Here we are on a Saturday afternoon with a root beer in one hand a blackberry scone waiting in the paper bag on my desk. Lunch. In an hour I'll head over to Brendan's house to meet up before biking downtown on a tandem-bicycle to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Here I am sitting on the floor with the space heater humming to my right. Bon Iver's record reaches the end of side one, so I alt-tab to iTunes and play "Ornithopters" for the zillionth time. It's sunny served chilly outside. Gotta remember to bundle up before the bike ride. Iven's coming down from Auburn later with plans of grabbing dinner and seeing the new Mission Impossible movie at IMAX. That's two movies in one day. That's money I'll never see again. Then again, these are friends I won't be seeing for a long time. There's something I haven't really thought about: the seven months of next year that I'll be out of this country. Seven months. It's not the full 12 that Jenny's pulling in South Korea, but it's twenty-six more weeks than I've ever spent outside of the border before, so that's fairly significant. In those seven months, people will move away, people will change jobs, people will change goals, people will change. I'll come back to a Sacramento both terribly familiar and irrevocably different. This is my excuse for neglecting my financial responsibility. Plus it's Saturday and I feel good because I spent the last three hours at Old Soul working on a screenplay. It's winter break. I'm done with school, I'm feeling good about those finals. I'm finally pushing through the "gray period" of waiting and now I'm booking plane tickets and reserving rental cars. My official date of departure is January 30 with an arrival of January 31 in Istanbul. I'm keeping in touch with Rasim, who will be my first friend in Turkey and has offered to house me until the dorms open on February 2nd. Hopefully everyone in Istanbul is so friendly. Now that I've got a ticket and the confidence of passing my classes, I'm more excited to tell people about the plan. Now it feels real. I even felt so motivated that I cleared out my closet and donated all of my DVD's and got rid of some clothes and moved furniture and threw some old junk away. Now my room is a mess, but it looks like progress to me. Last night Chris and Katie came by and I taught them how to play backgammon. Every time I say to someone, "Hopefully I'll see you before I go," I have my doubts and I wonder if this may actually be the last time we ever see each other. January 30 is not far from now. On Monday I'm renting a car and driving to San Diego to see Sean. On Tuesday I'm going to the Turkish Consulate in LA, and I'm hoping that everything goes smoothly. I've got my acceptance letter, my passport, my eight passport photos, my ID... The lady on the phone said it takes two weeks to finalize the student VISA, which sucks, but maybe they'll be able to mail me my stuff. I doubt it. Still, I gotta do what I gotta do, and it'll be awesome to finally see San Diego and see Sean in his new habitat. Speaking of people named Sean, there's a good chance I'll be able to meet up with Shaun in Denver when I spend a few days there with my grandma after Christmas. I miss my Old Soul brother and it'll be a treat to see him again. And then it will be New Years Eve. And then it will be 2012. But not yet. Right now it's Saturday. Right now I've got to bundle up because it's time to go outside.
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