Apartment 231

I can’t believe it’s been 20 years already. They’ve gone so fast. I don’t remember the exact date, but for some reason the 8th of January sticks in my mind as the day I moved to Austin to attend j-school at The University of Texas College of Communications.

The UT Tower at night seen from near The Daily Texan basement.

It was my first time living away from my family, though Dallas was only a three-hour drive away. I was far enough to be independent, but close enough to visit over a long weekend. And thankfully I already had a few friends who’d moved to Austin before me. I wouldn’t have to build my life completely from scratch.

Getting accepted at UT was a surprise. I didn’t go to college right after high school. I’d been a poor student, and for a while I thought school was an environment where I’d be destined to fail. So I kicked around for a few years in bands, working menial jobs, just barely getting by. But that was not a satisfying life by my early-20s. I knew I could do better, and I knew that if I were going to do better it meant I probably needed a degree.

The idea of working out my brain was exciting, and scary. I started slow, taking just one class my first semester at Brookhaven, a community college in Farmer’s Branch. I always thought I was terrible at math when I was in public schools. It was my worst subject, and I hated it. My SAT scores (1265) were out of date by then, and I needed to take an entrance evaluation before registering for classes. As suspected, I would have to take remedial math classes before getting to college algebra. Three of them.

I decided that I was going to take on my most difficult subject first: math. So that first semester, I took the first of my remedial math courses. And I took it seriously. I paid attention in class, did all of the homework assignments, and managed an A at the end of the semester. My most difficult subject was conquerable. I had just proven to myself that I could do this.

So I ramped up my course load. I excelled in English classes, and at writing essays, and this is what inspired me to think about being a writer. I hadn’t chosen a major yet, but I didn’t think I wanted to be an English major. Looking at career prospects, I didn’t want to end up teaching English in a public school. But my favorite writers often have journalism backgrounds, and at the time I practically idolized Peter Egan from Road & Track magazine. Checking out job listings, I discovered that a journalism degree could get you work as a journalist, but it was also an entry into advertising, marketing, and public relations jobs. All of which sounded better than teaching.

Seeing the Mermaid Purse at the Red Eyed Fly on Red River Street in Austin.

At the end of 2002, my band broke up. A few weeks later the spring 2003 semester started, and I took my first journalism class. I really dove in that year, and by the fall semester I was the copy editor and opinion page editor of the school paper, the Brookhaven Courier. It felt like I’d made a pretty big shift in my life. I would be getting my Associate of Arts at the end of 2003, and the next step was transferring to a proper university. I’d applied to three: the University of North Texas in Denton, The University of Texas at Arlington, and The University of Texas at Austin.

(Here’s some copy editing geekery for those of you who noticed the capitalization of the word “the” in the line above: if “the” is part of the official name it is capitalized. If not, it isn’t. Which is why it’s capitalized for the UT schools, but not UNT.)

UT-Austin was my moonshot. Not only was it among the top j-schools in the country, I loved Austin and wanted to live there. It wouldn’t just be an escape from the suburbs of North Dallas, it would be an escape to a place I actually wanted to be. But I thought my chances were not all that great, as UT-Austin is a notoriously difficult school to get into.

And the first letter I received from UT-Austin was a rejection. I was disappointed, but the other two schools had accepted me, and I figured I’d probably choose UNT and do the Denton thing. Denton wasn’t as fun as Austin, but it was a lot more fun that any Dallas suburb, or Dallas itself in my opinion. It would be OK.

Outside Apartment 231.

But in early November, 2003, I received another letter from the College of Communication at UT-Austin congratulating me on my acceptance and welcoming me to the campus. Talk about mixed signals. The letter arrived right before the big Associated Collegiate Press conference, which just happened to be in Dallas that year. I’d be attending, along with all the other editors from the Courier.

Do you remember the exact moment one of your dreams came true?

