Inevitable

So, it was bound to happen. I knew it was coming eventually. The three things that happen every time I move (I move a lot. I’ve established a fairly predictable pattern for myself when it comes to the ol’ moving routine.) But even though I know these things will happen each and every time I make these life changing jumps, I’m never quite prepared for them when they actually do. They all sneak up on me like that it’s some new crazy thing I’ve never been through before. Like that maybe this time, the move will be different than the past 9 and these three inevitabilities won’t occur. (I feel a little like Charlie Brown, *swearing* that THIS time, Lucy won’t pull the football out from underneath him when he attempts the kick ...like that this time he won’t fall flat on his back.)

Today, I fell flat on my proverbial back. Just me and Charlie Brown, looking up at the sky, telling each other I told you so. Good grief.

Thing one: I am the world’s worst moving procrastinator (and by worst, I mean best). And somehow, I always seem to forget this until, um, about three days before the move when I wet my pants with worry and don’t sleep for three days. I can promise you that I will be packing boxes until 3 in the morning the day I actually move. Because this move is happening so quickly and because I am getting rid of so much stuff, I don’t think I really thought that packing procrastination could be possible this time.

But oh friends, let me tell you. It is, in fact, quite possible.

I have a house full of guests coming this weekend (yeah, let’s play Good Idea/ Bad Idea with that for a moment, shall we?) So you might ask, what did I do tonight, 7 days before I start to move all my Earthly belongings to a brand new apartment? Why, I baked cookies of course! Six dozen, made-from-my-mom’s-secret-recipe, delicious peanut butter cookies. What else could I have possibly been doing? (Yeah, it was about 10p.m. when I looked around my apartment this evening and was like… Crap. What am I thinking baking cookies?) And so, even for a pro like me, packing procrastination this time around is proving to be EPIC. (I wish there was a competition for NOT getting something done. Because I would *so* win that.)

Thing two: when going through a move it is absolutely essential for my body to “come down with something.” Yes, that’s right. A move is not a move for me unless I’m at least 30% incapacitated. And friends, boy, do I have the broken body trifecta for you! First, it’s fall allergy season here (as is indicated by the two-ton elephant balancing on my bridge-of-nose-eyebrow-region for the last week.) Stupid (gorgeous) deciduous trees and fluctuating weather patterns.

Second, I had the very very ever-so-small, ever so slight and probably nothing (so seriously family, don’t freak out PLEASE) twinge of a headache this morning. Not what my mother used to call a “real person headache,” but rather the monster cluster migraine headaches that I get every few years. And by cluster, I mean daily for about six weeks straight. Anyone who has ever had a migraine understands why this is a bad bad thing. Now, take that feeling and multiple it by about forty days in a row of blindness, throwing up, and needing to be confined to a quiet, dark, cold room (you know, right in the middle of me trying to move, get settled, and start a new job,) and well, that’s going to be pretty handy I’m thinking. I’m keeping fingers and toes crossed that it was nothing, which I truly believe it was. But it freaked me out a little. There aren’t words enough for how bad this would be.

And finally, in the “kick me while I’m down” category of the inevitable moving health issues, it seems that I have pulled my back (at what age do people start having back problems? I feel like I’m too young for Ben Gay…P.S. Stop it with the third grade humor.) Anyway, it was bad enough that there was a point today that I actually contemplated a doctor’s visit (and I hate the doctor.) But heat and ibuprofen seem to be slowly doing the trick, so hopefully that particular annoyance will soon pass also. So between sinuses, backaches, and the very small potential that I’m starting a migraine cycle, it was a banner health day. Maybe it’s good that I’m procrastinating the packing. With my luck I would drop an anvil on my toe. (Now you’re totally wondering if I own an anvil…and why.)

Perhaps it was moving inevitability number one (the realization of the procrastination and woeful neglect of packing) coupled with inevitability number two (the general feeling of personal health ugh and the sincere fear of it soon being headache season) that brought on moving inevitability number three.

Moving inevitability number three is when you realize that as excited as you are for your “what’s next” that there are parts of where you currently are that you are genuinely going to miss terribly. I sat on the couch this evening thinking back over my time here (the cookies had to cool enough to ice, obviously. I know that seems like I was doing nothing this evening instead of packing…)

I thought about the friends I’ve made, and sadly the friends that I’ve lost; The friends that have already moved on, and the people that I will leave behind. No matter how I justify or rationalize what’s next (and we all know that what’s next is incredible and good and absolutely the right thing for me and for J), there are things and people that will be very very hard for me to leave.

