Luceo Magazine

Big City Living

Chad Lennon
February 2003
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A move has taken place with the Luceo staff and that move was I. I have recently moved to Dallas from my home in Tyler to work in another Michaels (the Arts and Crafts Store) as a department manager. Not only is the move a big deal but the promotion is a bit of a shock as well. Speaking of shocking, the living alone in the big city thing is a bit more strange that I would have imagined. To let you know, I have never before lived on my own or even lived anywhere else than Tyler (which is a mere fraction of the size of Dallas) so this is all quite new to me.

Now you might be asking why I would want to leave all my family and friends to whisk away to a place that I have rarely been to and know not a single soul. The answer to that is that I am almost certainly insane. At least that is what my alternate personality keeps telling me. And so, my very awesome family helped me move and obtain some much needed furniture and other items so that now I, with my two guinea pigs (Scruffy and Tuffy), am living cozily in a Dallas suburban area just five minutes from my store—which is nice.

I managed to unpack everything I own in the first day, which apparently is quite an accomplishment to the people I now work with. Then again, I am a neat freak, so it meant nothing to me. [Editor’s Note: This is an outright lie. While not a slob, it is more than a stretch to claim to be a “neat freak.”] I got one glorious day off and then it was time to start being a department manager (but the actual “managing” has yet to start as we had to do a stupid inventory which took all week. *groan*) But enough about that boring tripe.

During my short duration in Dallas, I have noticed there are many stores I never heard of in my almost 22 years of life. I mean weird, obscure stuff that I will probably never go to and neither will anyone else for that matter. Apparently, there is quite a bit of money floating around this area, as a woman came into our store and had nine dioramas of her kid’s crappy little marker and paste drawings framed, dropping a nice $1,200 on nothing more than debris. Also at my job, I met a girl that street-races. I do not know if you have met anyone who does this, but these people need to find something else to do with their time other than talk about cars. If you were unfortunate enough to have seen the movie The Fast and the Furious, you would have been as weirded out as I have was with the surreal experience of talking to this girl. After listening to her ramble on, I almost for a second felt like I had been magically transported into the movie—it was so not cool. Other than that, people at work are all right, albeit lazy, but a few work just fine.

Living alone is a new experience; there is so much to do: I mean laundry, cooking, cleaning, playing video games, you know, important stuff like that. But seriously, I am hoping to find a girl to “co-habitate” with. That way I can cut down on the workload, but of course she will have to love my precious guinea pigs [Editor’s Note, 2008: dead and buried] or she will just have to go.

Lastly, there are a few little strange things that you all need to know. One department store I went into had a mannequin dressed up in a wheelchair (personally, I think she was faking it). In addition, every single apartment I went to has a very ornate swimming pool with fountains and little water sluices and the like. In Tyler, you get a hole in the ground filled with water. Keep that in mind next time you go swimming.

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