Eastward Ho!

The Balabusta in Blue Jeans is moving to El Cerrito. Stop. Are there Jews in El Cerrito? Stop. Investigation underway. Stop.

You have to understand, the Balabusta never really planned on moving to El Cerrito. The Balabusta was born in East L.A. and raised in San Francisco, and she takes being an urban meydl pretty seriously. Now she's packing her bags and looking toward the burbs.

It's making me a little nervous (abandoning this business of talking about myself in the third person for a while). I'm packing up my whole household, including boyfriend and parakeet, and going across the San Francisco Bay, for complex reasons. (We need a change. We thought the landlady was selling the house we live in now. San Francisco housing is really surreally expensive. I work in the East Bay, and this move will cut an hour off my commute each day. Stuff like that.) But I've decided to take this as an opportunity to record in blog and story my thoughts about striving to be a balabusta in blue jeans.

I want to be an organized person. I want to have a clean, lovely, well-run home. I want to make time to write more, learn more, be involved in the community, do things for my friends and family. And I want to do it all without going crazy. I want to be a balabusta (in blue jeans).

So this is going to be a story about El Cerrito, about identity, about decluttering, about feminism, and about Jewish housekeeping gone slightly haywire. Stay tuned. I'm still in San Francisco right now. The packing has only just begun.