Old houses, new homes

So on Easter Sunday I moved from Seedpod Co-op to a friend’s house in Cambridge near Central Square.

Pretty stoked.

Settling into the room for the first time tonight.* Although instead of unpacking, I’m mostly writing emails and blog posts.

To end on a positive note, first a few reasons I’m sad to have left Seedpod.

• No longer being with the totally awesome people who live there. If you don’t believe me, consider that they do things like this. (Note the next show.) Seriously, if you don’t mind the commute, check them out for vacancies, which are more frequent around summertime.
• No longer having an amazingly well-stocked kitchen, at a reasonable cost, without having to personally shop all the time.
• No longer living in the most diverse neighborhood of Boston.** And not just because of all the good pho on Dot Ave. One part of why I wanted to move there was unease with the almost unconscious tendency of college-educated white kids like me to stick to mostly-white neighborhoods.

And a few random reasons I’m happy to live on Laurel St.:

• I’m a short walk away from such vintage and thrift establishments as the Great Eastern Trading Co. and (a bit further) The Garment District, even though the men’s section at the former is mostly just polyester disco shirts you want to buy but can hardly ever wear.
• Shopping for myself, which means I can eat (a) what I want, and (b) at the level of frugality/expense that I want, which tends to be more polarized than how the average coop eats. Though I’m not off to a great start. I did my first grocery shopping tonight, and I think I didn’t fully realize that, when I went home, I wouldn’t have anything to eat but what I bought. My dinner ended up consisting of chocolate, Irish Breakfast and Hennepin. I suppose you could do worse.
• Being. so. close. to. Cen. tral. and. Har. vard. and. Da. vis. and. M.I.T. and. down. town.

(No, that’s not my house pictured, it’s just some random photo from St. Louis “Hotness Confirmed” Missouri.)

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*I haven’t unpacked since then because I’ve been doing a freelance book design project, which I think might be my last. I loooove me some typography, but I find it a bit unsatisfying as paid work. I need a lot of time to really suss out creative ideas, and that’s difficult with commercial projects that have, you know, deadlines. And it’s perhaps inherently frustrating as art because you can’t easily be creative without distracting the reader from the words themselves, which results in a constant battle to be normal without being boring. I’m happy I once got to set a book with Sauna however.

**Because Dorchester is so huge, it’s divided up into multiple other neighborhoods, so should the whole thing really be called a “neighborhood”? It’s more like a borough. Except we don’t have boroughs.