Emotional support landmark

Try to find a landmark of solace when living in a new landscape. I seem to feel affinities for buildings and structures effortlessly and there’s a ferris wheel at the Downtown Aquarium which I felt an immediate warmth towards when I first saw it. The ferris wheel’s kaleidoscope of colorful lights smiled at me.

One of the most special things I could share with someone is showing them the places that haunt me, the places I visit. How I interact with a place I love, or am ambivalent towards, or detest, is a physical extension of my interior world. When someone grants me access into their world in such a way, it is an honor—to invite another person to participate in passing time at a specific location that carries an emotional charge for them is an intimate gesture, and shouldn’t be taken lightly.

What does it feel like to drive on one of the “most dangerous roads in the U.S.” with a death wish that replays like an incantation until you pass by a landmark—a ferris wheel—that looks at you with an earnest face. Is it goofy that a ferris wheel can be life affirming?

There wasn’t a better way to celebrate my first year in Houston than taking a free ride on the ferris wheel at the Downtown Aquarium.

July was the hottest month on record in Houston

I was lucky to have access to a pool.

"You don't have it"

“What are you going to do? Stay in Texas? You don’t have it to stay in Texas and you don’t want it,” my friend told me, a retired English teacher. “I have it and I don’t want it.”

Well I’m staying in Houston, Texas. What' I’ve learned so far:

• If you’re not tied to a 9a-5p work schedule, try to get any driving done between 10:30a-3p.

• If you’ve parked your car in the sun for an extended amount of time, open your windows just a bit after you get back in your car to let the hot air escape.

• It doesn’t take much for me to choose convenience over the environment. I’ve really let things slide. I am living in an archaic gas and oil empire, and there’s something morbidly debaucherous about using styrofoam, endless plastic bags. My lifestyle is an ongoing, undramatic murder of Mother Nature. Without laws and regulations, I don’t seem to have the stamina to commit to reusing, recycling, and…

• In the inner-loop (scroll down in link for a summary of inner vs outer loop) there are a handful of independent bookstores, such as Kaboom Books and Kindred Stories. On the other end of the spectrum, Barnes & Noble feels vibrant and enriching considering it is a corporate chain, perhaps due to to the lack of independent bookstores and it feels like a sanctuary in what feels like a bleak landscape of big box stores.

• Stay hydrated.

• Don’t mess with Texas! Be wary of ant hills in the fields of blue bonnets, in any grassy patch really.

• When I got my Texas driver’s license, I had to give up my California IDs </3. I don’t know if there is a workaround this, but beware.

• There are other items which I will add over time, if I remember . . .

FOR THE RECORD

August - October 2021, How to do an interstate move of a ~300 sq. ft. studio for love/life change:

Moving trucks were in high demand, especially in California: there were so many trucks leaving the state and not coming back. “It’s expensive to live here and it’s expensive to leave? Of course it’d be,” I thought out loud over the phone with the man at Budget who patiently explained the shortage of trucks to me and he told me they did offer mark downs at certain times of the month but the total cost of the rental wouldn’t be less than $4,000.

Moving is expensive, especially post-2020. Flying was expensive, rental cars were expensive, moving companies were expensive. There was a car shortage for months now because a computer chip part for the new cars were missing because there was a shortage of labor or something, because of COVID19—the details are hazy now. How would I strike a balance of achieving cost effectiveness while retaining my morale and motivation to complete the move?

I could minimize the cost by just paying for a storage unit that would then be transported by the moving company (no transportation fees! no gas expenses!) That seemed to be the most affordable option outside of renting a car. The major car rental companies didn’t rent one way cargo vans. I found Sprinter Vans which looked like a scam? They seemed too good to be true, with one-way packages to Texas or the Bay Area, which should have been the first sign that this was an unreliable company, but I was hopeful, even though I couldn’t locate any actual vans in real places. I kept filling out the form to get a quote but I stopped once the site required I enter my credit card information in order to get a quote. I was getting desperate but not reckless.

I decided to try my luck at renting a family van at Hertz, ship my futon and frame via Greyhound and hope that I could rearrange the seats to fit most of my things, and still drive over with my two friends and their travel bags (I’d just gotten my license six months prior to renting the car and didn’t feel so comfortable *driving on the highway* this is a very important detail! little did I know what a role driving on the highway would play over the next several months). When I got to the El Sobrante Hertz, they were out of family vans and were going to try to send me off with a Toyota SUV, but my friend asked if we could take the Ford Explorer instead because it seemed a lot more spacious.

Back at my house, my friends and my parents and I loaded the great American car as much as we could and I had to leave my boxes of books behind. The plan was to drive from my house to my friend’s house where they’d take over for our drive to LA. As an inexperienced driver, maneuvering what was the biggest vehicle I’d ever driven thus far was absolutely terrifying. I felt self-conscious driving such a gas guzzler and felt like I was too small in my stature and personality to handle a vehicle so wide and high off the road. Yet I still decided to call my boyfriend to let him know that I’d gotten the rental and while trying to locate his contact, I started swerving off to the side—fortunately there weren’t cars around me as it was the early afternoon on a weekday. Heart pounding, I looked up in time to correct my direction, get him on the line, give him an update, and arrive safely at Eva’s place.

My friend Eva at the Carls Jr. by the Grapevine, its the last leg of the drive from Oakland to LA en route to Houston. Eva, both pragmatic and romantic, packed the car really efficiently and also encouraged me to not be afraid to fall in love.

June - July 2022, How to do an interstate move and separate residences following a breakup:

Review what I learned in my move over from California to Texas and share as much helpful information as I can to help my ex-boyfriend move from Houston, Texas to Georgia, where he will start grad school. I am staying in Houston. Moving is still expensive, even though it's a shorter distance. He wanted to hitch a 4’x8' trailer to his hatchback and drive it (he installed the hitch himself, to save costs) but was told by multiple mechanics and my car-savvy cousin that doing so would damage the car. “Companies give a towing capacity to everything, but it doesn’t mean you can actually tow with them.” A sad turn of events, but still, a valuable lesson.

CALIFORNIA TO HOUSTON, TEXAS OK?

It has nearly been six months since I moved to Houston from Oakland and six months exactly since it was the last day at my job working at the chocolate shop in Berkeley. The last day at work marked the beginning of the final dash towards getting myself and things out of the Bay and on the road towards Houston, Texas. What’s in Houston? My boyfriend aka my love, humidity that makes the swaths of lush green sparkle and glow like a dream, new prospects in every way, I was ready to exchange the weights I’d been dragging since 2020 with the weights of the big unknown state…of Texas.

Texas: Big trucks, Hill Country, oil fields, wide plains, styrofoam, fading small towns, swamps, armadillos, HEB—stands for ‘Howard E Butt’ or more recently, ‘Here Everything’s Better’, take your pick.

There’s soft and golden sunshine in Northern California, bright yellow and smiling at me. In Texas I get a lot of straight up sun, orange and hot, with a side of sunshine. It’s relentless and gorgeous, like an opera.

*at the time of publishing to this site, I have been in Houston for almost 9 months. I saw a headline yesterday about how yet another California company, Chevron, is moving their operations to Texas and encouraging their employees to relocate to Houston.