packing

Pardon my complete lack of attempt at wittiness with the title of this post. I’m sick. I’m tired. And I’m packing. The congestion that I whined about twelve days ago…is still firmly embedded in my chest. I’m mostly okay, until I start hacking up a lung.  Good times.

The up side is that the occasional coughing fit makes me feel a little less guilty for taking the occasional break. Doesn’t that just work in your favor though?

I’ve lived in studio apartments for the last…million years, so I’m kind of perpetually packed. If you live in a studio, you have to be.  Essentially, I just have books, clothes, pictures and some glassware to pack.  I am, however, sorting.  Because when we move, we purge.

Going through the pre-packed boxes can be brutal. There are the VHS tapes of every MacGyver episode that a friend devotedly taped for me. I now have the DVDs; I don’t even have a VCR anymore. It makes no sense to keep them, but things fell apart and that once-close friend and I haven’t spoken in over a year.  And…the VHS tapes are making a 3,000 mile trip across the country.

Because I’m not above emotions overriding logic.

There are also my bookcases.  I’ve come to home these for the last four years and it’s breaking my heart to leave them behind. It’s just not cost effective to haul them across the country. I can’t possibly justify it. I also can’t possibly afford it.

Damn.

And can I just say…

Jewel cases: the bane of everyone’s existence when moving.

I didn’t even place them. We really did have two Brahms and two Jude cases right on top. That is so my junior and senior years of college.

Mostly, sorting is fun. This is, um, Fed. Needless to say, he was named before my li’l obsession with Roger Federer got out of hand. Fed stands for Flesh Eating Disease, because that’s what he is.  One million times his actual size, Fed is a streptococcus pyogenes and that’s a knife and fork on his tummy. He vants to eat your flesh…

These just beg the question, Where are my Obama buttons?

Just so you know, that Kerry Edwards button lights up. It’s so fucking hideous.

This scarf probably warrants a post of its own. After I told my friend Jen about my breakthrough realization that, it’s not my fault I’m a girl, not the boy my Daddy wanted me to be and I can forgive myself for being a girl, she jumped up off the couch and wrapped this fabulously girly Muppet-fur scarf around my neck.  I think this was the first pink article of clothing I’d owned since my Easter dress when I was 8.

And because I know you’re straining, the close up on that shirt is:

Thanks, M@ber. :-)

Finally, there are a few things that seem to permeate my apartment. Appearing in seemingly incongruous places, these are the things that float from one bag to another and are just everywhere in my life:

There is always a black ponytail holder to be found on every other surface in my apartment…except when I want one.

My hair is just barely long enough to pull back again, into one of those stubby little ponytails that just seem silly. At this point, it’s at the length where I still prefer to do two pigtails.

Because that’s not the least bit silly when you’re 28.

The UK OK post its will never die. My former, former place of employment had a ridiculous stash of these – a donation from the UK tourism board for an event. We had thousands of them when I started working there, two years after that event. We all joked about how, somehow, we all ended up with a block at home.

Last month I stayed at my friend Josh’s place. Josh and I met when he was interning at said organization back in 2003. On his desk: a block of UK OK post its.

And, of course…endless gratitude to Tampax for giving me a tampon with an applicator that can hide inside a closed fist.

Yes, I’m an applicator sort of girl.

Judge me as you wish.

Because metal nail files freak me out…and I cannot, for the life of me, manage to keep track of these. I have three packages of Revlon emery boards, in various states of fullness.

We’ll see if I can find ONE of them when I get to Seattle.

Back to hauling boxes of books.

I leave you with the eternal moving whine: I have too many books.