danah boyd | apophenia

Moving has been unbelievably chaotic. The packing process took more out of me than i could’ve imagined and i managed to re-injure my elbow. Then i lived in an empty apartment while people came and cleaned and painted and Marbellio screamed. Then i took her to a friend’s house for the night where she screamed most of the way through the night. Then there was the painful car ride down to LA where i landed in the midst of them painting my house for two days. The first night, i slept in my sleeping bag on top of plastic in the middle of the paint zone. The next morning, Marbellio ran out the back door when the cable guy appeared. We searched everywhere but couldn’t find her. Just as all of this was happening, the nice man from the Financial Times landed at LAX to come interview me. After four hours of searching (while telling the FT guy all about social media), we put up flyers all around the neighborhood. The Kinkos guy was super cool – once he realized what we needed copying, he gave us half off and made us promise to report back. Around 5:30PM, while i was getting photographed, she walked in the back door and meowed. I nearly fainted. She was filthy but home.

In the midst of all of this, i got to meet many of my neighbors and tour my neighborhood. I’m *so* excited by my neighborhood. It’s unbelievably diverse. There are families and hipsters, churches and swank restaurants, modern uberpricy houses and shacks. There are people of all ages, races, cultures. And everyone is unbelievably nice. It’s kinda surreal really.

Today the movers come. Let’s just hope that this is the last of the true chaos and we can settle in and make it home.