Welcome to another week of life on the road. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband.
This week, we’re in Atlanta, enjoying yummy food and movie theaters.
For anyone who works in a creative field, or probably many others, I bet you can relate to the experience of finishing a document and happily naming the file “Document_Final” as you send it off to your colleagues. Only to then discover a typo in the first paragraph and a missing paragraph on the second page. So you send them “Document_FinalFinal” to fix the errors. But then your boss informs you that the plan has changed and the entire thing needs to be reordered. And pretty soon your file name has become:
Document_FinalFinalFINAL_1PM_GL_4PM_BC_SHAREWITHCLIENT
That’s kind of how Aaron and I feel right now, but for the decision of where we’re gonna live.
A couple of months ago, while we were in New Orleans, we talked over dinner about making a decision. At that point, our top choices were North Carolina (not Durham because it felt a little small but perhaps Raleigh) or Austin, Texas. Aaron admitted that all year, he’s sort of assumed that we were going to end up in Austin and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. There were things we loved about the city, for sure, and he knew there would be opportunities to work in tech there, but still, it didn’t feel totally right. I said I was still holding out hope for Atlanta, and that I’d probably be pretty happy with Austin or Nashville, but that North Carolina had really surprised me with how much I liked it.
We talked through pros and cons and we landed on an idea—North Carolina could really be a place that we want to land long-term. And Aaron, who would still keep traveling if I didn’t have a desire to rest, wasn’t ready to settle down so permanently. So what if we tried Austin for a year or two and got some stability under our feet again, while knowing that North Carolina would always be there for us when we were ready? This seemed like a good idea.
So we were decided—Austin. We told a few people.
November turned into December. Time went on, and...we weren’t feeling super excited. Finally, someone pointed out to us, “You seem like you’ve chosen Austin for some arbitrary, practical reasons but it’s not actually where you want to go.” (Was this person a therapist? Of course they were.) And we had to admit that, yeah, we had. We wanted to go to North Carolina. We’d really liked North Carolina. Why were we putting off going to North Carolina?
So we were decided—Raleigh. It was bigger than Durham, we’d really enjoyed the time we spent there, and we thought it was a great spot on the East Coast to live and still be able to easily travel to a good many places within a day’s drive. We started telling everyone we were headed to Raleigh.
December turned into January, 2023 into 2024. We drove to Atlanta.
And pretty quickly we realized that...we really like Atlanta.
We like the neighborhoods and that most of the city is a lot closer together than we thought from looking at the map. We’ve had some really good food so far. We had a great time at the Botanical Gardens Holiday Light event. We love Charis Books, the feminist, queer, independent bookstore. And I’ve done a preemptive search to make sure we can kayak here.
We also love that filmmaking happens here. I met up with a screenwriter I’ve known online for two years but had never met in person, and we went to a screening of her (spectacular!) short film and others, two of which were filmed in the area. It’s exciting to find other working writers, actors, and directors without having to be in Los Angeles.
While walking around one night, we just sort of knew. “Have we decided?” I asked Aaron. “I think we have,” he said.
So we are decided—Atlanta.
We do go back to Raleigh after this month (because we’d already booked it before we decided and it is now nonrefundable) but starting around March of this year, we should officially be Atlantans. Is that what we call ourselves? I’ll have to look it up.
There you have it. FinalFinalFINAL decision, at least until further notice. We’ll keep you posted.
What else is going on?
I saw the new Mean Girls movie, which is a musical even though the trailer tried to pretend that it’s not for some reason. I had a great time.
I read No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall cover to cover in one night. Very fun and compelling mystery with three sisters at the center.
If you’re ever in Atlanta, the restaurant Twisted Soul is fantastic!
I watched and really enjoyed the movie Language Lessons directed by Natalie Morales.
Congratulations! That's a big decision to make and if you have to revise the "final" again, it's all good. There is always room for more file changes. ;)