I should surely be doing my homework.
But there’s television. Remember that?
And movies On Demand.
And my obvious infatuation with Jason Segel.
Just like any hobby or passion, your celebrity crushes require regular maintenance.
Maybe tomorrow? Once I’m done procrastinating on this assignment, and can fully focus on procrastinating on Friday’s assignment.
When I was but a wee undergraduate, each new semester was an excitement. Any minute shift in my schedule would change my life. No more class on Friday? My life is complete. No Thursday night 9 to mid shift at the library? I can finally go out to a bar with my friends! Early classes and afternoons off? Nap! Gym! Homework!
I must have lost my youthful exuberance since January of 2007, because I harbor no such delusions about Ye Old Grad School. At the beginning of each semester, I close my eyes, pinch my nose, and jump.
And every semester is a different cold, black-watered pool, swimming with things that bite. This fall, I have to survive:
So I’m assuming this semester will be trying, because it will be. I’m assuming there will be a rhythm, but I won’t know what that rhythm is for a few weeks.
I’m not trying to force anything here.
However, I have a few hopes for this fall semester:
1) I will take pride in my academic writing. Because I’ve turned in far too many a paper without even a proper proofread…
2) I will continue to prioritize healthy eating, exercising, and sleeping. Why bother with grad school if you’re just going to be grumpy and sick?
3) I will write things down. Which is less intuitive than you’d think.
4) I will be experimental with my caffeine intake. My vending machine has vanished, I can’t afford $4+ on Starbucks everyday, and I’m trying to cut back on fake sugar products. So stay tuned to see how THAT all works out…
5) I will apply what I’ve learned in my LIS classes to my new Ref Desk gig. Which is, surprisingly, fun!
6) I will write things down in fancy, expensive notebooks. Exclusively.
Done and done.
No, I will not shut up about moving yet, because I am absolutely floored by how much this move took/is taking out of me.
First, a little bit about my beloved boyfriend and I.
To put it plainly, he is the frog of the relationship, and I am the toad.
So our multitudes of discussions regarding this move went a little like this:
Toad: But, what about this potentially awful thing that might happen? What if it’s not even worth it to move?
Frog: That will not happen. Our new apartment will be sweet, the moving process will be free of complication and fairly cheap.
And, because I am a Toad who also works very hard to be more flexible and optimistic in her major relationship, I believed him.
When the move became more and more complicated, expensive, and difficult, my Frog was worn down. On Official Moving Day, I had to take the god forsaken 39 bus through standstill traffic all the way into school to work for a few hours. I hightailed it home quickly afterward, only to be kicked off my train and left to walk in the 95 degree heat, with sleep deprivation behind me and the prospect of unpacking all of my crap into a shared apartment space ahead.
Lance awaited me. “Remember when you were all upset last week and said we need to get rid of half of our stuff?” he asked. “Yeah, we’re doing that. Which boxes should I throw out now?”
This move was enough to break even the Froggiest of Frogs.
Whenever I talk about moving to Boston, the phrase “the worst day of my life” comes out of my mouth without any hesitation. A year ago, I let my Frog talk me into leaving Michigan at 2 in the morning instead of waiting until daylight hours. We made it to the first rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike before said Frog started falling asleep at the wheel. We dozed together for a few hours in the front of a very small pickup truck, and I woke up repeatedly with my heart throbbing in my chest, dreaming that someone in the rest stop parking lot was stealing all of our earthly belongings from behind us. After another nap, a little rain, tolls, hills, hundreds of miles traveled at 55 mph, and Red Sox traffic, we met our realtor in Boston and proceeded to move all of our belongings up three flights of stairs. It was after midnight when we finished.
However, when we woke up the next day, life hadn’t quite started. Getting there was the hardest part. This time around, life didn’t stand still for a few weeks while we got our bearings. Lance returned to school the next morning, picking up his first week of teaching where he left it. I reported for work at Job #1 at 9 a.m., and clocked out of Job #2 at 9 p.m., and classes started the next day.
Truth: I didn’t even have time to take a shower.
My brain did not enjoy this. My mental fog didn’t clear until about 2 p.m. on Thursday.
My body liked it even less. Excedrin. Sore muscles. Stress stomach.
It was like everything in my life vanished on Wednesday. It’s coming back slowly, in pieces, but unfortunately, grad school waits for no woman.
Papers. Readings. Articles. Oh, my!
