This of a hot Southern evening....

Tomorrow I'll be shifting house.

Just when I thought I'd come to terms with American lingo, it turns out you don't shift, you move. So yeah, I stand corrected, I'm moving to a new apartment.

A new place is kind of like a new pair of slippers. Uncomfortable in the beginning, but soon enough you fit in and life goes on. Until it's time to hunt for a new one. I like living in the past, but this place has definitely run its course. The furniture provided to us right at the beginning has become useless, the sofa has long become a breeding ground for bedbugs, and the bursts of tap (sorry, faucet) water upstairs has been reduced to a trickle. And of course, Splinter had been a regular visitor over the spring. We kept him at bay by placing big bottles against the kitchen cupboards and cutting out his food supply. But he still comes out at night, almost as an unseen roomie. The casings on the lamp lights have come off as well, so I expect they'll slap a heavy fine on us. But then we'd do well to get back even a small fraction of the deposit from them, so maybe we're even.

I didn't have any great friends in this place, but there were these people I would encounter while strolling barefoot through the premises, walkman in hand. Most of them had a smile ready, some would stop for conversation. They made my evenings. The Filipino who's been around, the punk who had a strange habit of leaving his beachball to bob about in the pool, the Japanese girl who seemed nocturnal, the jamming trio who took a fancy to Bob Dylan songs, the IITan who invited me in for tea, and the chap who compiles his thesis outdoors on his laptop. Maybe I could have got to know them better. Maybe I didn't feel like worming my way into new places.

The new apartment doesn't look all that promising. There's not much around, just wide open fields; this one was closer to the university. There aren't any places to grab a bite in the immediate vicinity. Maybe the crowd there will compensate. The manager seems a bit cold and rude, but that's how they all are apparently. It's their job to be as detached as possible from the tenants. Thesis boy has this theory that you only find women in such positions of power; a man would probably invite you in for a beer and ask you the score.

I'm almost apathetic to this change of apartment, but when it happens I won't know what I'm hoping to find, or what I'm leaving behind. Better to keep it that way.