Signs that you may be getting overly preoccupied with moving
1. You drop off a few pieces of clothing at the dry cleaners’ and then forget to pick them up until the beginning of the following week, at which point you discover that the cleaners have closed for the summer and won’t re-open until September, by which time you will be long gone. And your first thought, after "Crap! How am I going to retrieve them?", is "Well, at least that’s less to pack."
2. You’ve lost all vestiges of self-consciousness about being seen in public scavenging discarded boxes. Sure, people occasionally give you weird looks, but so what? If they have no idea why someone would want to economize on their moving costs, well, that’s their problem. They’re probably the same people who live in the quarter-million-dollar houses on the edges of town, keeping the property values astronomical and contributing to the ridiculously high cost of living in your area. You dislike these people anyway, with their SUVs and their expensive all-natural hemp-fiber clothing and their bland privileged cluelessness. Il faut épater le bourgeois! Or so you tell yourself as you duck down another alley in search of another promising stack of cardboard.
3. You would ordinarily be happy at the thought of your 19 or 20 smallish cartons of books, because rooms with lots of books in them make you feel at home, and you know that once everything’s out of storage, they’ll be one of the first things you’ll unpack. But now you lie awake worrying about how much they’re going to add to your moving bill.
4. Upset at the fact that you’ve managed to lose a jumbo roll of packing tape somewhere inside your small one-bedroom apartment, you wind up on all fours peering under furniture muttering "I just saw it ten seconds ago, now where did it go?" and also "What the hell is wrong with my BRAIN, I’m coming down with ALZHEIMER’S, I’m having a senior moment and I’m only twenty-nine, aaagh," and — hey! There’s still no sign of the tape, but a search under the sofa turned up a missing tin of shoe polish and a copy of James Elkins‘ Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (highly recommended, by the way) that you thought you’d lent to someone and never gotten back.
Somewhere in one of Margaret Atwood’s novels (Cat’s Eye, I think) there’s a passage about the Madonna of Lost Things, who looks after objects that have gone missing. I’ve a feeling I’m going to be invoking her a lot in the near future. Madonna of Lost Things, pray for my missing roll of tape! Our Lady of Objects That Disappear, keep the books safe on their long journey to Virginia!
I’m fond of Elkins’ The Domain of Images, so I’ll check out your newly found book. I’m moving this summer as well, although in the other direction, and reading your accounts are a comfort: I’m not so alone in my frenzy. thanks
Oh, hee! I know the moving psychosis well! 🙂
(btw, local colleges, bookstores and groceries can be excellent sources of free boxes — some scroungable, others simply there for the asking)
I LOVE this post and I couldn’t agree more with #2.
On #1, I’m a Dryel girl for the most part these days, but former drycleaning adventures often netted by clothes in what I began to affectionately dub “dry cleaning jail” for which I had no bail.
“Dry cleaning jail”! Hee! (How well do those Dryel things work, by the way? I’m going to have to find alternatives to the cleaners if they’re going to hold my clothes prisoner.)
Rana, did you also find yourself worrying about completely irrational things that no normal person would worry about, or is that just me? I’m starting to doubt my sanity a bit!
Because you just throw the clothes in the dryer with the Dryel, it doesn’t work so well with heavier materials or suits and such. But it works well on clothes that don’t necessarily need a crisp press or are virtually wrinkle-free, and it’s certainly cheaper than dry-cleaning.
Dryel also works with sweaters. It’s not so good at getting out stink, though. 🙁
Yes, one does begin to obsess over strange, irrelevant things. Boxes were my particular obsession (I can’t stop hording them, even now!). I learned where all the dump sites in town were, and could spot a decent box from a moving car. Trying to haul boxes on a bicycle is a further sign of the obsessed.
I also specialized in very carefully sorting and cataloging the first 50-75 percent of my stuff, then devolving into “oh, just stuff it in a box already” (with my parents’ help), then going full bore into “Toss it! Toss it! God help me, I don’t want to pack anything more!” (The irony there being that, even so, when I next unpack fully, there will be all these boxes full of things that should have been tossed five moves ago and never were. Why was I saving all those film cannister lids, again?!)
You may also find yourself doing things like scrubbing the toilet with an old toothbrush because it is too much trouble to unearth the toilet brush from whatever box it was stuffed into. 🙂