Things I Have Learned While Moving
1. Don’t move.
2. You REALLY don’t want to move in Boston.
3. You really REALLY don’t want to move in Boston on September 1st.
4. Your current apartment will want you out of your place on August 31st, so they can clean. Your new apartment will not let you move in until 1 p.m. on the 1st, so they can clean. Raise your hand if you would rather have that $130 for the moving van and $100 for a hotel room than that probably-not-that-much-cleaner apartment?
5. Things you can give away for free on Craigslist within 12 hours:
– parts of a broken hookah
– those Emergen-c packets you hate, the ones that taste like your tongue is decaying with every sip
– 3 jigsaw puzzles
– that deck of novelty drinking game cards you had two sets of from your Christmas stockings
– an air conditioner
6. We are, obviously, pack rats. Lance worse than I. He’s the one that wouldn’t let me throw away the silly package of bar cards.
7. Lance, however, is not as sentimental about his beloved soup pot as I once thought. We broke its lid in a freak accident months ago, and it is now time to say goodbye.
8. Moving is a fugue state. I used to feel this way about exam week in undergrad: it sucked, because I had to take exams and study and it was stressful, but I didn’t have to go to classes, most of my exams lasted less than an hour, my work schedule was different. So even though it wasn’t exactly fun, I did get to do things like sleep in, study leisurely with ample breaks for playing Super Nintendo emulators on my computer, go out with friends.
This week, my job is Move. It is stressful, and it sucks, but when I’m not actively packing or making plans or running errands, I really have not much to do.
And instead of fretting over what to cook each day, we decided to take our grocery money and use it to eat out when we want. The cost won’t be terribly more than our grocery spending, and it’s just more convenient. I have eaten Qdoba twice this week and had my favorite sandwich from my favorite sandwich place. So more fun, too.
It’s a mixed bag.
9. Due to #4, you will have to abandon all of your frozen and refrigerated goods. Please, dear movers, acknowledge this reality months before your move, and do not allow your chronically optimistic boyfriend to delude you until it’s too late to eat all of your frozen goodies.
10. You can pack an entire box of your own belongings without making a visual dent in the amount of crap left in your apartment. Actually, you can keep packing boxes with the same effect, for at least 15 boxes, most likely more. I’ll keep you posted.
11. Moving Day Suckitude does not necessarily decrease with the distance of the move. Yes, it would be hard to beat a 24 hour, sleeping at rest stops, move in at eleven p.m. by yourself up three flights of stairs…. but given #4 and the complications of… oh… having to go to work the morning after and go to work and class on Friday? Well, this one could take the cake.
12. I am no longer infatuated with a new apartment. Any new apartment.
13. Unless it has over 1000 square feet of space
14. And a spare room.
15. And a pantry.
16. And central air.
17. Or a gym!
18. I’m going to bed…
19. Being homeless for 5 hours means your favorite animal is homeless as well. Options include hunting for a cat babysitter (who doesn’t OWN a cat because your cat is mean and antisocial), leaving your cat in an potentially overheated car, or buying a cat leash and taking her to the park all day.
20. You will have to call Comcast, which is usually a lengthy, tedious experience. You will inevitably speak to the least informed customer service representatives employed by this corporation, including those with minimal communication skills and those who think that it is simply impossible to install internet and cable before September 10th, no matter what.
You may also end up with a land line. For some reason.
21. If don’t buy proper groceries and only buy a case of beer, your snacks start to look a little strange.
Apple, chunk of cheese…. beer.
Peach, crackers…. beer.
Blueberry yogurt, tomato slices… beer.
But it’s Sam Summer, so you should really just roll with it.
And who said you had to pack sober, anyway?
My animal did not particularly enjoy her trip back to her birth state.
On the drive from Boston to Jackson, Peach sat in the backseat, curled up fairly compactly, and refused to move or eat or drink or use her litter box for the entirety of the 14 hour trip.
And when we carried her into my parents’ house, she flipped a lid at having eight people, two friendly Corgis, and a foreign cat all in her face. I was bitten, Lance scratched, and she hid under a foot stool and swiped at her offenders with her claws all evening.
I learned that my cat can growl! Which she did toward Moonshine right on through our trip, never letting her enter the room without at least an intimidating hiss.
She also hissed at my parents, my sisters, and me. We penned her up in Dorothy’s room during the day, and she spent nights perched on the arm of the sofa that was my bed. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to see her 2 inches from my head, gazing intently into the ceiling fan. And when our eyes met, she would give me a good hiss too.
