I wanna move.

I wanna move so badly that I can practically feel it as a physical presence, like the onset of sinus pressure, making me restless and claustraphobic. I keep looking around this tiny shoebox of an apartment and going “How have I lived here for so long? How have I not gone blazingly insane?”

To give you some idea, my best measurements of this place indicate it’s less than 500 sq ft, and in fact, I keep getting a number that looks a lot like 432 sq ft, which I am trying not to believe because that way lies madness. I feel like a truculent sardine. This is part of the reason I don’t do many physical paintings–I have no room. My acrylic winged frog, 18 x 36 on masonite, which I painted because I couldn’t help myself, was done by sitting at my computer table, wedging the ends between my knee and the coffee table (on a diagonal slant), the water for cleaning by brushes balancing dangerously near the keyboard, (which was being used to house the tubes of paint–there’s still a smear of Payne’s Gray on my O key) and two extra brushes tucked behind my ears and clenched in my teeth. Needless to say, my muse has to be beating me about the head and shoulders and screaming to attempt such a feat, and my bladder hasn’t been the same since.

It’s not that I dislike Minnesota. I’ve been pretty happy in Minnesota, these last nine years, the people are nice, I’ve got friends I’d miss. I have acclimated to the weather. But god in heaven, I have grown to hate this apartment.

It’s looking more and more likely that we will, in fact, move to Arizona. We’re flying down in late April to look around. I am, cautiously, allowing myself to get excited at the prospect, although this may be in part because I have vowed that even if we don’t move there, I am getting out of this friggin’ apartment this year, if I have to tie the cats to a cat-sled and mush them to freedom. I’ll do it, too.

I have a dream.

My dream is that someday I will live in a place that was built in the last century, rather than the one before that (or at least, has been restored sometime in the last century–this thing was built in the late 1800s, and I think it’s still got the original wiring.) A place where there is more than one grounded plug on which to run our computers, where plugging in a toaster does not blow a fuse. A place where water damage is not causing the hideous wood panelling in the bedroom to warp away from the walls and the leaking radiators buckle the wood flooring until I can see into the basement from my living room, and where I do not live in fear of my upstairs neighbor crashing through the ceiling. A place where the hot water comes out at more than a trickle, and without the mold-filled, raccoon-sized hole under the sink. A place where the bathroom linoleum is actually capable of being clean, instead of merely less crunchy. A place with a toilet that has user-serviceable parts, and where flushing said toilet does not cause the basement to experience a brief rainstorm. A place where structural damage has not caused the doorways to warp and slant, which is sort’ve annoying, and I hear it’s really really bad feng shui and that I should probably festoon every available inch with bamboo flutes and mirrors, but meh, some causes are lost. A place with a washer/dryer that still have doors.

I wanna move.

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