And it was tonight that it hit me-- that leaving is really soon.

And so I had my first (actually there’s usually only one of these, at least until official goodbyes start) good moving cry. I cried for the people I love; for the people I miss; for the people I will miss. I cried for the relationships that I am sure will fade over distance, and the ones that I most sincerely hope do not.

It’s the people who make moves hard. It’s relationships that make a place home.

It’s funny, I often see life best reflected for me in the eyes of my students. And this week has been good in that respect because I have forced all my students to have one last appointment with me before I leave (so I have basically seen all of them.) All the conversations go a little like this: Hey I’m glad to see you! I’m really excited you’ve got this great new opportunity somewhere else. Holy crap I can’t believe you’re leaving me. What am I going to do? Eh, it will probably be fine and I’m happier for you than sad for me. But this still kinda sucks. And also, I hope we can still be in touch.

When it comes to moving, I think this is the inevitable cycle with me, too. And yesterday, I got stuck in “Holy crap, I can’t believe you’re leaving me. What am I going to do?” phase. But just like my students can recognize, I too am much happier than sad, and it IS going to be fine. But it does still kinda suck. Just a little bit. And like I told my students, *of course*, I can still be in touch when I leave. Because as those who know me best can attest to, cultivating long distance relationships with those I love is the greatest inevitability of all.

It's moving time

31 weeks down
22 weeks left
(And this is where I usually talk about the diet. Well friends, the diet is temporarily on hiatus. 1) J was home and I ate lots and lots unapologetically; 2) I had visitors in town staying with me last weekend, during this week, and will have this coming weekend, all of whom require nice big dinners out and/or convenient bar food (things not on diets); and 3) I’m to the “eat it so you don’t have to pack it or buy more groceries” part of the move. Foiled frozen mystery leftovers do not a diet make. And so, this diet countdown will resume again when I have a pattern again, and am moved and have gone grocery shopping. Really, only about 3 weeks from now, if you can believe it. I just hope I don’t completely derail the progress I’ve made in the meantime.)
10 ish months until the wedding.

I am weirdly bipolar when it comes to moving practices. I can be both sentimental and simultaneously heartless. There are things that I have held on to for years and years as special and memory-filled that I will, when moving time commences, completely and without discretion or emotion just toss away without a second thought.

This practice happens pretty regularly for me, as this town boasts my LONGEST tenure (five and half years) and the apartment just previous to this one, my longest continuous residence (four years) since I left home at 18. I’m a mover. I get antsy. I like to look for new towns and new opportunities and new places to hang my hat. I have driven my share of moving trucks and have perfected the art of what one of my girlfriends calls “Uhaul moving-box Tetris.” (Think about that image for a minute. It’s practically perfect.)

At any rate, the point is that about once every three years (on average) I gut my earthly belongings and heartlessly toss previously sentimental possessions into the dumpster in the name of convenience or spring cleaning or most often, reinvention.

This move is proving to be an exemplar of this behavior for a couple of reasons. First, I’m moving from a relatively BIG one bedroom apartment with tons of closet space (three walk-in closets, one of which is likely larger than your first bedroom) to a relatively SMALL one bedroom apartment with very little storage. So just by shear square footage math, a goodly portion of my possessions has got to go. Second, I’m just sorta feeling moving-lazy this time. If I don’t *LOVE* something, it’s kinda not worth packing it and (more importantly) paying to have it boxed and moved, right? I’m becoming frugal in my old age (or, as I just said, perhaps it’s just that I’m lazy. But frugal paints a nicer picture I think. Let’s go with frugal.)

But probably the biggest reason I’m downsizing life (and quite frankly, the most exciting part of all of this as well) is that I’m getting ready to move to a small apartment (please please…from my lips to God’s ears) for a mere year, until J and I are married, and he is *finally* stationed in the same city as me, and we are *GASP* living in the same residence. Not just the same time zone, or area code, or zip code or town, but under THE.SAME.ROOF.

And so I find myself happily saying things like “I’ll not need to bring that with me. J has one of those and I can live without that for a year,” or “J’s is nicer than mine. So I can get rid of that,” or “J loves my fill-in-the-blank. Gotta bring that along for when we live together.”

These sorts of statements have made this move different from my others. I’m sure that every person on the planet who has made the life-changing step to move in with a significant other has felt this very same way. It’s time to start thinking about the sacred act of “the consolidating of the stuff.” But with that also comes the sacred act of “getting rid of the old boyfriend and bad juju memorabilia.”

