We move to South Carolina in a few hours. I am so excited that even though it's 4am, I can't sleep. Sleep problems aren't usually something I have to deal with, so this is a somewhat new experience. However, like everything else in the last 2 days, I am too cheerful right now to be concerned with how a lack of sleep might affect me later. WE ARE MOVING AWAY FROM MILWAUKEE IN LESS THAN A DAY! It's finally happening. Is everything from our Milwaukee chapter neatly closed off? Not a chance. We still haven't sold our house and there are quite a few belongings that we can't fit in a trailer and bring with us. They will either be free on the curb or remain in the house for future Cris/Paul to deal with for when the house finally isn't our problem anymore. Maybe a nice couple will buy our home this weekend and be like: "Ooh, look, the house came with a mattress, couch and chair, rugs, a desk, and a dining room table set! Score!" That would be sweet. Then we wouldn't have to spend even more money on this place by hiring a company to haul it all out.
Moving to another state is certainly way more expensive than I even imagined. We knew it would be rough, but we have been saving for this for quite some time. However, when you think you have a few weeks to sell things and then it turns out you only have a few days (Paul has a second interview in SC this Thursday and it's cheaper to move now than drive down for the interview and then come back up and pack, etc.), then you try to sell perfectly reasonable things for WAY cheaper than necessary. For example, my sweet beloved car is a Hyundai with 94,000 miles on it. Perfect shape and drives great, just needs the air condition to be recharged, has some cosmetic issues, and the back doors stick so they are difficult to use. We are currently asking for 1,000 bucks for it. It makes me cringe. We put our awesome brown faux-leather couch and chair, only 3 years old and in perfect condition, up for sale for 500 bucks. No takers yet, which surprises me. We also have brought tons and tons of our stuff to a local thrift store (lucky store). Roller blades, nice clothes, nintendo games and a nintendo DS, frames, pictures, kitchen gadgets, and much more have been brought to the thrift store. It's sad to see them go, but there's no room. We had to buy a closed utility trailer for our belongings, so hopefully we can sell it for a similar price when we get down there. Yup, moving to another state is expensive. And scary. Where are we going to live? That's what everyone asks and we have no idea. Are we supposed to buy a place to live without even visiting it? We have to wait until we get down there. So it's a bit of a gamble: we are going to stay in a hotel for a week and by the end of that week, we hope to have a place to live. No pressure or anything. :)
Anyway, this post is supposed to be about my final thoughts on Milwaukee so I better get focused (hard to do at now 5am, but I'll give it a try). We have been in Milwaukee for 5 years. It was the second stage of our married life. The first stage was our naive honeymoon phase, where we were still getting our undergrad degrees, living on campus, and eating free food given to us from our awesome parents. :) That lasted about a year. Then we moved to Milwaukee so that I could go to graduate school and thus began Stage Two of our lives, which I suppose should be called our 'Learning Stage'.
Here's a few things that we have learned from being here in Milwaukee:
(1): We are not city people
**Our time in Milwaukee has been a bit miserable for us because we learned that we hate city life. We learned through these five years that our favorite hobbies include: fishing, hiking, sailing, going to wineries, gardening, making crafts and furniture, etc. None of these are good hobbies for people who live in the city. They all take place hours away from cities, so it has been rough. We do NOT like: going to bars, going to baseball games, going to museums, and other city-type activities. When holiday breaks come, we leave the city as fast as we can. On normal weekends we are bored out of our minds. Thus we learned that we cannot ever again live inside a city. We need a few country acres near a lake to be happy.
(2): Midwestern social and cultural ways do not fit with us
**Paul and I are terribly shy and awkward around strangers. It takes us a long, long time to feel comfortable around people. The few people we got along with here in Milwaukee were from other states. We would become friends and then they soon left us for their awesome states again and we would be friendless once again. We need to live in a place where people are nice and outgoing to strangers and newcomers. This is one of the reasons we are going to move to the South. Every time we visit the South, people are so friendly that we forget our awkward ways. When we came to Milwaukee, we knew no one and had no friends. As we leave, we only have Rick, a friend from Michigan and a few other nice people that we know but weren't really friends with from Milwaukee. That's right, we arrived with no friends and left with no friends. Sigh...it's been a tough five years, but we did learn that we need to try a less snobbish/cold culture than the Midwest.
