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where to live
Jun. 11th, 2023 07:34 pmI've been in the greater Vancouver area since early April, and will stay until early July, with a move within the region in two weeks. Alexei and I are doing this together as a 'test run' of both cohabitation and of specifically both moving together to this region. I'm surprised by how much I like Vancouver; I thought I would find it an insufficiently "big city" but that turned out to not be a concern. Burnaby, our current neighborhood, could have been *far* too suburban but we lucked into a place near many resources including the local train system. It remains to be seen if we can afford this long term, or if our next place (Mount Pleasant, closer to 'metro Vancouver proper') is a better or worse fit.
I still miss some things about New York, about the way my apartment was really mine, about feeling sufficiently connected to a place to give back to it and support it. I wanted to be there during the recent smog making DIY air purifiers and giving them away; I want to be supporting recent efforts at a community land trust in Astoria and Woodside. I don't miss my old city job but I miss the feeling that I was making a physical location better, and don't feel tied enough to Vancouver to start the process here - but I think I could get there, with time.
I think some of the flip side to that is the connection to Vancouver is much more about its natural resources, as opposed to its human ones. I'm doing a lot more hiking, taking ferries to Victoria and Nanaimo, searching for creatures in forests and marshes. Some of that is just that those are things Alexei likes doing, but some of it is just...that's what's available here to do, and it is fun and lovely in a different way, and it's interesting to learn to enjoy it more. And if I want a street of weird little businesses and bars and what not, I can just walk down Commercial Drive or Main Street, instead; hell, even the malls here are more interesting than I would have expected. (Shoutout to the arcade in Metrotown, full of extremely specific Japanese rhythm games.)
Cohabitating with Alexei turned out to be much, much more teneable than I ever thought it would be; it really has just been simple to rely on each other this way and figure out how to live in a space together. Pushing for that long term requires a number of leaps of faith, but it gets more and more tempting all the time to just go for them.
There's lots more to say, about the shifts in my career, about things that are challenging for Alexei right now (and thus the challenges of how to be a good partner amidst those things), about some specifics of things I've done in the last few months - but this feels like a good place to at least start posting again, start synthesizing all the changes that are happening.
I still miss some things about New York, about the way my apartment was really mine, about feeling sufficiently connected to a place to give back to it and support it. I wanted to be there during the recent smog making DIY air purifiers and giving them away; I want to be supporting recent efforts at a community land trust in Astoria and Woodside. I don't miss my old city job but I miss the feeling that I was making a physical location better, and don't feel tied enough to Vancouver to start the process here - but I think I could get there, with time.
I think some of the flip side to that is the connection to Vancouver is much more about its natural resources, as opposed to its human ones. I'm doing a lot more hiking, taking ferries to Victoria and Nanaimo, searching for creatures in forests and marshes. Some of that is just that those are things Alexei likes doing, but some of it is just...that's what's available here to do, and it is fun and lovely in a different way, and it's interesting to learn to enjoy it more. And if I want a street of weird little businesses and bars and what not, I can just walk down Commercial Drive or Main Street, instead; hell, even the malls here are more interesting than I would have expected. (Shoutout to the arcade in Metrotown, full of extremely specific Japanese rhythm games.)
Cohabitating with Alexei turned out to be much, much more teneable than I ever thought it would be; it really has just been simple to rely on each other this way and figure out how to live in a space together. Pushing for that long term requires a number of leaps of faith, but it gets more and more tempting all the time to just go for them.
There's lots more to say, about the shifts in my career, about things that are challenging for Alexei right now (and thus the challenges of how to be a good partner amidst those things), about some specifics of things I've done in the last few months - but this feels like a good place to at least start posting again, start synthesizing all the changes that are happening.