First off, that portion of my life is officially done. No more bad ex-boyfriends or journals full of angst-ridden (and exceedingly bad) high schooler-type, unrequited- love poetry. I don’t need the pictures or the “love” notes from anyone but J. But more importantly, I don’t want to bring that into our new place. OUR new place shall be free from drama and the torment of our previous thirty-four years of bad choices. But how do you decide what's bad juju--what stays and what goes?

* * * * * * *

Well now, here’s something I’ve never done before in a blog post: a before and an after. It’s not unusual for it to take me a whole day to complete my thoughts for posting, but I generally stay on a pretty similar line of thought. The events that have transpired today have parlayed themselves into an interesting little corollary for the end of this post. Ha. Talk about being lent perspective.

So I was going to wax philosophical about how to choose the sentimental bits that stay and those that should be tossed, using some sort of hilarious bridget-jones-esque equation about the number of years you were with your ex + the number of years you’ve kept the “stuff” times the importance of the material (movie stub v. Superbowl ticket) minus the total amount of materials acquired divided by the severity of the break-up. And then I was going to suggest just setting fire to it all anyway. But today’s parable proved a more real (even if less hilarious) gauge.

In the middle of my writing this morning, one of my girlfriends came by to pick up some stuff of hers that I had and needed to return to her. We were talking about just this sort of thing, what to keep, what to throw, what was acceptable married people’s secretly stashed ex-materials, when I started talking about one of my very favorite and most sentimental items in the house. Everything started to be compared to that one thing, my most prized possession. And then I went to show it to her. And it was not where I had left it.

And thus began the frenzy. I turned my house upside down. And backwards. And forwards. And I cried. And I screamed. And just generally lost my ever-loving-mind. Every drawer was opened. Every container emptied and refilled. Every nook and cranny of my apartment searched. And in the process, every last piece of “should I keep this old photograph” type stuff in the maybe-pile immediately found its way into the large, extra reinforced, contractor-grade trash bags sitting all around my house.

That’s when it occurred to me that if I had to stop and ask whether or not it was important to me to keep, the answer was no.

And so into the trash it went, all those little baubles and keepsakes as I went searching for what was truly important to me. (Relax hippie-friends. I’m recycling and donating like a fiend also. I’m not just summarily filling trash bags. But you know my exes. And let’s be honest, there isn’t much of a market for old photos of those supermen, is there?)

It was interesting to me how quickly the question of “is it worth keeping” was thrown into stark relief. The answer, uniformly, was a resounding no.

I took eight trash bags to the dumpster today. I kept one small box of photos (not of exes.) I kept one small box of letters and cards (from friends.) I have one small box of everything J (all his letters and movie stubs and photographs.) And one small box in which I have stuck all my journals since I was 20 (if I ever die and someone finds them, I’m truly sorry for the age 19- 22 Sylvia Plath phase. Wow. Those pieces will NOT be my writing legacy.)

This time, moving time is not just about downsizing and purging and a fresh start for me. This is a fresh start for us. Me and J. Beginning our lives together. Starting the “what’s next” phase of life that we’ve both been longing for, for what seems like forever. This is it. I'm ready. Let's go.

And in preparation, I have to say, I’ve never been happier to take out the trash.

Denial

Yesterday one of my very good friends asked me about the prospect of coming down to help me with my upcoming move. A dear friend, he just wanted to help out any way he could with my exciting new adventure. It was a very kind offer that I sort of blew off. “Oh, we don’t have to worry about that yet,” I said nonchalantly. “We’ve got plenty of time to worry about those details.”

“Um. Ok?” replied my friend questioningly. And then he abruptly changed the subject.

Last night, I sat on my couch totally relaxing, drinking a beer, doing some Sporcle quizzes online and watching the Phillies playoff game. It was good and I was happy, operating without a single ounce of urgency in anything that I was doing. Just a regular ol’ Wednesday night in a normal person’s life.

Today I rolled into work early, just so that I could leave moments later and grab breakfast with a friend before *truly* starting my work day. And then I came back, worked for a couple of hours, and left to have lunch with a couple of my girlfriends, ladies who I try to have lunch with about once a month or so. While having a fabulous, leisurely lunch at the new Thai place in town, my friend said to me, “Wow, so wait… is this really our last lunch date?”

“No, no, of course not!” I chimed in, poo-pooing her question almost mockingly. But from that point on in the lunch, somewhere way far back in the back of my head, I sat thinking to myself, Wait…is this our last lunch? No, that can’t be right.

