangs over you like little black rain cloud.  What if all the good places are taken? What if we don’t end up near the bus station/good bus lines/school?  What if I have to take TWO buses to work every day instead of just one? What if we have to haul our laundry to the laundromat again?

It turns out that one does not simply rent an apartment in Huntington. I have spent lots of time browsing Craigslist for apartments. It’s mostly people trying to get out of their leases at The Village.  I must have looked at hundreds of ads, but we only ended up looking at a couple of places before settling. I think this is mostly because NO ONE on Craigslist would email me back. I would email them via the Craigslist email address on their ad (because most of them neglected to include contact info) and never hear anything back. Only to see the same ad re-post several days in a row.

We looked at apartments by a big rental company that deals largely with Marshall students.  They had a couple of buildings that looked nice on the outside, but turned out to be too tiny inside, with small, square rooms and practically no kitchen cabinets.  We wouldn’t even be able to unpack all our stuff. They had another older building with bigger units, which we knew we would need if we went with them.

The second apartments we looked into were much newer and very nice but super expensive.  The landlady there charges per person, which is a ridiculous way to charge for one apartment. She seemed really nice; I could tell she cared about her tenants and her apartment building. However, she referred to her tenants as “kids.” Sure, they’re college-aged and probably mostly in college, but kids?

The one thing about her was most off-putting to me was the way she was super involved in her tenants lives and she was incredibly gossipy. She told us the personal details of the people whose apartments we were looking at, as in, why they were leaving. It was a little uncomfortable.  I made a mental note to myself not to tell this woman anything personal about myself if we moved there. Nothing I didn’t mind her turning around and telling all her prospective tenants about, anyway.

One thing that bothered us in particular about both places was the fact that we couldn’t sign a lease on our own, like with our current place. No, they both wanted us to have a co-signer (read: parent guarantee) before they would let us lease an apartment. Because we’re children?  I mean, we’re getting married in less than a month, why do we still need our parents to sign stuff for us?  Not to mention we’ve been renting apartments for 2 or more years now, with no problems on our part ever. So, yeah. Lame.

We ended up settling on one of the more spacious apartments in the older building owned by the first company we looked at.  It’s the same price as what we have now, doesn’t allow pets, and doesn’t include and utilities except garbage, which is disappointing. If we were going to move, I wanted to find something better than our current apartment. Cheaper, at least. Instead we ended up grabbing one of the first things we could find because not having a place to live past July was stressing us out (on top of everything else).

Oh well.  At least we found something decent. It’s hard to find good places around here.

Hopefully we’ll have better luck in the Northwest.

It’s National Poetry Month again and I will celebrate by sharing some delightful news: a poem of mine has been accepted to Et Cetera again. Actually, aside from my fiance (hi Levi!) and my bestie (hi San!), I haven’t told that many people about it.  I’m pretty excited, even if it is just a school lit magazine.

Sometimes I feel horrible about how much I write (or don’t write). Sigh.  I need to get better at this.  When I graduated, I thought I would have SO MUCH TIME to do ALL THE THINGS that never got done enough while I was in school. Well, it turns out that Zoe-With-One-Job-And-No-School often feels like she has less time for fun things than Zoe-With-One-Job-And-School. How does this even make sense?  I was going to keep studying Japanese (I don’t want to forget it), write SO MUCH, read that shelf full of books I haven’t gotten to yet, and plan my wedding.

And yet, I haven’t touched my Japanese books since December. Nor have I gotten very far in my reading list.  And I haven’t really written much.  At least my wedding is getting planned though. But that’s a whole new post by itself. Maybe I’ll write about it.