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I moved out of my apartment in Austin this past weekend, and not without some sadness. My roommates and I lived a fairly cozy sheltered life. We’d baked hundreds of enchiladas and lasagnas and cakes—mountains of cakes. We spent hours sprawled out in the living room watching Netflix or playing videogames (more often than not, watching someone else play video games, and offering elaborate commentary)—this apartment also marks the first time I really ever played on an Xbox. In classic me-fashion, I’m a latecomer to the game.
I settled into our apartment in a way I never had in the dorms. I started thinking of it as home— so much so that I routinely told my dad on the way back to the Greyhound station that I’d call him “when I got home.” I didn’t even notice it as first. It was a very subtle and quick acclimation. It makes me sad in the same way that going back to Houston does, and walking through a house that you used to live in but knowing you eventually have to go somewhere else.
But school years and leases end, and it was time to spread out. We scouted out a little four-bedroom house on the east side of campus. Home for a year, and then back to thinking about moving and furniture and boxes. So many boxes.
A trend I can’t shake
My family tends to accumulate stuff on a large scale. We moved from our first house to our current house and never quite finished moving in. The garage is still full of boxes of books and 80s relics shoved none-too-carefully out of the way so there’s room to walk around— but barely enough. We gather and gather, replace, but never quite discard. I don’t know whether it’s out of nostalgia or just an implied foolishness at throwing out something you paid money for and which still, at face value, has a purpose. I’m just as guilty. My crimes are toys, clothes, and books, all of which (the latter being a unique case) I tend to grow out of and can’t really part with. Being in college messes with that. You can only fit so much in a dorm room. I learned that the hard way. So there’s not much you can convince yourself you need past the sheets, shower shoes (which I highly recommend), and microwave food (which I don’t) that you’re supposed to bring. The by-rule is that you can bring anything that fits in the back of a truck or a van. No more, no less.
Dorms teach you how to be a temporary resident; you can only really pretend that you have some claim to your room—that it’s any expression of how you want to live. But we invested a lot into our apartment—a lot in very relative terms, because of course, I’m describing the purchases of poor college students with poorer taste. We had art, some of it handmade and some of it ordered from a poster website so we could eat dinner (and also slave away at homework) below Gustav Klimt and van Gogh. It helped that we had a beautiful concert harp sitting by the table. An illusion perfected.
Come time to pack away our little home, I kept uncovering doodles we’d taped onto each other’s doors, books, and homework assignments. I couldn’t keep these. I had five boxes and a few plastic organizers, and a whole year’s worth of furniture and artifacts to fill them with. I had to choose. The food went first. Old vegetables, half-empty cans of jam. Things I couldn’t feel bad about tossing, although living in Austin has created this enormous sense of guilt in me when I throw away something I could probably recycle. #2 plastics, #6s, glass, aluminum—all of it went into bags and all of those went into the dumpster, with few exceptions. My apartment only started “recycling” a few months ago. Before then, we’d take our carefully-sorted boxes and bags to campus or a few centers set up near us. Even now, there are two small trash cans in the alley that are for “recycling.” Paper and metal, but not glass. It’s a shame.
Weight and burdens
Towards the end, we started throwing things away wholesale. The furniture had already been moved and stored, along with boxes filled with boxes filled with things I’d thrown in haphazardly out of haste. Small appliances, a vacuum that decided that instead of cleaning the carpet, it would catch on fire, containers, the free water bottles that accumulate after a few years of college event-shopping, and a disheveled boxspring that it took me a year to get rid of, having found out twenty minutes too late for my dad to drive back and take it home with him that it didn’t fit my bed frame—are now moldering in a landfill somewhere. My enormous, disgusting cross to bear.
This is the DART bus I ride back and forth from work every day. Actually, that’s incorrect. This is one of four buses I ride every day. Two up, two down. This is the bus that gets me home at 6 PM, more or less on the dot.
A lot of people ask me why I ride the bus at all. There are two reasons, one a little more complicated than the other. The big reason is that I don’t drive, but I’m working on it. Long story short, I should have squeezed driver’s ed somewhere in the mindless and free summers of high school, rather than trying to find a few weeks when I’m home from college and don’t have any other commitments. It’s a hassle, but one that will hopefully be resolved soon enough.
