I used to drive a tan 2002 Toyota Avalon. It was a large sedan that used to belong to my grandma, outfitted with leather seats, electronic seat adjusters, and a spoiler. This car was used to shuttle my brother, cousins, and I to and from school, and was my car up until January of this year. It’s strange talking about the car in the past tense, but after it started having engine troubles and its reliability window began to wane, with the help of my parents I got a new car, a 2026 Corolla Cross, with a roof rack and all-wheel drive. I like the car a lot, though I’m not much of a car person. Also, I barely drive it.
This isn’t because the car is unreliable. It got me to Kirkwood in the snow, and is obviously more reliable than my beloved “tan-mobile” that the dealer threatened to offer $100 cashback for, the car my dad and I instead chose to donate to our local NPR provider. The reason I barely drive it is because Sacramento, the grid in particular, is small and dense and bike-able and really perfect for my present life.
Moving to my hip surgery, I finally have a date for it: May 8. So it already happened and I’m in pain but a happy kind of pain. Scheduling appointments was somewhat difficult, but getting to them was easy: I biked to the doctor and my labs, thank you Sacramento. It feels good knowing that the hospital was only a mile away, and that it wasn’t a pain in the ass getting to the appointment or moving from the car to the front door of my apartment building. Knowing my friends can do drop-in visits without disrupting their own schedules puts me a bit more at ease, as does knowing that my rent is affordable. Right now I’m looking out upon a tree-lined street while writing this, and my family can easily stay with me. I can’t imagine what the scheduling process would have been like in another city, or if my parents would have a difficult time getting to me, nor do I want to think about being laid up in a place where friends would have a harder time saying hi.
In the week leading up to the surgery, I saw my friends nearly every day, partly because I knew I would be laid up, but also because it’s easy to see people here—it never feels forced. In LA, since everyone is so far apart, life felt segmented, with planned work commutes, frequent flaking on behalf of myself and others, and overall exhaustion. To meet up with someone it felt like an appointment was required. In Sacramento, however, everything is grouped together, so making time to see friends has lower stakes. There’s less pressure to do something fun or to hang out longer than necessary. Sometimes I see friends in passing, while biking from work or just going about my own routine, no appointment needed. Many of my afternoons are just spent walking around in the hopes I’ll stumble upon something. Maybe this sounds selfish, but since seeing people is naturally integrated into my routine, my schedule feels less disrupted than before. Of course, I realize there are places in LA where one can have the smaller lifestyle, but in the natural course of things one is bound to meet someone or hear of an event that is outside of one’s neighborhood pocket, and you’re faced with losing an entire day to that prospect or giving up on it due to a scheduling conflict. In Sacramento, it’s almost a given that the thing you want to do or the person you met lives close by, and if a connection fades it’s because that connection was not meant to be, not because of distance. Obviously, the sacrifice is that Sacramento is a smaller city with less to do, but as someone working full-time and going to school, the lack of options is almost nice.
I’m in a decent amount of pain right now. It’s going to be four weeks on crutches, followed by four months of physical therapy. It’ll be nine months total until I’m hopefully back to normal. As someone who uses athletics as a way to destress after work, the limited activity is definitely going to get to me. What’s funny is that before this injury, I was in the best shape of my life. I hate to look too much into things, but even with all the ways to view progression in my fitness stats, I’m still aging, and wear and tear is a requisite part of being human. This whole experience is making me realize that it’s important to see oneself as more than a body, and that I need to be intentional about how I go about things, especially when my social media feeds have algorithmically drifted to exclusively action sports content.
Something that has rung true for me recently is that nothing great happens in a vacuum. I’m most motivated to do things that bring me around people. Thus, in these next few months I plan to find communities that exist in other places besides the gym; there’s a knitting circle that my friend goes to that I’d like to visit, among other things. I think the thing that’s hard for me is that I usually find that good things happen when I leave the house for whatever reason, which will obviously be hard to do. I will have to find new ways to spend my time, which while difficult, I think will be for the better.
Outside of my work, there are sea lions that spend their day together, sunning themselves on a dock that floats on top of the Sacramento River. While I’m not entirely sure what goes on underwater, it seems nice, laying there. It’s what my cat does too: nothing. Resting as default. It looks like exactly what I need.
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