Also, my simple life at home was starting to bother me, which is part of the reason why I don't want to be in school at the moment. I'm sick of this 'fantasy' life where I have no responsibilities other than sitting in front of a computer and finishing off assignments/studying. I just want to switch up the rhythm to my life, and I figured this would be a nice way to shake things up. Indeed, it was.
Here's some shots of the interior of the place:
Not too shabby. In the second photo, you can see my air mattress and my sleeping bag to the left, along with my laptop and other study tools on the table.
My roomie is at school most of the time, since he likes studying in the library rather than where he lives, so I have been treating the place like it's my home. It's an incredibly empowering feeling to walk up to a fancy apartment building, whip out your apartment keys, and walk into a classy looking suite. I've always wondered what it feels like to own your own place, and now I know. Is the independent life all that it's cooked up to be?
My schedule looks like this:
- Wake up at 6:30-7:00
- Make breakfast for the next 30 minutes or so
- Eat breakfast, leave some for friend
- Make lunch for the next 30 minutes or so
- Take my morning dump, change, pack
- Yell at my friend to wake up
- Head out for class
Having that extra responsibility of feeding myself is actually great. If I starve for whatever reason, I have no-one else to blame except myself (maybe my roommate, if he doesn't go grocery shopping when he should). I must take into account the length of time it takes to make each meal and the quality of the food. Of course, the tough part is learning to cook when you've never really had to make food for yourself for your entire life.
Thankfully, my friend knows a thing or two about cooking, so he showed me the magic of cooking steak. We made some for dinner on Friday, and this was the result:
Not bad. Thanks Jenn for the food prep tips over text!
Another interesting point to make about living in this apartment is that there is no internet.
Wut? No internet?
Yes. No internet. And also possibly never any internet.
But is such a thing even possible?
When I mentioned this to a friend, the first thing he mentioned was, 'but how will you pleasure yourself?', with a genuinely worried face. He's a funny man for having that being the first thing to pop into his head. But that's beside the point. Living without internet for more than one day is an intense experience. You think a lot more about your immediate surroundings. You have more time, which you can use for physical exercise, meditation, or studying/doing homework. Whereas there may be days when hours pass by browsing the web, without that connection you are always aware of the time. It makes you plan ahead. Dare I say, the experience is refreshing. I'm not sure how much longer I can hold it up though, considering the basic connectivity I require from being a computer science student and working on a web app project.
I am typing this from home, which I returned to for the weekend. Back to having food made for me. Back to convenient internet access. All this made me reflect on my experience.
One of my biggest goals in life (which may be modest for some people) is to get a place to live. To be self-sustainable. To be able to earn enough money to pay my own rent as well as give a couple hundred to my mom so she can live without having to worry about whether a certain food is on sale at Safeway, or if her apartment rent will go up. I pretty much got a taste of that life. I returned to my 'own' place after classes, which I could treat as my own, and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to do.
It made me think: now what?
What do I do, once I reach that theoretical point? I would have to imagine that there could be times when I'm sitting in my fancy apartment on my fancy sofa sipping a glass of wine, being bored and wondering what to do other than waiting for the next workday to show up. What would be the next step in my lifestyle?
Is this even something to think about? I'm probably looking too far ahead. As things are right now, I'm a non-working debt-ridden university student. I will never be able to purchase a full home in Vancouver in the foreseeable future. But I have to say, thank god for my co-op salary next term. I'm definitely looking forward to it.
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