Below is what I learned two years ago. Even though I remember these lessons clearly now, I’m not sure I could convey them as well as I had here.
I suppose you could always bring more along if it makes an easier transition. But there is always a sinking thrill in seeing your new place. The rooms are usually smaller than they appear, not as sunlit as the photos, and might either be barren, or too littered with the history of its previous inhabitor. That’s from the doorway. Taking the first step through, is taking the first venturing one of commitment. However many more steps you take afterwards, and in whatever direction, your head is going to be moving back and forth, your eyes taking in as much information as they ever will, your fingers laying contact with your new abode: the information, for once, is all relevant, all you, all yours.
And what are you going to do with it?
Funny that you never consider, as you set out to do your chores for the next while is all for one very simple desire: making yourself comfortable.
What can you not live without? There’s the basics: food, water, shelter, warmth/clothing, sleep. Everything else is up to preference really.
Oftentimes people write about children, adolsence, an adults, old age, and everything in between – with the exception of university students. Why? I suspect it is because university is a condensed formative experience: the assimilation of ideas, and the steady compromise between survival and ideas. We’re too busy trying to figure out to live to actually record the process.
Incidently, we never record our leaps and bounds that land us in springs, or fields, but more often than not, in puddles and off cliffs. It is the time that one learns to fend for oneself, the only aid being a phone call home in a dire emergency upon realizing one doesn’t know how to do laundry, or boil an egg, or clean the bathroom.
Last year I learned that dumplings must go from freezer to boiling water if they are to remain intact and individual. And to think that I thought myself brilliant to remember to defrost them.
This year I learned that wardrobes are ridiculous to assemble, and can be fixed with stubborn smacks and random exerting and inserting. Desks as long as I am tall, however, are simple to build, but difficult to co-ordinate the final inserts.
I also learned that mini ovens blow the circuit breaker for my bachelors, and with experiment, that one energy saving light may be turned on, with the hot water boiler, and a – a miracle! – two lights might be on when the oven is going. That was experimentation after blowing the breaker twice within 5 minutes.
Within a few days of moving into my bachelors, I also learned that fridges are never to be turned to full, and mini fridges will either freeze everything, even out of the freezer compartment, or that the freezer compartment will be inadequately cold if the vegetables are not frozen.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to cook a little. It began with boiling eggs on the corner of the room opposite of where I was building the wardrobe. The ones I didn’t finish would be frozen in the fridge accidently – with the curious result of ice clustered on one side along the cracks of the shell, and the white dry, but still freezing. Forgetting about it at room temperature for an hour meant an alarming pile of mush that went into the garbage.
They say we should make reflections and new years resolutions. Reflecting is much easier when your past leaves pieces for you to rediscover years later.