On my way home from work today (which honestly was a pretty lame workday really…work 30 minutes, take an hour breakfast. Work two more hours, take an hour thirty for lunch…come back and work a couple more hours… leave by 4. My “schedule” is the part of this job I’ll miss the most…), I stopped by the dress shop to say hello to my wedding gown and my girlfriends who work there. When I relayed to them the date I was moving to DC, they both looked at me with eyes that bugged out like that we were in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

“You’re moving, when?”

“Relax…not until the 13th.”

“Um, of November?”

“Yeah.” (More blank stares…coupled with the long, silent blinks and slightly gaping mouths that come packaged with said blank stares.)

“You *DO* realize that that is, like, three weeks from now, right?”

Well duh. Of course I do…Silly girls. (Wait, what?)

I came home a little flustered from that encounter to my comfy and lived in and totally put-together little place I call home. Off to my bedroom I went to change out of work clothes and into pajamas for the evening. While doing so, I definitely tripped over the FOUR loads of laundry that I have sorted out and that are currently sitting in baskets on my bedroom floor: the patient clothes which have waited to be laundered for the last, oh, I’m going to say 6 or 7 days now.

I pulled some (dirty) sweatpants from one of the baskets and slide into my slippers, readying myself for a delightful evening of baseball and writing while sitting on the couch and contentedly enjoying my downtime. Life is good, no?

There’s an old (and very lame) joke-type punch-line that very witty people throw into conversation when someone says something that completely disregards reality. Some vaudeville-type wiseacre chimes in and says “Denial…it’s not just a river in Egypt anymore.” Ba-dump-bump. CHING! (Hilarious. Really.) Annnnd, holy crap. I think that’s me.

I feel like for so long I worked so hard at figuring out what is next, worrying about whether or not I would ever have a “next job” and applying all day every day for new opportunities. I spent countless hours worrying about what was next; whether or not J and I might be able to be together; wondering if I was going to make enough money to make ends meet on my own. Constantly, every day, driven by doubt and fear and disappointment and “what-ifs.”

And then all of a sudden, finally, all of that is gone. The veil of anxiety has been lifted from my face, and my smiling mug is upturned to the sun like a sunbathing cat in a springtime windowsill. Ahhhh…. I’m not worried about any of that stuff anymore. I will soon start a new job at a new institution with good money and good people in an amazing city where J might actually get to be upon his return. I have spent a lot of time worrying about all that, expending every last speck of my energy and effort on securing all these bits and pieces. And I did it!

And now I’m done. No more worry and no more effort. Done, done, ANNNNNND done.

The problem with this, of course, is that I don’t really have the time to sit around playing on the internet and relaxing in the evenings right now. Not yet. I’ve got stuff to do.

And so, as the weekend approaches I realize that it’s time to get my ducks in a row. No more sitting around waiting to hear about what is next. Gotta get moving (literally.) Clothes to Goodwill. Books to donation. Things to be thrown, well, need to start being thrown.(Anybody need an Ab Circle Plus?) I’ve already begun the process of tying up the loose ends at work. Now it has to start happening in my house. I have the luxury of having three weeks to get this stuff done (as opposed to, you know, three days), but I have to take advantage of that starting ASAP.

So, the moving denial is coming to an end. This is happening and it’s happening *now*. I don’t get to relax. Not quite yet. In fact, my guess is that the next two months of my life are going to be a happy, sad, exciting, overwhelming, emotional blur. But that’s ok. Passing the time while J is gone is a good good thing (and this will most certainly do that!) And what’s on the other side is going to be awesome. We’ve just got to get there. So I’m officially throwing myself in the packing boat this weekend and paddling straight across the Denial. I need to quick get to the dry land on the other side that is called DC so I can start my new and exciting life. 3-2-1- Go. Somebody throw me a lifejacket already.

My sit-com life

30 weeks down
23 weeks left
So many pounds gained. (Oof. Let’s not talk about it. Leave was awesome, and calorically filled. Gotta get back on the wagon. Also, note to self: when J comes back for REAL this spring and we still have 6 months until the wedding, I can’t just jump off the diet cliff because he’s home. If I do, my wedding dress isn’t going to fit. )
10 ½ months until the wedding.

