Next weekend my life is going to change in a very drastic way and it's kinda starting to freak me out. For years, I've moved almost annually from one apartment to another and I've almost always had more space than any one person could ever require. During those years, rents in my area of South Jersey have exploded to the point where none of the apartments are worth it. No basic one-bedroom apartment in South Jersey is worth $900. There's no justification other than the fact that people are forced to pay it because they can't get mortgages. I wouldn't have a problem getting a mortgage...but I certainly don't want one. So I'm moving to South Philly with a roommate in a small apartment with no washer, no dryer, no dishwasher, and no parking space.
This is a lot to get used to. I'll be sharing a bathroom for one thing, which is just something I never can quite wrap my brain around. After years of needing to do my laundry in machines being used by only me, I will be figuring out the ins and outs of schlepping everything to and from a laundromat. (I still have no idea how people do t-shirts, which obviously need to be ripped from the dryer after ten minutes and hung immediately.) And with my worse-than-garbage sense of direction, I can't believe I'll be looking for parking spaces every night and expecting to remember where my car is when I wake up the next day.
My bedroom is a good size which is important because it's where I'm going to be living for the most part. The rest of the apartment consists of a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room--and the living room has been converted to the second bedroom! Even though my room is big, I have been standing in my current living room, staring at the boxes I've packed and wondering just where in the hell I think it's all going to go.
Still, this is exciting. Living with my new roommate is certainly part of the adventure because I've known him for years but not that well and I'd never even considered what it might be like to live with him. I'll be incurring some new costs (tolls coming over the bridge from work every day, a laundromat, almost-certainly-higher auto insurance, and the occasional cab) but they should be more-than-outweighed by what I'm saving in rent, which is going from $825 to $325. Yeah, that's $500 a month back into my budget. Can you even imagine? It's like getting a $6,000 raise.
Even more exciting, however, is that I love South Philly. I mean, I fucking love it. And all my friends suddenly live there. Amy & Paul, Sandy, Vince, Todd, Dane... The list goes on and on. Plus, my favorite restaurant is, like, two minutes away.
So it's going to be an adventure in that it'll be a totally different way of life...but it's also going to save me a ton of money...and it's going to be a blast because I'll be in a place I love and surrounded by people I love. Who could ask for anything more?
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