Our faculty advisor at the Courier was friends with the head of Texas Student Publications, the group that administrates student media at UT-Austin. She got me a meeting with her to straighten this all out. The TSP head told me that if I got a letter saying I was in, I was in, regardless of what had come before.

Holy shit!

I’m going to UT-Austin!

I had two months to find an apartment I could afford in Austin. I’m not sure that would even be possible today, and it wasn’t exactly easy then. But I did it. It was a new complex on East Oltorf, only a couple of years old. They had a 1-bedroom apartment on the third floor that would be my first home away from home. I signed a lease on Apartment 231 starting in January.

The floorplan of Apartment 231. Well, actually, it was the mirror image of this.

One of my favorite songs at the time was “Pacific 231” by Burning Airlines. I took the apartment number as a good omen.

Now, I said I don’t remember the exact date, but I do have a general idea of when it was. I know I was still in Dallas for my dad’s birthday on the 4th, and I think it was around the weekend when we loaded my belongings into the family business’s cargo van and headed south down I-35.

The move-in is a blur. I remember some things, like pulling the washer and dryer up the stairs on a dolly, but what I remember most is that quiet moment after mom and dad went back home and I was in my new place alone.

I looked around at my apartment and all of the things in it. The coffee and end tables that had once been in the family home when I was growing up, the washer and dryer they’d given me, all the effort that went into setting me up with a real home in a new city where I couldn’t just pop by my folks house to do a load of laundry. And I was overwhelmed by a feeling of love and warmth. My parents hadn’t really wanted to be separated from me, but they wanted me to be happy and have my best chance for a future, and they made some sacrifices to make that happen.

Inside Apartment 231.

I’d always been close to mom and dad, but now I appreciated that closeness on a new level.

As for the apartment? I loved it. Sure, lugging guitar amps up to the third floor wasn’t fun, but I had a nice view off my balcony of a pasture nextdoor, and Austin felt more like California than Dallas. There were tons of inexpensive local restaurants, beer was cheap, there was music everywhere, and the geography was pretty.

That first semester at UT was simply awe inspiring. I still remember how I felt in those early days of walking around campus, seeing the tower and not quite believing I was really there. I joined the staff of The Daily Texan as a copy editor and moved up to Assistant Copy Desk Chief by the summer semester.

I lived in Apartment 231 for two years before moving to a less expensive apartment in South Austin off Bannister. The second place was good, too, but that’s another story.

The view from Apartment 231.

Living in Austin and attending UT was a dream come true. But like so many dreams, it wasn’t permanent. By the end of April, 2008, I was moving back to Dallas to go back to work for the family business. The economy was a wreck, jobs were difficult to get, and money was scarce. My car was stolen three weeks after moving back, and three weeks after that it’d be totaled in a police chase.

I wasn’t happy about being back in Dallas to begin with, and one of the reasons for that was the high rate of property crimes. In Austin, you might get your stereo stolen, but in Dallas they’d take the whole car and ruin it.

But it turns out that most nightmares aren’t permanent either, and neither was my stay in Dallas. One of the things my experience in Austin left me with was a renewed longing to be back in … California.

My graduation gift had been a trip back to Ventura County, California, the place where my earliest memories were formed and the place I’d always considered my true home. That only strengthened the desire to find my way back as a resident.

In October, 2011, it happened. I flew back out to California for a job interview, and secured an offer. My start date would be November 8th. Once again, I’d be moving away on short notice. And once again, my folks stepped in to make that happen, helping me box up my stuff for the move and letting me transfer it from my storage space to some shelves in the family business’s warehouse.

So here I am now, back in the Conejo Valley. I love it here. It still feels like home. But 20 years after I first moved away from my family, I’m starting to think about being together again. I miss them terribly, and every year gets shorter. While they’d love to move out here with me, the cost of living in coastal California would be a hurdle.

I have a decision to make, and probably soon. Stay in the place I love, or be with the people I love. I’m not sure which way things will turn out. But I have a feeling there’s a right answer, even if it is a tough choice to make.