Anyway, then she had an appointment at the Reproductive Organ Removal Facility. I was in Ohio with my mother for two days, so my sister Betsy was so kind as to fetch her from her surgery. The drugs must have done her some good because from there on out, she was a changed cat. She let everyone pet, often to the point where I wondered what happened to her old fighting, biting spirit. Was her personality due to too much kitty estrogen? It was strange. She cozied up to the dogs, although they wouldn’t come near her after she’d swiped their noses a few times on that first night. She roamed the house freely instead of hiding in the fireplace all day, or behind a couch.
The abundance of loud voices and slammed doors and barking dogs still frightened her multiple times daily. And of course, she and Moonshine still had territory wars, but no actual catfighting took place. Which was for the best. My Peach has a freaking creepy growl, but Moonshine lives Outside, with Other Animals With Claws and Teeth.
I spent some time fretting over my antisocial animal.
“Are you upset because it’s your fault that your cat is hissing? Do you think you broke her?” my dad ask.
Which I could tell was code for, “Do you REALLY think you can control your cat in ANY way, you silly girl? I could barely control you as a child and you were a HUMAN for Pete’s sake!”
But no, I wasn’t upset about that. I was mostly upset that my animal was being such a poor houseguest. Like when somebody invites their grumpy boyfriend over and he gets mad at the world and then everyone rolls their eyes at that particular sister? I was that sister, and while my actual grumpy boyfriend spent most of the week in Lapeer with his family, my cat was an annoying stand in.
And also, ever since we got Peach, I’ve wanted another cat, someday when we have a slightly larger abode. Watching my cat claw at other animals dampened my menagerie-related spirits just a bit.
But I guess she ended up okay.
She’s now back in her home, where she hasn’t hissed once, where she eats, drinks, uses the litter box, and wakes me up every morning so I can pull her security blanket onto the bed she she can lay with me. She fights. She bites. She loves our abundance of moving boxes.
It’s just the *actual* moving I’m concerned about. We are moving in with a roommate. And I will be bringing both a freeloading friend of Lance’s who is looking to move to Boston, AND an antisocial cat who, on her better days, has a tendency toward ankle biting.
Everyone cross their adorable little paws for me.
I live in one of the most walkable cities in the US, a city that also boasts a slightly unreliable but mostly efficient public transportation system,
and I miss my car.
A lot.
I am that spoiled.
What’s worse is that I’ve never been a big driving person to begin with. I delayed getting my driver’s license in high school, and even after I did, I was the friend who everyone offered to pick up or drop off, because if they didn’t offer, I’d find some sneaky way to ask.
Also, I drove a 1983 Oldsmobile Omega that had a bad habit of losing the will to drive while idling at red lights and then refusing to restart for an hour or so. That might have had something to do with it.
And I didn’t buy my own car until I was almost 21, and I pretty much HAD to find one so I could get from my apartment to my classes. If I had moved to Appian Way rather than Deerfield Village, I wouldn’t have bothered.
But driving freely around the state and the country for 3.5 years really ruined me.
I miss NPR.
I miss buying drinks at gas station stores.
I miss blasting music and singing at the top of my lungs.
I miss having an extra sweater or hairband or pair of shoes or 75 cents stuffed in between the seats.
I miss road trips.
But most of all…
I miss being able to manage my extreme forgetfulness with a quick U-turn,
because on days such as today,
when I got up at 6 a.m.
so I could go to Starbucks for a few hours and work on a paper at my leisure,
and realize once my dear darling boyfriend has dropped me off,
that both the book upon which my paper should be written,
AND the extensive lunch I delicately packed, full of healthful snacks to get me from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.
were both still in my apartment,
that U-Turn could have come in handy.
Alas, alack,
I am stuck
watching trains pull up and pull away at Brookline Village, waiting for one empty enough for one-more-person to squeeze on
(third time’s the charm!),
procrastinating on my homework, despite my best intentions,
and spending 10 dollars
at the lousy salad bar
again.
Car, I miss you. I hope to see you again, someday, in Auto Salvage Heaven.
Yesterday was the last day of my internship.
My last unpaid assignment: write up the flap copy for a book of Egyptian Myths. That is code for “Summarize Egyptian History in about 150 words.”
Fun! But the editors also took me out to lunch, and on my way out the door, handed me a Judy Moody tote bag full of brand new books and goodies. And since it was the last day of my internship, and my last day hanging out in Somerville, I picked up some overpriced but nonetheless completely necessary treats and headed home.
Of course, because of this detour, I ended up on the super-crowded 5 p.m. trains. Carrying a bag stuffed with the lunch I packed but didn’t eat, Judy Moody, and carefully balancing a bakery box while I teetered and tottered on the Green Line.