The second reason is probably why a lot of people take the bus. It’s cheap. Third reason? It’s easy. There’s a bus stop across from our apartment complex. The other bus stops right in front of the gate. And once I get on, I can read or write—things I can’t even do when I’m not driving. It’s calming at the end of a long day. Most of the time.
I’m no stranger to buses. They’re probably the most reliable way to get around Austin, and a godsend if you don’t have a car. I always make sure I’m nice to my drivers, mostly because I can’t imagine how hard it is sometimes to shuttle stressed out people back and forth from their jobs, to take a couple hits, and keep going for hours and hours. Nothing big. A “Good morning, how are you?” and a “Thank you, and have a nice day” can mean a lot though. I’m not the only one by far, but I try to do my share. Least I can do, right?
The bus system in Dallas is pretty efficient. Buses are usually on time, stay on route, and get you where you need to go. Traffic’s a problem no matter which city you’re talking about, and it can get a little crazy in Dallas too. I got stuck on the tollway for an hour waiting for an accident to get cleared up—I can’t complain. We drove past the wreck and the ambulances, and everyone who’d been groaning and looking at their watches suddenly got silent. It’s fair to be annoyed. People expect a certain thing from a service they put money into. People also generally understand that some things, like accidents, are inconveniences that can’t be avoided, especially not by a bus driver.
Yesterday afternoon, the buses were running a few minutes behind. Nothing shocking. Usually, you can get five or six minutes back once you get out of the city, and then you’re back on schedule. But rush hour in downtown Dallas being what it was—a crowd of people and cars, buses, and bikes all trying to get home at 5:30—delays are sort of par for the course. And a backup a few hours back in the system can make all the buses that follow it a few minutes late. This, I thought, was common knowledge.
I’ll probably hate myself for saying this later, but I really can’t wait to get back to Austin. I’ve been letting my lazy side run free for about three months (six weeks of which I worked and worked hard, mind you!), and I really need to sit down, slap myself a couple times, and hit the books. I have a thesis to start preparing for and two majors to finalize. Granted, there will be quite a few Hulu breaks, especially since I’ve started watching Haven which is basically X-Files set in small-town Maine, David Duchovny stand-in and everything. Before I start fawning uncontrollably, I thought I’d explain something.
An explanation…
When I say I’m studying Classics and Linguistics to people who for a variety of reasons have never heard of it, everyone assumes, for reasons I cannot fathom, that “Classics” means “that girl reads a lot of Dickens and Hugo.” Which is totally true, but besides the point. Classics is the study of ancient Greek and Roman civilization. It combines history, literature, drama, politics, geography, languages, art — everything. The breadth of this field, both in terms of subject areas and sheer timespan, is the reason I chose it for my primary major.
Linguistics, similarly, does not mean I just learn a lot of languages (although this ls also true). It means that I am studying the science of language, the mechanics. It does help to know many languages to be a linguist, but you don’t learn them through the major. There. That settles things. For now…
…And a defense
It’s not even that people don’t understand what I’m learning. I’m starting to figure out a few people don’t value it. Sometimes it startles me who I hear it from: people who I thought valued education and culture. Now, there are some pretty silly majors out there, but far be it for me to tell someone that what they studied is worthless. At some point, one should be allowed to acquire an education for education’s sake, and that means study what you love, whatever it is. Some of us (ahem) love the past, and it will never be enough for me to sit down and read a Wikipedia entry about ancient culture. How could that possibly be enough? What does that teach me but the bare bones of these people and civilizations? It’s the same for History, English, Classics. Hell, it’s the same for all of the Liberal Arts. To know enough about your field to call yourself “educated” demands more than any casual research will ever give you. It demands an education. It demands mastery, and that’s something that anyone in any field should agree with.
I am not a classicist. Not yet. Not for several more years, until I’ve mastered the languages, read the works, poured through the history, thrown myself completely into my field. After two years, I have barely dug a hole two inches deep. The amount of things I’ve learned, however jaw-droppingly huge to me, is only a fraction of what I must one day master. It will take a lot of education to get to that point. In three weeks, I get to dig a little deeper. The only feeling that comes to mind is this: bliss.
