Moving

The Wicked Witch of the East (side move)

If you’re reading this on Friday, I’m moving today. If you’re reading this on Saturday, I’m still moving today. And if you’re reading this anytime within three months of this article’s publish date, I’m still putting my house together.

You already know this – moving sucks. I have yet to meet a person who feels otherwise. But why? What about it sucks so bad?

When you think about it abstractly, the fact that we’re able to move at all is a modern miracle. The very idea of taking everything that’s inside one house, packaging it up into a truck (or trucks), driving across town, and unloading it all into another house in the span of a few hours is positively mesmerizing to me. Given the pace of our society, the economy is fully dependent on a nimble workforce able to adjust and shift on the fly, and the tools at our disposal to service these needs are amazing indeed.

Yet, we hate them all.

I hate the tape. I hate all the stupid boxes. I hate how my hands ache like I’m an arthritic 90 year-old woman after a day of shuffling all this crap around my house for weeks on end. I hate living like a goddamn Eastern European refugee. I hate it all. In a rare moment of quiet reflection where I actually looked forward to going to work instead of dealing with this endless process, I was able to distill why this such an odious process.

1. Arduousness

Just strap a yoke onto your shoulders because you’re volunteering to be your very own oxen and cart your shit around like you’re taking some ungrateful dysentery-riddled assclowns down the Oregon Trail. Moving requires a metric crapton of lifting, pulling, pushing, bending, jimmying, unscrewing, wiping, dusting, stacking, and otherwise finagling that you’re probably not accustomed to on a day to day basis. The sheer physical exertion is enough to undo even the most active Michelob Ultra enthusiast. You drop a giant h-bomb onto your body, which is nothing compared to the voluminous incurring of…

2. Expense

If you’re a right-thinking person making a decent wage, and you don’t hire movers to do the vast majority of the work, you’re a crazy weirdo, and you’re probably reading this in your underwear while spoon feeding hot fudge to an oversized Beanie Baby. Seek help. I’m not saying movers aren’t expensive – they are – I’m saying paying not to get snippy with your wife all day is well worth the investment. But all the other ancillary expenses are death by a thousand cuts. Appraisals, inspections, boxes, tape, getting all the shit fixed from your inspection, paint, etc. The costs mount, and you’re overwhelmed by the unshakeable feeling of…

3. Endlessness

“Will this ever end?” is all you can think while you’re packing a room for what feels like the 12th time. Packing in particular is amazingly interminable. It’s easy enough to put all your DVDs in a box and look at a shelf and think to yourself, “Well, that’s packed.” Then you see all the randomly shaped accoutrements also on that shelf that you never think about and remember that EVERYTHING has to be out of this house, and you have to figure out a way to pack this shit too. On one of my shelves sat two globe shaped bookends, two laminate card holders that house a Karl Malone rookie card and a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, one of Kristin’s old laptops, my two diplomas from CSU, an old copy of a book that belonged to one of Kristin’s relatives that looks like a small version of the Necronomicon, and a box full of RCA adapters, power cords, and extension cords and shit. You have to pack that too. You have to clear out that drawer full of travel shampoos and conditioners you never look at. You have to gather up all your coats at once. Every time you think you’re done, there’s more random crap to deal with it. Looking at it all, and you’re struck by the vast majority of your stuff’s…

4. Pointlessness

Moving is good for putting you to a decision about a lot of your stuff. Is this thing important enough to me to want to put it in a box, load it on a truck, and transport it to a new location? You become the cruel boss coldly laying off employees before Christmas to increase your company’s efficiency during lean times. You’re fired, fleece jacket I got for free at a work conference! Off to Goodwill you go! The complacency of your rarely-visited closets is amazing, and moving is an excellent opportunity to purge. I’ve lived in my current home for over 3 years, which has caused my possessions to bloat. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place in the last 15 years, which means my purging has gotten lazy. I miss being able to turn over the inventory regularly, but I definitely don’t miss all the…

5. Injury

I have a bruise on my left oblique that is giant and yellow and gross. I have no recollection of how I incurred this injury, but I do know I woke up the other morning, felt a pain in my side that hadn’t been there previously, and worried I had liver cancer or something. Bruised shins, cut fingers, blisters a-go-go. Banged heads, wrenched backs, sore hands, and a gnarled visage are your makeup for the foreseeable future. I once moved a dresser with my friend Keith while wearing sandals (I am an idiot, yes), and ended up banging my toenail so hard on the thing, it fell off in a heap of disgustingness three weeks later. I know I’m going to bleed from the hand by the end of this move thanks to my new box cutter, and I can’t wait to fuck with that flap of skin for a fortnight.

You already know this – moving sucks. So this is the last time you’ll hear me bitch about it.

See you all next week, where I promise the first post will be about something that makes me happy.

3 comments on “Moving

  1. Deuce says:

    I wish I got fleece jackets from my work conferences….

  2. Mike Flick says:

    Well call me a crazy weirdo. . .

  3. mrs deuce says:

    Try Packing Your 9Th Month Of Pregnancy And Moving A Week After Giving Birth. That Was Total Insanity. Shortly After We Moved In Here Powerball Reached Some Crazy High Amount. We Were Talking About How We Could Spend The Money And Robert Asked If We’d Move. I Said “Hell No! We’re Staying Here A Long Time!”Emerson And Reese Will Have To Move Us Out Of Here. It Is A Great Time To Get Rid Of Stuff. The Amazing Thing To Me Is How Much More You’ll Get Rid Of As You Unpack! Didn’t I Just Go Through All Of This Shit?!?! And The Expense! Shelf Liner For The New Cabinets, Furniture For Th Rooms You’ve Never Had. Start Keeping Track Of How Many Trips You Make To Target And Home Depot, You’ll Amaze Yourself. Congratulations! In The End It’s All Worth It. Oh, And It’s Nice To Call In Moving Favors 🙂

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