So here we are, almost a week into living in California. How have things progressed, you ask? Well allow me to tell you!

Arriving in California was comforting, but also a little overwhelming, and my roommate’s words kept echoing around in my head, haunting me.

Don’t live in a van. Don’t do it.

-Zach B, Roommate for Life

I started to second guess myself. Was this really what I wanted? Was I actually being insane? What if I went through with it and then decided I didn’t want it? I’d have to deal with all the stress of having to find an apartment while starting a new job, and trying to sell the stupid van on top of all of it. Would I actually be alright without truly having a home? I was in full-fledged panic mode, and I’d been on the West Coast less than a day. Panicking is very not my style, or so I like to think, so I decided to do the rational thing, and make a list of pros and cons of living in a van, and then make a well-informed decision based on that. So, ordered from most important to least important reasons, here is my list:

And here is where things start to get interesting. Since my internship last summer, when I realized the only thing I needed was a place to sleep, and company perks could provide the rest, I’ve done a little bit of research into how exactly this whole van situation would play out. In my search, the most encouraging thing I found was this:

Google Security came by very early on, but once they determined that the guy in the mysteriously parked white van was just an eccentric Googler and not the Unabomber, they never came by again.

Keep Reading…

The weeks leading up to my inevitable departure from UMass Amherst are but a blur at this point, a torrent of papers, finals, and tough goodbyes. I remember having to check the “One Way” box when purchasing my flight, which at the time seemed like exile, or even a death sentence. I remember sitting in Marcus Hall for the last time, frantically typing away at my Machine Learning final, wondering when I’d next see any of the people around me. I remember walking out of my last class, a 4 PM history GenEd about the American family. I remember the strange feeling of seeing my bedroom empty, something I hadn’t seen since I moved in nearly two years prior. Compared to the next steps in my life, these memories are fairly small events, which somehow makes them more important, you know?

It took me a few days to code up this blog, so I’m going to write a couple of posts back to back just to catch the site up to speed with my life.

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I don’t know exactly when I had the idea to live in a van, or where I first read about people who had done it. What I do remember, distinctly, is finding out how outrageously expensive it was to live in the Bay area.