Levi and I selected an apartment last night, and are putting through the final paperwork today. It’s a unit at a brand new building called The Palms, modeled after similar buildings in West Palm Beach, FL and Los Angeles.

Right now the building owner’s son is squatting there, so there’s some furniture in there that will be replaced with our own stuff, and obviously we need to put in some lighting beyond the recessed ceiling lights. Here are some photos Levi took last night (a Flickr slideshow is below). We’ll post more after we’ve moved in and decorated it ourselves.

The monthly rent is right in the middle of our budget range ($3250 split two ways), and it includes some pretty fantastic amenities: a fitness center, a reservable 20-seat movie theatre, a conceirge, a doorman (security), a well-appointed lobby, an included parking spot, and a nice enclosed courtyard/park. The Palms seems to aim for somewhere between the yuppie crowd and the American Psycho crowd in clientelle, so I should have some interesting neighbors. Also, it’s literally a three minute walk to Caltrain, along with being conveinently close to Whole Foods and Safeway, which is perfect for picking up fresh groceries for dinner on the way home from work. I’m glad to finally live in my first real city.

There is going to be a lot to do to transform our apartment into our envisioned swank bachelor pad. Fortunately we’re already set on technology and most furniture, though it will be nice to eventually upgrade to an HDTV. Furniture-wise, I’ll be getting a new bedroom set (I’ve used my current one for nearly two decades since it was handed down to me and want a bigger bed), and will be looking into a baller leather recliner and sofa. All in all, Levi and I are totally stoked about our new bachelor pad!

Back on the previous incarnation of my blog, I had elaborated on my moving plans, and noted that relocation of my vehicle was covered in my startup package at Apple. I presently drive a 1993 Ford Explorer, a SUV which, while handy in the snowy winters of central Pennsylvania, gets only 20 miles per gallon of fuel.

Ultimately, I’ve decided not to take the car with me. It’s worth less than it would cost to move it, it probably won’t pass CA emissions inspection without costly repairs (though it did pass in NJ and PA, so maybe it’s ok), and it lacks an airbag. However, I’ve also decided not to replace the car.

First, there’s the matter of cost. I’d nominally be looking at around $800 in monthly expenses between the car payment, the insurance, the parking fees in San Francisco, and fuel costs. That’s half my rent!

Second, I don’t think I could bear the “soul-crushing slog” back and forth between San Francisco and Cupertino, even I carpool with friends. The daily commute was the straw that broke the camel’s back for ex-co-worker and decent human Buzz Andersen. Quoth Buzz:

…As the stress and hours increased at work, my 45 minute commute down 280, which I had initially thought of as a reasonable (even pleasant and scenic) drive, became a soul crushing daily slog. With most of my social life in San Francisco, but my demanding job an exhausting drive away in Cupertino, I started finding it harder and harder to keep up relationships. As a recent article about commuting in The New Yorker put it:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

My plan around such isolation is to ride the train into work, which will be a fairly social experience, given that my roommate and a variety of my other work friends will all be taking the same train in. The train back at night can even be happy hour. During my morning commute, I plan to put some of the time into work on my dissertation, and with the upcoming introduction of free wifi to the Caltrain, I can even trim some time off from my Cupertino workday by doing email and updating some bugs from the train.

My third reason for ditching the car has to do with restoring some simplicity to my life, which I alluded to as a goal in my previous post. As a mass transit commuter, I’ll be kinder to the environment. As a person who will have to get up and walk to the train station or to the grocery store, I’ll be kinder to my body.

My plan for getting around will ultimately involve renting cars for the weekends that I really want to get away to distant destinations and cabs for those nights out in the city. Even if I were to do that every weekend, it would still be cheaper (~40/day plus gas) than owning a car!

I suspect that eventually I’ll leave the city for cheaper real estate. In the mean time, I’m going to enjoy the perks that the city offers with respect to commuting alternatives and corner stores. If you think you too can live without a car - without its impact on your budget, body, psyche, not to mention its impact on the environment - I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Have you ever run out of space on your hard drive? I mean really run out of space, when the operating system is throwing warnings up on the screen. “What can I possibly delete?” you think to yourself. There are a few first places to start that are relatively stress-free. You take a cursory look in your Trash, making sure that there’s not something in there that you would in retrospect like to keep. Then, you hesitantly tell your computer to empty the trash. You get a little space back. Maybe you delete some funny videos people forwarded you in emails. Crisis averted… For now.

Eventually, you get the warning again. But it gets to a point that there’s nothing in your trash and you’re still out of space. This is where I am at with my computer, and it is a perfect metaphor for where I am at in my life. Overfull. My computer is sluggish from being full of data, my drawers are bulging with clothes I’m never going to wear again, and I think I have my pre-algebra book from 7th grade on a bookshelf somewhere. I’ve simply taken on too many things in my life, and they’ve made me physically, mentally, and emotionally sluggish.

I’m lucky to be young. I’ve got the better part of my life ahead of me. So far I’ve lived in eight cities in three states and one “metropolitain county” in two countries (and visited more), and there’s little doubt that more adventure is in store for me. The adventure that is currently on the horizon for me is moving my life to the opposite side of the country, continuing my career at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area. Everything from my past will be far east from me, or farther west when you take a spherical world into account.

The move that is part of my next adventure affords me the opportunity to declutter my life. At the hard drive level, I’ve been able to delete gigabytes of files and emails corresponding to organizations, activities, and people who will be part of my collective past; my memories, but not my future. In the real world, I’ve disinvolved my time and attention from the physical analogues of these things. Over the next few days, I’ll continue to separate my wheat from my chaff: what clothing won’t I wear again, what books I’ll give away, what furniture, knick-knacks, and people from my childhood, adolescence, and early twenties it is time to leave behind as I begin to furnish my independent adult life and mind.

This is going to be an interesting and challanging change for me. Rarely in life do we get a chance for a clean break; to put our life through the wringer. I’m going to try to do better with creating and cataloguing my future memories in ways that still let me have a balanced and invigorating clutter-free life. It’s time to buy a digital camera, to get some healthier food for the pantries, to put my computer to sleep, and to go for a walk in the warm May air.

I like to write, but I don’t like to feel like I have to write at a certain time or in a certain way. I’ve abandoned my previous weblog into the ether of cyberspace (Google ranking be damned!), and I am thinking that my writing in this space will be a bit different from now on. Most of you who come here wanting to know what’s new with me should, like me, instead strive to use the most rewarding possible medium of communication. If we can get together for a hot (or frosty cold) beverage, let’s do that instead. If you have my phone number, call me. Don’t worry, I’ll still post some things here, for those who don’t know me yet or who don’t have a better way to contact me yet (start with my first name at billstevenson.org), as well as to share some things I think you’ll enjoy.