Right now I am in this room. I am sitting at a desk that is a horizontal hollow-core door exactly three paint cans high. I'm looking at a room that isn't quite mine yet, and just a little in awe about this whole experiment.

There's no scientific method, so no worries. The experiment is existential and starts out with a fundamental query: what if I could just do what I want?

Of course, there's booby traps. Not the good kind. The question presumes that I know what I want, which in my case is a big presumption. It also presumes that I can't already do what I want.

The first point of this blog is that I just did.

It all started, as so many things do, with the most gut wrenching sense of loss that I can remember experiencing. That might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. In the end it matters less what caused it, and more that it is a universal experience. It was miserable and lasted way too long. I think at some point I realized that as long as I have to breath and take up space here, I might as well do things that make me happy...

(crickets)

It's not that I had forgotten what makes me happy, but more that the things that make me happy ended up being different than they had been. Here's an example: swinging. I used to LOVE swinging. Seriously. I remember there was a swingset where I first went to college. In the midst of my first-time-leaving-home-anxieties, it was the sign from God that I needed in order to know without a doubt that I had made the right choice.

Heh.

At any rate, I can't swing anymore. It seriously messes with my sense of gravity now. I am running my own little pilot study, and I'd be willing to bet that if you are older than 33-34, your body stops being able to do that. I have a theory that it's because of intelligent design, and genetically being predispositioned to not compete with your baby for toys. My sister has a different (although not mutually exclusive) theory that our inner-ear goes through structural changes because of fluctuations in hormones. We Willems love us some theorization. Can I GET an amen?

Praise God.

So when in the midst of great suffering I poked my head out of my ass and looked around for what I wanted to get out of this whole cosmic shebang, in addition to the obvious things like eating delicious food, mastering that 'pull the noddle from your mouth out through your nostril' trick and ollying up a curb, I realized that at some point it was becoming less about the answers and more about what it felt like to ask the question. Noteably, my life a year later looks very different now than it did before I started asking. Both externally, and internally.

Today, I realized that I want more than anything to be able to nest right now. To have a home. Since landing here I have been staying with a friend in her LOVELY home that she normally rents out to tourists, outfitted with fireplaces, woodstoves, a comfortable bed, pillows, throw rugs, and internet. I thought that my stuff would be here by now, and hoped that I would be writing this from a fully furnished and orderly abode. At first it seemed that my wanting to nest would be frustrated by external circumstances.

Until I questioned that assumption.

Tonight I am sitting in an almost empty house, sleeping in a sleeping bag on an army-style cot, and writing from a desk that is really a door stacked 3 paint cans high. My dear friend and her lovely boy brought flowers that are radiantly displayed in a clear bright-blue nalgeen vase. I have stacked my clothes neatly on the bathroom shelves, and I have installed the shower curtains. I have tea (but no sugar or cream) steaming in an enameled camping cup, my dog asleep in her makeshift bed, candles and incense burning, and internet access.

And most importantly, I have toilet paper.