2005-11-18 - 6:19 a.m.

The whole of my adventure is as follows, without any delusion or lies: Following one of my whims, I packed my things into boxes and began making plans to move away. I wanted to live in San Francisco, in the hub of the world -- I wanted to run away towards a little dot on a map, without knowing what to expect. My boyfriend and my roommate wanted to come with me, and by September first we had a nice little apartment in South San Francisco and some fake offer letters from jobs, just to get our feet in the door.
Here is where the adventure really begins: my boyfriend and my roommate were on their way with the moving truck. We were going to load it up and start out for our new home, but then our apartment complex in South San Francisco called and said, "Sorry, you've been declined."
To say that this came as a complete surprise would be a terrible understatement. We had thought that everything went as planned, but our plans were unravelling quickly, and all I had now was a lot of boxes all stacked up in my living room and a moving van. I could have stayed with the boxes, sleeping on my floor until we had another plan, but instead we loaded up the truck and left as planned, except now we had no destination.
We arrived in a California city called Martinez, where some of my boyfriend's friends live. They hooked us up with a deal on the rental truck and they also got us a cheaper rate at a hotel, where we stayed for two weeks.
Two weeks with three people in a room with two beds -- free movies, breakfast, and free alcoholic drinks at night. We put our things in storage and lived off of free hotel muffins and bagels and eventually we all found a job giving telephone surveys -- seven hours in an office chair, on the phone, getting paid $8.15 an hour without actually doing anything but talk on the phone. Now that we had an income, we began looking at apartments, and eventually got in. The woman said we could move in on a Friday, and on Thursday the hotel kicked us out to make room for another guest. Homeless. Again. We slept on a friend's floor and woke up to the prospect of having a home.
It has indeed been a crazy journey, but we have all our things in order now: our apartment has a big balcony that connects to the dining room and our bedroom and all three of us got bored of our job and so applied at the hotel where we once lived -- and all three of us again got hired. I serve the free breakfast and work the front desk, the boyfriend does the front desk at nights, and the roommate cleans and does maintenance.
My life is sane again, but I will always look back on the adventure to California with fond memories: homelessness, hotel coffee, bus stops, hardwood floors, long walks, using spare change to buy lunches, a stockpile of free muffins, and the cycles of hopelessness and optimism.