moving (again)

So the last time I blogged was when I was in San Francisco, where M and I spent a month after our cross country trip, enjoying the luxuries of my brother's apartment while living a simple life of sustenance. Now I'm in San Francisco again, back in my brother's apartment, while I look for a place of my own to occupy for the next few years. I don't know if the blogging recurrence after a long hiatus is due to the common city of SF and place of this apartment, or to the common feeling of rest after having traveled far, or my own manufactured value of commonalities, but I think that regardless of source there's some connection.

It feels strange to be somewhere that I'll be for the next three years, instead of the next three months. This past year was all motion, where feeling settled was being in one place for one or two months. At the end of last summer M and I were in the process of settling into commuting between Long Island and New Haven, which lasted a few weeks before we decided to pack up and move to California, which we did a couple weeks later. That fall, we spent a month and a half figuring out in the morning that night's place, which varied from the woods to a stranger's couch to our car. After that, the October of steady nights in San Francisco felt good. We took another road trip through the Northwest, seeing northern California, Oregon and Washington while I went on interviews. We spent Thanksgiving with my family in Denver. We flew back to the East Coast together, me for interviews and him to spend Christmas with his family. I flew back to California to spend Christmas with mine, and he joined me for New Year's. We then packed up, leaving most of our camping gear in storage in Fremont, and took another road trip down to San Diego to start 2012 there. The plan then was to find a place for M to stay while I went to Uganda for January and February, but we had little luck in finding a place. We spent a couple weeks there, again couchsurfing and sometimes resorting to motels, once setting up a futon in a kind stranger's kitchen. I had to fly to Uganda before M was settled in San Diego. He eventually found a non-ideal place, while I settled into the dust of Uganda. After Uganda I visited him briefly in San Diego, and then returned to New Haven for a mandatory class, the last of my med school requirements. At the end of that period, I matched into residency at UCSF on March 16 and the day after, flew back to San Diego to spend my last two months of medical school living next to the ocean with M. In mid-May, I flew back to New Haven for the last time, to graduate. The day after graduation, I started yet another drive cross country, to return here.

I journaled a little during our big road trip, a lot during Uganda, and I wrote intermittently while I was in San Diego. But I spent most of my time in the process of something, instead of processing. And per usual, there's little transition to unravel all that's come before. But I think that in the midst of all this moving around, now that it's time to be in one (physical, at least) place, I will work slowly at wrapping up this blog, and moving onto another.