hello, moonbirds!
i don’t often use this blog as an actual blog, despite my tenderest dreams of leaving behind a bookshelf full of notebooks that people will read when i am gone and realize how smart and funny and gifted and dope i was.
and then they publish those journals and they become international best sellers and everyone in the world is like, “wow. what a smart and funny and dope person that molly person was, if only we’d showered her with money and gifts and attention while she was alive.”
and up in heaven i’d be like, “omg that’s soooo embarrassing, those are just my little nothing journals!!!!!” but i would secretly be super thrilled, and only me and god would know.
but god would be cool about it.
god would be like, “what’s a little pride between friends? everything is fine.”
what was i talking about??? this is why i could never have a youtube channel.
oh right, yes. i moved to london! it’s just for a year, while i get a master’s degree, because basically what happened in my life was i had a very hard -- not bad!! just hard -- year at work and decided that i needed a reset. also, i’ve been meaning to go back to school since i left school in the first place, and now that i am so old i practically have one foot in the grave i realized that like. if i don’t do it now i’m just never going to do it.
this is the only way to ever get me to do anything, which i’m not proud of but can be honest about.
a surprise benefit of this move is that now that i’m blonde, and having an american accent isn’t the norm, the number of people per day who ask me whether i am notable actress elizabeth moss has really skyrocketed. to be fair, i do look a lot like elizabeth moss.
(do i just start saying yes? is that what i’m going to do?)
there are many interesting things about moving to a new country. one of them is that moving to a new country is a nightmare. it’s a nightmare!!!! not only is it 8,000x more expensive than moving to a new place in your own country, which is ALREADY EXPENSIVE, but also you have to deal with the government in a really weird and visceral way, and it’s irritating and expensive and hard and EXTREMELY nerve-racking, and that’s me talking as a fairly affluent white lady, toward whom almost all governments mostly take a paternal and protective view. i can’t imagine what it’s like for someone who is ... not that.
jk i can imagine it!!! it’s awful!!!!!it’s probably a war crime!!!!
one thing i liked about the UK visa application though is that they asked me without any dose of irony whether i had ever committed a war crime, or participated in a genocide. i liked that both because it cleanly and expressly let me know that war crimes and genocide weren’t welcome behaviors in the UK, but also that they trusted me to be honest about it.
i hope one day to never meet the war criminal who’s like, “well, yeah, but the past is the past.”
one thing i DIDN’T like about the UK visa application was everything else about the UK visa application.
A N Y W A Y, i’ve been here about 10 seconds, but have already begun nesting in a way that implies to me that sometime during this, my 28th year, i’m going to start wanting kids. you know what i’m talking about? like i feel like the point in your life where if you’re ever going to go from Not Wanting Kids to BIG WANTING KIDS is always kicked off by suddenly you feeling like, “oh man, i just need a good SPACE i need my SPACE to be WARM AND WELCOMING AND COMFORTABLE,” where before you were like, “hello!!! welcome to this dumpster. i live in it. the wifi is bad. i stole my coffee table from a frat house my brother lived in.”
humans are just bowerbirds with worse plumage, and you can quote me on that.
i’ve got all my furniture and the basics settled, which is to say i went out and immediately bought like 14 plants and called it a day on decorating, but my bookshelves are empty which is causing me real anguish and i can’t hang anything up because i’m terrified of putting holes in my wall.
so far london is great, although we disagree on a handful of small things that i know i’m being painfully american about but i can’t help. like for example, i can only take the trash out one day a week. i am the only person in my whole flat complex that is allowed to take her trash out on that day, and every other day i am nOT allowed to do it. luckily my day is a monday so probably i’ll be fine but what if i had a party on wednesday! what am i supposed to do with the detritus of having people i like come to my house!
jk i GO to parties, i’m not fool enough to THROW parties, that’s WAY too much responsibility.
but IF I DID.
also nobody in my house organizes their mail because we don’t have mailboxes, we just have, like, a Mail Shelf where all the mail goes, and it stresses me RIGHT out. yesterday i blacked out and organized everyone’s mail for them which is weird and invasive but honestly it was kind of like i just lost control of my body. i’m not a NEAT person by nature* but my god, folks, we can do better than that scene from It’s Always Sunny where charlie is the mailman!!!
*honestly most of my life is me running around behind past me cleaning up her mess like, “WHO RAISED YOU?”
still, overall, it’s been good. i miss chicago, obviously, because chicago is the love of my life. i’ll probably be posting at weird times and my twitter engagement is gonna go way down but on the other hand i live about four steps from this big old secondhand bookshop so doors, windows, god, etcetera.
if you live in london, of course keep an eye out and say hi if you see me! i have only like 4 friends here and i am frankly desperate for more.