The time I had to move, Part 1

(Apologies for a shorter entry today, but I’m making this one free for all. The second post this week will drop Thursday or Friday.)

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Everyone’s life has a couple or a half-dozen or maybe scores of pivot points. Times where a different decision would have completely changed the trajectory and course of your life. I don’t know if it’s a function of me being a writer or if everyone else vacillates between what The Weakerthans call “the easy lie of absolutely no regrets” and puzzling out what would have become of me if things had gone a different way. Or if I had gone a different way, I suppose.

The first such divergent path I can recall (that I had any measure of agency over) was when I was in grade school, and my father received a job offer that would have necessitated a move to Detroit. My sister and my grandmother and my father and I went and got the huge atlas that slid into its own slot of honor in the top of the bookshelf that housed our 26-plus volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and we flipped until we found the pages for Michigan. We looked at where Detroit was located within the state, and we looked at the map of the United States with its crisscrossed veins of interstate highways and imagined the trip that might take us from California to this strange, bisected state. We talked about winters that actually came with snow, and about how often we might be able to visit our family if we moved. I remember feeling a mixture of curious and excited and sad and afraid, and I remember that ultimately my sister and I convinced my father not to pursue the opportunity. (But I might have that completely wrong; my dad might have decided that on his own, or my grandmother might have not wanted to be so far away from her family or him so far away from her, or maybe he himself was too scared of a change, or maybe the truth was that this job offer was either hypothetical or mischaracterized, or never materialized. Whatever the reason, we remained.)

And then my sister graduated and left home, and six years later I chose not to repeat a chemistry class that would have allowed me to receive the required grades to apply to UC Davis (which I only wanted to go to based on one visit when my sister briefly attended, and I really had no idea what I wanted to major in at that point) and instead chose to attend junior college when I graduated. Along the way, my father had other opportunities that passed by — a longtime girlfriend that he probably would have eventually married was suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed shortly after. Another couple of relationships that might have given him some support and companionship were not helped by my bad attitude. And chances to move and buy a more sensible home and build a better nest egg for himself were sunk in part because I didn’t want him to move. I was living with him and helping him, and was quite satisfied to maintain a status quo.

After two and a half years of community college and realizing I wanted a career making movies, I applied for a transfer to San Francisco State University, where I would major in Cinema. It was my first time living away from home, and I moved the summer I turned 21, in the year 2000. I was waiting tables at Olive Garden at the time, and also managed a transfer to the Olive Garden in San Francisco, which was located at the Stonestown mall, which was just a block from SFSU.

I rented a room in a (supposedly) four-bedroom house located half a mile from SFSU, and my entire world existed in a little circle of south San Francisco, abutting the city line shared with Daly City. I was living on my own for the first time ever, in my favorite city in the world, and for some dumb fucking reason, in my first semester at a four-year college, I signed up for a schedule that had me attending classes six days a week.

Oh yeah: and at the time, I was a Christian and a Republican, and I was straight edge and had a bad attitude and poor work ethic. I guess I’m still straight edge and have a bad attitude and poor work ethic, but I was then, too.

This is all just the table-setting for the story about the time I had to move, but it’s important context.

Next time: my strange old roommates, my semester at San Francisco State, one traumatic night, and the time I had to leave. Also, a miscommunication that I’m still a little bit peeved about, and as a treat, the saddest 21st birthday of all time.