Assis dans un apartement vide.

So here we are at last, with my very own blog...
I suppose in the long run this will be Serbia-related, but who knows. At the very least, it's certainly a useful way to keep family and friends updated on my life.
At the moment I'm sitting in an almost completely emtpied apartment. My mother was here this past week helping me figure out storage and pack up and all that sorta fun stuff. Man was it fun, there's nothing as exciting as putting stuff in boxes all day long, then lifting those boxes and hauling them all around town, then rinsing and repeating! Yeah... Fun like the dentist's office. But we got it done, somewhat to my astonishment.
I'm still not used to walking into the place and not having *any* of the stuff I've had around for the better part of two years lying about, the usual mess, etc. It really drives the point home that I'm just about done with Washington, DC. Weirdly enough, I think I like this whole Spartan-Bushido-Dojo (it sounds better than "I got no stuff") style of apartment decor. My girlfriend strongly disagrees.
In a few days I'll be heading to Austin, TX, to housesit for my mom for about 10 days, and then I'm back here again for just a handful of days to really wrap up the last few things, close up the storage for good, hand off the keys to the apartment, and then *finally*... I'm off to Serbia, on October 17. It's about damn time.
It was easy to daydream about going to someplace different and new everyday when I was stuck in my dreary office. The reality of packing up everything and moving to a place where I don't know the language, a single person, or anything else for that matter, is a little more, um, complicated, both logistically and emotionally. I knew, of course, that it would be, and I'm glad that as I get closer to D-Day here I'm not finding myself doubting my decision.
Why Serbia? I really don't know. I can't give specific reasons, a list, measured and logical facts or anything like that; it just feels right. I'm not sure it will even really matter when I get there. What matters more is that I know leaving DC is the right thing to do. I've been here, more or less directly, for 6 years now. That's, uhhhh (smell the burning calories as I try to do math) probably twice as long as I've lived in any other single place. You could say it was my first attempt at "taking roots" in a given place, trying to stick out friendsihps and relationships and jobs and yadda yadda yadda. Before that, it was always time to pick up and leave every 2-3 years, a lifestyle you get used to (or addicted to? Jury's still out on that one).
Looking back, I can't say DC treated me particularly well. In the interest of looking foward vs. backwards, I'm not going to waste time on it all, but suffice to say I'm not really sad to be leaving at all. I worried (or hoped?) for awhile that getting closer to leaving would sort of drive home some kind or realization or epiphany, that hey, life ain't so bad here, and that I'd somehow get sucked into staying here longer. I'm glad to see that is not the case, but in fact quite the opposite.
At this point, I cannot *wait* to get to Belgrade. I've been planning all of this for a long time now, and I've been slower to act on it than I initially imagined, but now that it's almost here I can practically taste all the beer and meat I plan to consume there. Through a lucky and utterly serendipidous turn of fate, I have managed to find another guy just about my age, from the US, *also* going to Belgrade, for reasons as fuzzy and vague as mine. Very fortunate, and very bizarre, I mean really, what are the odds? Either way I must say I'm quite glad to have been put in touch with him. He, however, just arrived in Belgrade about a week ago and has been very busy updating his own blog with pictures and overall reports of how fricking awesome everything seems. Naturally, this makes being stuck here in an empty apartment, counting the days, that much more difficult. I guess I should be using this time to practice my Serbian more... Yeaaaaah... Homework was never my forte.
On that note, I'm seeing that this (only second!) entry is absurdly long, so I'm gonna stop there.
Adieu.