Current mood:

pensive

Big update!
Things seem to be changing so fast. In less than two weeks from now, I will be leaving Columbus and heading home to Pennsylvania for the summer. After that, I will be coming back here to get my stuff in August, and moving to Tennessee to attend MTSU. Callie and I drove down there for a visit last week, to take a tour and get some administrative stuff taken care of. It's only the second time I've been down south. Murfreesboro, like much of the south, is a weird mix of old and new. There's a lot of the old south: run down neighborhoods straight out of Gummo, storefronts that haven't been updated since the sixties... But there's also a lot of subdivisions and brand spanking new commercial developments.Many of the buildings at the school are brand new, a $38 million dollar library, an impressive business school, and the 10 year old Mass Communications building where I will be spending a lot of my time. Now that I've been down to visit, I'm really anxious to go.

I'm not the only one planning to leave. My friend Clint is moving to Chicago to attend graduate school. He says that many of his friends are leaving Columbus too. My roomate, who is a filmmaker, is planning to move to LA at the end of the year to try his luck in the film industry. Callie still has another year of law school, but she will probably be going home for the summer. I really feel bad for her. She tried so hard to line up a summer legal job, but after 45 interviews or so, she has yet to land anything, despite the fact that she's in the top 15% or so of her class. Damn economy. I really hope things are better by the time I leave school. Perhaps it would be best to just aim low.

So it's a weird feeling to know that I will be leaving the city I spent five years in, probably for good. It's not that I really like Columbus that much to begin with. I will probably miss some things, like Barley's microbrew, or Studio 35, or the few decent concerts that come to town each year. But I never intended to stay here. Other than the fact that I resided here and knew the city, it never really felt like home. But what is home, other than a location that we always return to because it's where our stuff is? Or it's where our families are? But I might never have gotten to this point in my life if I had never left Pennsylvania. (Fat chance. I always knew I wanted to leave there.)

So here I am, in a state of wistfulness. I will be saying goodbye to the few friends I have made here in the next few weeks. I will be going home to see friends and family members that I haven't seen in months or even years. My mom is having a huge family get-together the weekend I come home. But above all, I finally feel optimistic. Ten years after graduating high school, and five years after moving to Columbus and adjusting to adulthood, I finally feel like I'm heading in the right direction. I don't know what the future holds, but as long as I enjoy what I'm doing, things will be ok.