I’m a bit of a bad tv junky. Well, let me qualify “bad.” Because it’s probably not *your* version of bad. I’m not a reality show watcher. I am proud to say I have never seen more than half of one episode of Jersey Shore (and that was by accident.) I do not watch Lifetime Television for Women. And I can’t imagine being the Real Housewife of Anywhere. No, my weakness is re-runs of late 90’s and early 2000’s sit-coms. Friends, and Seinfeld, and Everybody Loves Raymond…yeah, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve seen just about every episode of all of them about a half dozen times each. And no matter how many times I watch, they all usually still get me to laugh, at least once.

One of the things that I have always thought was funny in these sorts of 22-minute story-arcs is that the story formula always goes a little something like this: Everything’s happy and fine and normal: BAM! Life changing event commencing immediately is introduced from-thin-air as the conflict: Commercial break: People freak out and have hysterical and hilarious potential solutions to said from-thin-air conflict: Commercial break: Magically, everything works out in the end and the solution is so easy and obvious and everyone lives happily ever after until next week when something equally crazy happens again. Ah yes, reliable patterned sitcom shenanigans. Love it.

I’ve always sorta thought that there was no way that these huge life-changing events could possibly blind-side people like that and so dramatically change everything in an instant (at least on a weekly basis.) Totally unrealistic. That’s just tv. That’s not real life.

Silly, silly me. (We’ll call THIS post “be careful what you wish for…”)

After months of hoping and praying (not very patiently, I might add), applying for jobs, wanting a new scene, a new focus, a new mission, I have indeed *finally* at long last been granted just that.

I have been offered (and officially accepted, no less) a new job back in Washington DC, the place I know, the place I love, the place I left to come to graduate school, and most importantly, the only place on the greater East Coast (where J and I would very much like to stay and settle after marriage) where J might actually get to be stationed post his deployment. Look at that, the two of us having a shot at living in the same city. What a novel, novel idea.

I am over the moon excited about this turn of events. And oh, by the way, it’s effective immediately. Yeah. Accept new job. Quit current job. Tie up loose ends at work. Tie up loose ends with friends. Say goodbye to kids. Find a new apartment. Sell current apartment. Move all earthly belongings. In 25 days. Less than one month. Dum, dum, DUMMMM… Insert commercial break here.

Of course, J is very happy about all this as well. This was one of our “best case scenarios” as we went about the future planning (we did quite a bit of this while he was home.) He and I went to DC together for this job interview, and definitely did the “what if” planning. But somehow after such a long long stretch of not hearing anything back from anyone and being so disappointed by the lack of response of folks, I think we were afraid to really hope (at least I was. J is endless in his support and assumes that everything I put my mind to is eventually going to happen. Isn’t that adorable?)

In terms of the job itself…(if I can put aside the crazy details of immediate logistics) well, this is all very exciting. I will be working for a very prestigious organization doing a job that is much better suited to my talents and interests than the one I’m currently doing. The small staff of my peers is comprised of folks my age.. at the same place in life that I am (my boss is a military wife, by the way.) Young and hip and really bright and so fun. I actually *enjoyed* interviewing with them because I saw myself loving being their colleague. How cool is that? When you add the fact that they appreciated me and my degree (something I don’t get here) and are paying me accordingly (something I definitely don’t get here), this was a no-brainer. Add to that job security, chances for promotion, great new job skills, and paid international travel? Um, yes please.

Now we just have to make this happen. Insert commercial break #2 here.

Don’t get me wrong. Parts of this are going to be really really hard for me. I’m going to miss the people here. I have made some incredible friends. I love my students. And I like the pace of life here, the ease of getting around, the gourmet grocery store within walking distance of my apartment. This town has been very kind to me for the last almost six years.

But DC…the city I’ve been trying to conceal my love affair with all the time I’ve been here... Well friends, our love is too strong to deny. She calls me back, and I follow powerlessly like a love-sick teen-aged girl follows Justin Bieber. Now all we have to do is get J there post-deployment.

And so a new adventure at a new job in a new city begins. Just like that. 3-2-1 go. There’s not enough time to panic or to think about how crazy all this is which is probably a really good thing (besides, we’ve only got 22 minutes to resolve this conflict!) For the next three and a half crazy weeks, I’ll be running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to make all of this work. But I know that it will. It has to. This installment of the show ends in 22 minutes. The from-thin-air conflict always magically resolves itself in the end, and this will too. But don’t worry, there will be a new one to come along soon, I’m sure. Because that’s how life works.

So tune in tomorrow, friends—same Bat time, same Bat channel, to catch the next installment of my sit-com life. I just hope that, like I still do with Friends, I can keep on laughing.