Archives for the month of: July, 2008

Priceless advice

July 20, 08 //
2

So the second phase of the big move is now underway: I’m back in Missouri (where it is a brutal 95 degrees, obviously in my honor—though it’s not much cooler in the NYC area), having returned yesterday to collect the cats and oversee the move. Right at this moment I’m taking a break from packing CDs and other things that I didn’t manage to pack before I started the new job. The packers arrive tomorrow, ostensibly to pack the kitchen, bathroom, our few bits of framed artwork, and our electronics, but I have a feeling they’re going to end up packing more than that. (It turns out that packing services don’t add as much to the cost of a move as I thought they did, which isn’t to say that they don’t add quite a bit–but it’s so worth it, as I discovered the one time I had an employer who paid full relocation expenses.)

And I am a big giant ball of stress. I got about 3 hours of sleep, I think; between the heat (we have central air conditioning, of course, an essential in this climate, but it can only do so much) and all the worries and concerns racing through my mind, I just couldn’t stay asleep for more than an hour or so at a time. I think that must be the biggest reason that I keep having bouts of uncontrollable crying. This house is just so crowded with…stuff, stuff of all kinds, some of it toss-able, much of it not. I’m afraid that we won’t get all of it packed in time, though rationally, I know that worrying about that is silly. If we don’t get it packed and the movers end up being delayed a day, or we end up having to get them to pack more than we plan to, the world will not end. Worst case, Bill can rent a truck and move the rest of it when he’s ready to join me in NJ. Rationally, I know these things; rationally, I know that worrying about things I can’t control is silly and even unhealthy; rationally, I know that there’s nothing I can do but to keep packing and see how it goes. But “rationally” and I aren’t getting along very well at the moment.

My cell phone has this cute little feature that lets me add a message that displays when I turn the phone on. During the two weeks when I was between jobs and should have been spending every waking moment putting stuff in boxes, the message read, “Shouldn’t you be packing?” For the past month, though, the message has been “Don’t forget to breathe.” It’s good advice; I think I need to tattoo that message to my eyeballs for the next few days.

But it’s not the advice I’m referring to in the subject line. That advice is far better, and it is my heartfelt gift to anyone reading this. The advice is: Never move house. Ever. Find a city and a house you like or even love, and stay there. Or if you really want to move, because you hate your house or your kids are grown or the neighborhood is going downhill or whatever, for heaven’s sake don’t move any farther than a few miles. And for the love of God, don’t do it in July.

This is perhaps the most important advice I will ever give anyone. :-)

Peripatetic again

July 3, 08 //
2

For months and more, I’ve been wavering about whether or not to just delete the whole blog, to leave it here for posterity (an addition to the world’s growing collection of ghost blogs), or to revive it. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, but since I am wandering again and living up to the name of the blog—and since I have a rare ambient wireless connection here at my dad’s apartment (he still has dial-up, so I have to count on grabbing an open signal from the air)—it seems like a good time to post.

Yep, I’ve uprooted myself and my life yet again. In a little more than two weeks, I’ll be a resident of West Orange, NJ, a place I had never even visited before renting a house there. (I was in East Orange back when Upsala College still existed, many years ago, at a record fair or something at WFMU radio, but that was the extent of my knowledge of the Oranges.) The spouse is still back in Missouri, trying to juggle his long workdays with getting work done on the house so that we can sell it. The cats are there too, though mercifully, they’ll join me when I move in to the house; Bill (and the dog) will follow when they can.

And I have to confess that this peripatetic stuff isn’t as easy as it used to be, or seemed to be once. There are so many weird and scary variables that weren’t there the last few times I uprooted: having to sell a house in a tough market (and it wouldn’t be an instant seller even in a good market), having to find a place where we can have cars and pets and space, having to worry about Bill finding a job when he gets here. And not having the cats with me has been truly traumatic; I’ve given serious thought to packing the whole thing in and going back home, resuming my old job and my old life, and I think most of those thoughts have been triggered by my missing the cats. Not all of them, but most. Is it pathetic that I can’t bear to be away from the kitties for more than a few days? I don’t know, but when you consider that their lifespan is only around fifteen years (if they’re lucky, and it makes me nervous even talking about it), three weeks is a long fucking time.

Last time I moved east, with my first husband, we sold our house at a garage sale (really—our next-door neighbors made us an offer while we were chatting during the sale), we had the promise of an apartment in a brownstone in Park Slope, owned by family friends of my ex, and I never had to leave the cats behind. And my ex’s salary in Minneapolis was so negligible that it didn’t matter that he took a job here that paid even less than the one he’d had in Mpls.; we were still able to get by. At my new job, I’m making far more money than I did the last time I moved here, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem like enough.

And then there’s the New Jersey thing. My job is in Newark, and for a variety of reasons, it seems to make the most sense to find a place in suburban Jersey rather than staying in NYC and commuting by train. The office is in a part of Newark that could be called “emerging,” I guess, and it’s not really that bad…but it’s iffy enough that I wouldn’t want to have to walk to the train station if I were working late; I’d rather be able to just go to the parking lot and get in my car. (Many of my co-workers commute from Manhattan and Brooklyn, though, so my thinking may be flawed there.) Living in Jersey will also allow us more space and a less frenetic pace, and, if I’m being honest, the easy access to familiar stores like Target that we love to patronize is enticing too. (And there’s a Trader Joe’s within easy driving distance, which I’m excited about. Trader Joe’s has snubbed our part of Missouri, apparently forever.)

So we’ll be Jerseyites, and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s not the stigma of living in “Joisey,” exactly; just because I grew up making fun of the state doesn’t mean that I fail to recognize that it has many lovely towns and places. It’s more that I’m worried that a suburban Jersey life won’t feel like I’m back in New York, back home again; it seems more likely to feel pretty much like our life in Missouri, only a lot more expensive. Is that the life I want? I’m just not sure. Of course, there’s no way I can be sure until I actually start living there, and we’re renting, so we won’t be tied to West Orange for more than a year if we don’t want to be. But it’s yet another thing that’s been keeping me up at night.

Geez, this is the whiniest post ever, isn’t it? On the plus side, I’ve already gotten to see one of my two wonderful nephews,* and the opportunity to see them a lot more often is very welcome. And being able to hop on a train or bus (not as easy from West Orange as from some of the neighboring, pricier towns, but still very doable) to check in on my dad and my brother will be great—I’m really looking forward to not having to get on a plane to see my family. I like my new job, and I get the sense that I’ll continue to like it—and if ever I don’t, I’ll have a lot more job possibilities here than I would have in Missouri. So there’s lots to be optimistic about, and I’m trying to focus on that. Not altogether successfully during these first two weeks, but I’ll keep trying.

But I really think I’m too old for this. I’m not making any more cross-country moves for a while, that’s for damn sure. Or at least I hope I won’t have to.

*My nephews, who are now 21 and 17, respectively, are a genuine source of joy in my life. They’ve both turned out to be such amazingly good kids, smart and kind and fun to be with. Not that I would have expected them to turn out any other way, but y’know, they’re kids, and they grew up in a well-heeled New York suburb, and they could just as easily have been brats or snobs or otherwise unpleasant, despite having good parents who raised them well. I know this because a lot of my college friends grew up in the same suburb, and some of them were kind of wrecks. But my nephews, bless them, turned out to be good people, and they make me proud.