This summer has FLOWN by. Faster than I can remember in any recent year, and I know it’s a huge cliche to be talking about it, like every other person on the internet… but I can’t understand how we’re a week away from September. It’s making me feel even more frazzled than I already do, all “no, wait, summer, you can’t leave yet! I haven’t eaten nearly enough burgers and hot dogs! I haven’t seen the Jersey shore!”

But here we are, and half the reason I’m freaked by how little summer is left is that there are some pretty Big Things in store for September. Or, I guess, just one: buying a house. After a few incredibly nerve-wracking days, we managed to get through the inspection negotiations, so we’re now on track for our closing in a little less than three weeks. (WTF. HOW is that possible??) The mortgage paperwork is, I’m told, ahead of schedule, and today I signed us up for a homeowners’ insurance policy. Like a freaking adult or some shit.

I know I wrote like this when the wedding was upon us, over-using the word WEIRD in every post but… it’s weird. It’s scary, the idea that we’re going to own a house in less than a month. That we are planning to buy actual adult furniture that we intend to keep for fifteen years (not more as-cheap-as-possible crap). We might even buy a bed bigger than the full I bought when I first moved out of my parents’ house.

I’m feeling really overwhelmed, at all of the packing we still have to do, at the notion that we’ll be moving two days after we close on this place. I’m scared about this town neither of us knows much about, that’s so very Miscellaneous Western NJ (almost everyone I know, even lifelong NJ residents, has no idea where our new town is. “Oh, yeah, okay. …Is that close to Princeton?”). What if it’s too far from everyone we know? What if I’ll hate the fact that there’s no Target or Walgreens nearby? (The one characteristic of this Miscellaneous Western Jersey area is that it’s much more spread out than Dan and I are used to; most things will be 20ish minutes away, with only farmland between here and there.)

And just like before the wedding, when all I could talk about was how weird it felt, and how hard it was to imagine it actually happening, that’s exactly how I feel now. Everyone is so excited for us… and it’s not that I’m not excited, or that I don’t love our new place, it’s just that I’m scared and intimidated and having a hard time picturing living somewhere so big and awesome. But maybe, just like with the wedding, it’s my heart’s way of protecting myself from disappointment and the let down of too-high expectations. If I’m not exploding with excitement now, if I’m so prepared for the things that might not be perfect, maybe buying a house will be just like the wedding – so much more exciting and happy and awesome than I could have been prepared for. I hope it’s like that, at least.

I leave you with a favorite from the archives:

because Jimmy Eat World feels like summer to me, and they take me seriously back in time to my college days, and it’s back to school time, and that line I’m a New Jersey success story always makes me super jazzed, even if it’s hokey and obvious to say so. I’d sure like to have a NJ success story this month.