My parking situation is very much analogous to my housing situation: I don’t quite fit in. One of the most difficult parts of my situation, one that I underestimated during the planning process, is trying to fit the silly thing in parking lots.

Imagine this. It’s Saturday morning, and you’d like to run some errands. No big deal right, just hop in the car and go do them. Think again. There are two ways your scenario can play out.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I believe getting enough sleep is a key component to happiness and success. I also believe that the quality of sleep contributes to these factors. Because of this, I’ve been using an application on my phone that tracks my sleep, for the past year. Basically, you tell the application what time you’d like to wake up, and then tell it how much earlier you’re willing to be woken up. Then, you put it next to you on your mattress while you sleep, and based on your movements, it can estimate what stage of sleep you’re in and wake you up at the best time.

As I’ve talked with more and more people about my living situation, I’ve noticed a few questions that come up all the time. I’m going to answer them here in full, gory detail.

How do you go to the bathroom at night? Do you just pee in the woods?

As cool as it would be, my life is not an episode of Man vs Wild. I do have 24 hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at, so I could use the facilities in there if I really needed to, but thus far it’s just been about planning. I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 PM, and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night. When I wake up in the morning, I ride my bike to the gym and go to the bathroom there.

This is another post on philosophy, take that as you will.

I went out with a couple of co-workers last Friday, and naturally the conversation eventually ended up on my living situation. I’ve been continually surprised at how receptive people are to the whole concept of living in a car, normally once I explain all of my motivating factors. Mainly, I get a lot of “That’s really great! I personally could never do something like that, but power to you for going through with it!”, and that’s vaguely encouraging for me. Coupling these conversations with all of the time I have for reflection, I’ve come to realize a few things about happiness.

Ok, so I have a confession: this is the first post that I’m actually typing up FromInsideTheBox. By the magic and miracles of modern technology, I’m actually able to access the internet by tethering to my cellphone. I’ve already talked about how this place is starting to feel like home, but I think calling it a dorm room, as someone said to me today, is much more appropriate. It even looks like one (see the picture above for the current state of affairs). The only differences are that it’s larger than any dorm room I’ve lived in, and I’m not sharing it with anyone, which are both pluses in my book (sorry Zach). And while I don’t have any problems with it looking like a dorm room, I do have a few plans to make it a little more “homey” in the future.