This weekend, I moved. Many people find moving to be an intimidating process, but I believe it can be broken down into easy-to-manage components:
- Avoiding packing by watching Netflix, reading comics, and developing a website for yourself (that you tell no one about because you don't know what you're doing with it yet and all you really want is to start that "platform" thing that all the books about writing insist is important)
- Frantically packing all the random, fragile, meaningless crap you've accumulated over the years with neither strategy nor forethought the day before the move
- Crying
- Smashing furniture through stairways and people
- Pulling splinters out of the inside of your knuckles (that tender bit where the finger folds)
- Soiling previously healthy relationships with your hangry sassing while unloading an increasingly heavy sofa
- Weeping about soiling previously healthy relationships and pulling more splinters out of parts of your body that surely can't have touched something that produces splinters
- Where are these splinters coming from?? It's not like you furnished your apartment with rustic period pieces. Most of your junk is plastic or fake laminated wood but you've pulled enough splinters from your flesh that you could construct another bookshelf out of them
- Buying another bookshelf (instead of constructing your own bloody aberration) to house the bajillions of books you now jointly own with your roommates
- Finding three more boxes of books now that you've purchased (and filled) two additional bookshelves
- Crying again because the book problem is really one of the better problems to have
- Crying because there are many additional problems and you think you might be an additional problem yourself
- Drinking
- Crying
- Vacuuming two years of budgie feathers, birdseed, and crushed dreams out of your old apartment
- Dropping off the keys to your old apartment after mixing up the new and old keys at least 50 times
- Continuous drinking and rearranging your multitude of personals for the rest of your life (or until it's time to move again) and preparing for your debut on the hit TV documentary program, Hoarders
So, if you've got a move coming up, just remember that you'll pull through eventually, and will probably be left with only small physical and emotional scars that can be healed by time, therapy, and whiskey. You might also be left with a cranky bearded dragon, two screaming birds, two definitely not screaming fish, and a gourd-shaped cat. Also two loving roommates who will someday forgive you for being so damn bad at moving.