And of course, all that unbalanced, weight-bearing standing gave me one of those obnoxious headaches that just don’t go away.
You know, the headache that starts in that spot between your neck and shoulder muscles, climbs up behind your ear, clamps down your jaw down tight, makes one side of your nose start to run for no reason, and makes you kind of dizzy, kind of nauseous.
Wait, you mean I’m the only person on the planet who has these bizarro symptoms?
You’re kidding me.
So I spent the night stricken, in bed, reading the same Brazen Careerist articles I’ve read two, three times before. The ones about how you can’t control your biological clock, how you can’t put off your family dreams to nurture your career, how it is impossible to balance life and career goals without letting something go… while alternately scowling at my Facebook newsfeed for rubbing engagements and weddings and it’s-a-boys in my face…
and then alternately remembering that I’m only 25 and my boyfriend will come in and kiss me goodnight as soon as I flip off the light and that many people would probably enjoy this life that I consider to be so miserable so often.
Emotional and physical sabotage, keeping myself from oh, packing for this trip to Michigan that begins tomorrow… or packing up my apartment for a move that will occur less than a week after we are back to Boston.
And I’m sick right now, thinking about all that Lance has to do today. I don’t even want to get into details, but it involves visiting Southbridge, Lowell, Brockton, and Dedham, and the RMV.
And waiting for a package. Which, if you don’t live in Boston, let me tell YOU… this is probably the worst part of the day and will probably involve strings of expletives delivered to those who answer the phone at UPS and/or FedEx.
I just had to stop writing and call him, just now, because all this is freaking me out so much.
This also could have something to do with the fact that breakfast this morning was half a rootbeer float cupcake, 2 slices of sugary cinnamon raisin toast, a Doubleshot in a can, and 2 Excedrins.
*twitch*
At this point, I can’t even see past the next 5 minutes. What is going on? I’m going where? When? And I’m going to be in the car for how long? And I’m going to be in Michigan with my family with nothing to do for how many days? And I have to attend a costume party on Saturday and dress up like what??
I am about a page and a half away from the page requirement on my last final of the semester, but I think I could potentially overshoot it by a mile. Which has never happened in the history of me and writing papers, let me tell you.
But a lot has changed since I wrote my first five-paragraph-essay in the ninth grade.
At some point, Desmond Harding told me that if I turned in a five-paragraph-essay, he would shoot me in the head. Or something like that. I thought it would be easy, but I accidentally wrote one anyway. Then I revised enough that it wasn’t a five-paragraph-essay, and then revised it some more so it wouldn’t suck, but something went wrong because I got my paper back with the words “NO FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAY” written in the margins and I counted… and there were five paragraphs, and then Desmond Harding shot me in the head. Or something like that.
Dr. Patty gave me a dense book that I liked and told me I could write about whatever interested in for 10 pages and it wouldn’t be intimidating at all because it would be fun. He was right, even though he tried to talk me into writing about nature and conservation. Or birds. Or canoeing in Wyoming. Or something like that.
Oh, Dr. Patty.
Oh, Thoreau.
William Brevda taught me that yes, you can write a 10 page paper in less than 24 hours, with a hangover, if you dedicate yourself to the task. That means shoving down calories for energy, even if stress and peppperoni threatens to send those calories right back up the spout. That means closing down the library at 2 a.m. and moving over to Kaya, but you must then take advantage of the Idiot Studier’s Special – free additional espresso shots in the midnight hours. You must also resist altercations with your previously MIA boyfriend who drove all the way from the Upper Peninsula and went directly to said coffee shop without so much as a phonecall.
William Brevda taught me that with persistence, tears, and coffee, even such a painful paper can earn an A.
Desmond Harding told me that I should stop writing a five-paragraph-essay. Okay. I figured that one out. Then Mark Freed told me I should stop writing anything that wouldn’t fit on one piece of paper. From that day forth, I abandoned conclusions and most introductions. At that point, it was a good feeling. Letting go of unnecessary baggage feeling.
Last semester, I remembered how to do all that stuff I forgot about in the two-years I spent NOT writing academic papers. My paper grades were an accurate indicator of the variable memory of humans.
And this paper…. this final paper of my first semester of graduate school? This paper has taught me the following valuable lessons:
In seven days I must turn in 50 single-paged papers on single picturebooks.
I really liked this song when I was six years old. I used to sing it a lot
Little did I know, it would become my existence.
Like, literally. My existence.
14 down. 36 to go!
So yeah, if I have time to blog, then yell at me and tell me to get back to work please.