Well, I have just hit that time of year where I gather up all my belongings and uproot somewhere else until I come back to college. I like to call it "packing". I live in a home with 30 other women, and I haven't heard any positive things to be said about packing up their stuff, which is weird for me since I think packing is great! If we never packed up our stuff to leave, we would never find our favorite pair of shorts we lost in January, or that picture that was never meant to see the light of day. Personally, it takes me a really long time to pack because I just sit and go through my memories of the time I've spent in that place.
Most recently, I just stumbled upon a book I thought I'd lost that I love, called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (I highly recommend it, even if you're not science-y like me), so I just started reading it again, and I'm reminded why I loved this book so much in the first place, especially in science-based writing, it's very hard to not be extremely dry, and this book does a great job of it.
I also found my wine bottle corker, been looking for that for months!
One hard thing about attending college far away from home is you never know what exactly you need when you come to college. Yes, no one actually knows, but at least you can get the stuff you forgot or bring unnecessary things home. I've felt awful this whole year for taking up way more space in my room than either of my two roommates, but have been justifying it to myself by the fact that I live 2,000 miles away from home, while both of them live within 40 minutes. However, I realized while packing up my things that I didn't use about a third of the things I brought with me, and that I had been taking up all that space for no good reason (sorry roomies!). This is another great thing about packing: if you don't have hard emotional attachments to things, you can really purge everything unnecessary, like the 10 sweatshirts I haven't worn in two years.
^my room is so sad now!
The adventures of packing up all your stuff can actually be a good time (like the time my roommate and I drove around for two hours trying to find boxes in a part of Denver we had never seen - good times) but it's sad as well, because you know you're leaving the place where you made so many memories over the past year and that you won't see the people you are used to seeing every day for a long time. The bright and fun room I've lived in this year is now drab and dull, but this just means that I have the chance to redecorate my new place of residence - right across the hall!
This time packing is more bittersweet than I intended it to be, especially saying goodbye to my friends and sisters. I will be headed abroad to Zanzibar in August to study coastal ecology for four months, so I won't see some of the amazing people I've spent time with this year until 2015. But I know when I get back and am able to unpack, I'm going to start a great Junior year at the University of Denver!
^yay for studying abroad on an island that no one's ever heard of!
Thanks for reading!
Kim
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