Today, I went through the arduous process that is the bane of so many late-teen-and-twenty-somethings’ existence: packing. (Second only, perhaps, to unpacking.) We are constantly in a flux, in and out of college semesters and internships. Within the past year, I’ve packed and unpacked my life six times.
I can imagine it’s similar to the process of filling out taxes, once you become a real adult with a stable income and tax write-offs and dependents. It’s so tedious — taxing, if you will — yet you really can’t avoid it. You just can’t. Unless you want to end up in Los Angeles without clothes for the summer, or in big-time debt to the IRS, respectively.
Anyway, I didn’t want to end up in Los Angeles without clothes for the summer, so, after a few hours of covering my head with a pillow, my preferred form of therapy, I faced my obligations and packed up. On Friday, I will begin a 30-hour road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, with pit stops in Denver and Vegas.
If all goes according to plan, I will arrive in California on Sunday with my possessions — and the three friends I’m taking along for the ride — still in tow, just in time for a late Monday start at the Los Angeles Times, where I will be interning as a copy editor for the summer.
At some point in this blog, I will explain what that means and how I got to be so lucky to have such an exciting experience. I’ll be immersed in journalism this summer, so I might nerd out about the news or the latest development in the newspaper world. But I will also blog about the sights, the sounds and especially the tastes I encounter along the way. I hope to keep my writing skills strong and my family happily informed about my goings-on in the Golden State.
If you’d like to see what I wrote about last year during my semester in Aix-en-Provence, France, see Aix Marks The Spot. The clever names of both blogs are the brainchildren of Rebecca Schlesinger. She might name your blog, too, if you ask nicely!