In case any of you have any lingering doubts as to the absolute rottenness of moving, allow me to enlighten you on the finer nuances of its suckiness.
First, you have to pack. While that sounds rather simple, the Herculean task is made ever so much more Herculean by the fact that you must sort through everything, arranging it into some semblance of order so you can sort through it at the other end. Putting things together willy-nilly only manages to confuse everything. Unfortunately, as most of our lives are rarely as optimally organized to allow for quick packing, this involves moving great numbers of things from place to place in misguided attempts to categorize things. Do cookbooks belong with the kitchen stuff, or do I put them with the other books? Should I put all the bric-a-brac together, or do I sort it out based on sentimental value, monetary value, or likelihood of being broken? Do I sort out the useful change (i.e. quarters) from the jar or just leave it all jumbled together to be pawed through (several weeks' worth of laundry) later? Where do I put the quarters so I can find them later? (Answer: In the car. In a really obvious spot. Like under your butt.)
That leads directly into actual storage of said now-organized materiel: you must correctly gauge the number of small, medium, and large boxes that you will require to successfully transport yourself (and misc. suns.) from X—which was fairly nice, on reflection, and why can’t you just stay there and save yourself a whole lot of trouble—to Y—which is probably going to be a huge headache, complete with irascible neighbors, a noticeable dearth of attractive members of the opposite sex, and funny smells from the sink.
So you start putting stuff in boxes (notice we’re still in the Packing phase, and we’re assuming you’ve done all the fun stuff like finding a new place to live; canceling the gas, water, electricity; moving magazine subscriptions to the new address; sending out change-of-address notifications to anyone who could possibly be interested; setting up the utilities at the new place; etc.) only to discover that you don’t have enough boxes of any given size. That’s right, in the miracle that is Packing, your stuff has multiplied.
You accept the fact that your stuff is creating little stuff even as you’re packing the stuff into boxes. (You just have to pack faster than the stuff reproduces, which is pretty fast, considering people generally like to sleep.) You’re being reasonably careful with the packing. It wouldn’t do, of course, to have to buy all new stuff because you weren’t careful when the stuff you have now works just fine. So you wrap things. You wrap them nicely, as if anyone’s going to sit around and compliment your achievement in wrapping. What you don’t realize—until it’s far, far too late—is that all that paper you’re wrapping with is going to eventually come off everything, and then you’re stuck with a veritable forest of paper that glares at you accusingly: We protected your stuff, and then this, this, is how we’re repaid?
Some things are too big to fit into boxes. They may have originally come in boxes, but you threw those boxes away because they were large and inconvenient to keep around. You see now that keeping those boxes would have been handy—now—because you have no real way to protect those large things now, short of lovingly draping them in plastic wrap. So, you wrap them in plastic wrap. It’s like industrial duty plastic food wrap, except instead of leftover pizza, your couch suffocates behind funky green film.
More next time. Until then, ponder the ineffable properties of matter that require movement at all.
With a few deceptively simple signatures and a bit of money, I began leasing a cute little apartment just off the LSU campus.
It's positively tiny--only 450 square feet--but contains all the necessary bits: a kitchenette, a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. It's been remodeled recently, so everything is shiny and new.
I'm scheduled to move in on Sunday afternoon. Wanna help? Contact us and let us know.