The Move

There are several advantages to unpacking. One, for example, being finding your toothbrush. But let's see...I moved in on July 4th and today is the 18th. So that leaves me holding two brushes, one new, one old, and wondering how to fix the situation. Anyone not as young, destitute. and earning less per hour than her own cleaning lady would simply throw out the old one. But I, coming of age in our Modern Depression, have instead stuck it somewhere in my half-unpacked room, comfortable in the knowledge that when I move out one day, I will have yet another worthless piece of crap to cram into a cardboard box and shove down three staircases.

Which serves me right, I suppose, after what I did to those poor movers on Independence Day. It was a heat wave. They nearly died. We nearly had two dead chassids on our front lawn.

I have also come across numerous old folders and notebooks from college and high school. It's nice to riffle through them and remember my classes, professors, and all that stuff I learned and wrote essays about. But, after a few days of madly ripping through papers from middle and high school, I also wonder when I will finally chuck these, as well.

One of the best things I have found is my floor and the far wall of the attic alcove where I had crammed most of my boxes. Omigosh, I thought at one point toward evening, there is the wall. The actual frickin wall. I can see it, dead on. The end is in sight. Upside: the cat doesn't have to work so hard anymore to hide away in the crawlspace. Downside: all the weight I had worried about in the alcove is now transferred to the perimeters of my bedroom. There are moments when I think the floor may actually cave in from the weight of all my books, sending my room crashing down into the kitchen below. That would be, like, number two on the top ten list of Ways to Get Voted Out of Your Apartment.

But the best thing I have found so far? Yes, my time sheets! Thus end about a week's worth of frantically searching for the damn papers. Home, office, Teaneck home, subway, Columbia's lost and found, and a bagful of shattered glass later and it all comes down to an unmarked cardboard box. Here, I think, is a prime example of the doom and futility we face by moving. Because, you see, I had originally put those time sheets in a cleverly marked "Now" box. Granted, the all-important Now box had some pretty useless job search papers and bus receipts in it, and the scissors I would have used to cut away all the packing tape were tossed into some nameless box corned behind dusty Chinese scrolls, boxes of Magic the Gathering bought while I was in elementary school, and bizarro shoes I've worn only once, and under twelve tons of books, but still, the idea of orderliness was admirable if not fully realized. In any case, I went back and forth between Brooklyn and home a few times when I was just moving in, and there were also those excursions to my place of work, all places I carried my time sheets to in the hope that I'd be able to complete them and fax them over to the payroll office. But no. No, no, no. Doom and futility. When leaving home with the last of my possessions for the penultimate time (that word was used just for you, dad), I must have blithely tossed the time sheet folder into one of the half-filled boxes, filled with that rosy delusion that I would 1) fully unpack within a few days and 2) be able to keep track of which boxes contained what. I packed reasonably. I unpacked optimistically. I repacked unthinkingly. I unpacked resolutely. I found those sheets by the grace of whatever you believe in because, quite frankly, when I look at all the boxes left to unpack and how little storage space I have in my room, I know that here's a good chance that I would never have seen the sheets till October.

And now I must go. It's nearly 12:30 and I should have been heading off to sleep by 10 PM...so that I can get up around 5:30 AM for my 7 AM shift to wake 2-3 teenage girls at 9 AM. Somewhere out there my mom is laughing her a** off.