(3): There are a lot of bad people out there
**In rural Michigan, Paul and I were pretty laid back and trusting when it came to other people. We both came from households that were pretty laid back about locking house doors at night. Then we moved to Milwaukee and learning quite a lot about bad people. We were here for only a few months when our car's window was busted and our car was robbed. That was the first break in our naive understanding of the world. We learned that we could no longer ever leave anything valuable in our car. We learned that you can't have a nice radio system in the car or a nice GPS, basically don't leave anything nice in a car in Milwaukee. Our next two vehicles in Milwaukee were involved in parking lot hit-and-runs. Our second car we owned here had the front right almost completely ripped away from the vehicle in a hit-and-run. Instead of getting it professionally fixed (why spend a lot of money on a car if it might get in another of these type of incidents?), we bought good glue and glued it back together. Thanks for the lesson, Milwaukee, that there are bad people in the world. Our newest vehicle was also involved in a hit-and-run, but that was only minor: a few scratches on the back bumper and a busted back light. How tragic, though, that we have had such bad vehicle experience here. I also learned about how college campuses can be dangerous because of bad people. At UWM, there were robberies done to students walking near school almost every day. I was lucky enough to avoid that, but they emailed everyone whenever it happened and the amount of emails I was getting everyday made me freak out. At Marquette, I had to take the public bus to school everyday, where I was scared for my life every single time. Druggies, homeless people, alcoholics (sometimes all three in one), gang members, violent people who argued with bus drivers and had police come on board, etc. It was terrifying. I couldn't even walk from the bus stop to my house without creepy men (multiple times!) stopping their cars next to me and asking me if I wanted a ride or saying other creepy things. I no longer can be in my front yard without Paul home and the dog at my side. When Rick moved into his house, it wasn't even one month before his home was robbed. He lived right down the street from us, so we also learned that we weren't safe even in our own house. Yep, Milwaukee taught us that there are lots and lots of bad people in this world. We have heard multiple gun shots just down the street from us, we have had police with guns drawn in our yard as they inched carefully to raid our neighbor's drug stash, we have had people knock on our door to tell us that bad people are driving down alleys throwing rat poison in yards just to purposely kill dogs, and we even had an armed robber use our yard as a getaway point, so that detectives stopped by to take pictures of our place and yard. We no longer feel safe anywhere if the doors aren't locked or a dog isn't around to give protection. I can't go for walks alone anymore, even with mace in my hand. I hope someday we meet enough nice people that we can stop being so paranoid about the bad people. I hope what we learned about people in the world can be made more positive in our next stage of life.
(4): God is in control of our lives, not us
**When we moved to Milwaukee, I was one of the most career-driven people out there. As long as I can remember, I was dreaming and perfectly planning out my career and life. First, I would get my Master's degree, then my PhD, then I would get a professor gig and life would be grand. We originally moved to Milwaukee so that I could get my Master's degree. It was a success, and I must admit, I felt on top of the world, maybe even a bit smug. Then I applied for PhD schools and I got accepted into two of them. I was even more sure that my life was going exactly how I planned. I decided on Marquette University and started inching even closer to fulfilling my dreams. However, Marquette was a nightmare. It was very easily the worst year of my life. It is the worst school EVER. Anyway, after months of crying, stress, and depression, I dropped out of their PhD program. Fortunately, I got adjunct professor jobs immediately afterwards. I made my dreams come true: I was a professor! Except that then reality crashed down on me. Adjunct jobs don't pay much. It was enough money to cover the food that I personally ate, and not much else. I could not make a living like this. Professor jobs make me incredibly happy, but they do not make my wallet very happy. I started substitute teaching on the side to make ends meet. It worked out, but now we are about to move and I have no idea what I will do for work when we move. We are moving somewhere with less big Universities. So far, I have had no bites for adjunct professor jobs in SC. People keep asking me what I am going to do for a job when we move and I have no idea. For the first time in my life, I have no career goals driving me. And I am okay with it. I had a career-dream, and I made it come true. Now it's time to look at how I can make my life more God-focused. I would like to see my spiritual side become refueled and re-energized. Being in Milwaukee has made my spiritual life become dimmed, and I don't like it. A big lesson that I personally learned from this stage in our lives is that God is in control, not me. God should be my focus, not a career. Perhaps God will bless us with a better next stage if we make Him our focus instead of careers. I have learned from my time here that there are way more important things in life than a career. I want my next stage of life to be focused on God, on making lasting friendships, on finding good people in the world, and on having fun with hobbies with my wonderful husband.
I look forward to the next stage of life and I look forward to sharing those adventures with you!
