Overture

I am in mid-flight between Denver and Seattle on a plane full of screaming children and I am at peace. Thanks of course to modern technology that can drown out the noise with “Transatlanticism” and the gentle hum of the engines lull me to sleep for the first half of the flight. I wake for my ‘cinnamon roll thin crisps’ and coffee rations dulled out mechanically by the crew. Exhausted, sick, and a little hung-over, my friend’s challenge rings through my ears or is that just the remnants of last night? Excited over his recent viewing of “Jules & Julia” he has challenged me to blog about my experiences of moving to Seattle for my first 365 days of living there. This is the preamble.

It’s January 6^th and I am going to Seattle for 5 days to find a place to live. Everybody is tense once again and security is tight, as another failed attack has attempted to destroy our sense of security. I am more worried that I forgot to pack an umbrella and create a gameplan in tracking down apartments then potential terrorists. In reality due to bad planning on my part I only have three days to find a place since most offices are not open on the weekends, which is fine with me. It will be nice to have the weekend to enjoy the city.

So what is this blog going to be about? Why am I doing it? Why should anyone else care? Well its going to be about a young man, not unlike many young men these days, who is leaving the only home he’s ever known in Colorado to move far away to lush, strange, and unknown land of Seattle, Washington. This is where he has no friends, very few acquaintances, and Mom and Dad are too far away to raid the fridge at their house when he runs out of pocket money. It will be about personal growth, self-reliance, and the will to do something different as I learn what it takes to make it in the real world, in the big city, where the only person I can rely on is myself. At least that’s what I hope it’s about. It could just end up being a place for me to whine and complain about how lonely, grey, and wet it is out here. Hopefully it’s the prior one though.

No. This is not a story about some young bright-eyed kid who moves to Manhattan and gets in with all the right crowds and becomes the wunderkind novelist. I am on the verge of turning 24, still have yet to attain a degree, and I am moving to city only a little bit bigger than my native Denver. I have been playing it easy with my life and at school the past five years or as some say, “screwing around,” but I am moving out west far away from my comfort zone for the challenge and to prove to myself that I can take the bull by the horns.