Movin' Out

I haven't been so much thinking inside the box as I've been thinking about putting things inside the box.

A few years ago, when clearing out my grandparents’ house after they moved into a retirement home, my parents and I were shocked to find all the stuff they’d accumulated over the 40-odd years they’d spend in their 3500 square foot North Portland abode. As veterans of the Great Depression, my grandparents held onto everything just in case they’d need it later. There was a bottle filled with the round bits of paper that come from a three-hole-punch, neatly labeled “confetti”. There was a closet filled with mayonnaise jars that my grandparents were unwilling to throw out in the vain hope that 50 gallons of free mayonnaise might materialize somewhere downtown, mayonnaise that was all for the taking provided you had the right sort of jar to scoop it into. And last of all, there were boxes. Oh, lord, how there were boxes. Every box for every item they’d ever purchased was saved somewhere in that house, usually stuffed inside of a slightly larger box, with a few smaller boxes tucked away inside of it. My grandparents could fit 10 or 15 different boxes inside one another like those little Russian dolls – the difference being that these had at one time held a microwave.

After the arduous task of separating valuable family heirlooms from containers full of containers was completed, my parents made me promise to never accumulate crap like my grandparents did. We made a point of going through all of our own stuff and throwing out everything that wasn’t completely necessary for us to live our lives.* Moving to Portland helped this process along considerably: Sure, there was some sentimental value to the dusty box full of my preschool assignments, but not enough for us to want to haul 20 pounds of dried macaroni and glitter up 60 miles of Interstate just so we could stuff it in another attic and keep not looking at it. Moving into my tiny dormitory, I made a point of not bringing extraneous crap that I didn’t need, and as space was a priority I made a point of not collecting stuff that was otherwise garbage.

*Things my family still owns:
1) Set of pink plastic boobs
2) Fake arrow-through-head prop
3) Austin Powers 3

At the time, I felt like I was running a pretty tight ship. I wasn’t one of those girls who wallpapered her room with pictures of every single one of her friends, family members, and family members’ friends, and I wasn’t one of those guys who carpeted his floor with loose paper and dirty laundry.* I had very little in the way of decoration – a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks on one wall and the poster for Superbad on the other, in a wonderful juxtaposition of fine art and movies that use the word “dick-demon”. Drawers were employed for the storage of clothing, garbage was disposed of in a timely fashion, and the dust bunnies never got big enough to steal my iPod. Thus, I assumed that things would be easier when it came time to move out.

*I also didn’t crap in my garbage can, Julian. Yeah, that’s right, I said your name on the Internet – you probably don’t even read my blog, so what do you care? Everybody, Julian is the one I was talking about; he was the guy who packed hot lunches right there in his own room.

The week when everyone moves out of a college dormitory is about as entertaining as the circus. SUVs and minivans furiously jockey for positions in the parking lot as parents and returning students scream at one another. I’ve been watching, and these sorts of meltdowns occur pretty quickly after the parents and student are reunited; the parents realize why they were happy to get rid of their kid in the first place, the students realize that they won’t be able to come home drunk for a whole three months, and things just go downhill from there once these emotionally strained parties have to move heavy objects down six flights of stairs. The product of all this strife is an intricate ballet that involves a lot of swearing and the occasional dropped refrigerator.

Now, the very act of moving out of the dorms sounds pretty unpleasant when you first start thinking about it. If you live in a place for long enough, even a tiny closetlike place that you endeavor not to fill with pointless kitsch, things kind of start to get settled. Stuff that came down to school neatly packed and organized in well labeled boxes starts to get spread around the place, things you need mix up with things you don’t need, you keep the same bottle of orange Gatorade in your fridge for an entire year… The more a place becomes home, the harder it gets to move it, no matter how spare a lifestyle you’re trying to lead. You stop thinking about what needs to get packed – you don’t see a power strip as a possession, you don’t think of it as yours, a thing that you own, you just start to see it as a part of the room in the same way you’d think of the wall, or the 20 year old piece of gum stuck underneath the desk. But then it comes to you that no, those power strips belong to you, and they have to go home, and suddenly you’re looking around your little room so full of stuff and you realize that you’ve got to put your entire life into seven cardboard boxes and somehow fit them into your Mom’s Prius, and you’ve only got two days to do it because you figured packing was going to be a breeze. It is now that you realize why all of your friends had been packing for weeks before. It is now that you realize why some people are renting U-Hauls and trucks. It is now that you realize that the very thought of packing and moving anything in two days or less is some straight up asinine shit.

In a move distinctly reminiscent of my grandparents, I had saved all the boxes I’d brought my stuff to college in, and in order to clear one hurdle right away I set unfolding them and taping them together once again. At that point, I had seven large boxes blocking just about all of the available floor space in my room, so I figured that the next logical step would be to start putting things in the boxes. I decided to forego the careful planning with which my father and I had packed my things before I came to school in favor of just grabbing as many of my possessions as I could find and throwing them into the nearest empty container. I continued to throw just any old thing – laundry, desk toys, free lube courtesy of Planned Parenthood – into a box until it was filled to the brim, at which point I would close the lid and tape it shut using brute force and also some profanity. At some point during my packing frenzy I realized that I could easily starve to death, blocked into the corner of my room by piles of boxes with my traditional sustenance of dark chocolate and peanut butter already packed away.

Incidentally, I bet this sort of thing isn’t a problem for Buddhist monks. If a Buddhist monk wants to move, he just gets up and starts walking. Hell, he might not even be wearing clothes! It might sound kind of nutty right now, but when I was elbow deep in material possessions and packing tape I was thinking pretty hard about taking a trip to Tibet.

The good thing about my method of packing was that when my Mom arrived, everything I owned was in the boxes and we were able to leave with about as much dignity as possible. The downside to it is that now that we’re at home, I’m not really sure which of the seven identical boxes any given item is in. For example, I couldn’t tell you exactly where my mouse is right now – it sure as hell wasn’t in the box with my computer and power cord. I don’t know why I put it in a separate box, as my memories from my packing craze are somewhat hazy – I more or less blacked out and woke up in a room full of neatly packed boxes. I’m sure my Dad* is shaking his head as he reads this, because this is exactly the sort of disorder and inefficiency that he’s been trying to teach me to avoid, but I think it’s enough of a miracle that I made it home without leaving anything behind.

*Happy Father’s Day, by the way, Dad. I know Mom got her own entry and all that, but you have even less tolerance for this sort of holiday than she does, so I figure a footnote works just as well. You’ve never made any secret of the fact that you’re proud of me, and you’ve always been my blog’s biggest fan, even when it isn’t all that funny, and for that I love you. Also, you could easily pass for Steve Martin’s brother, which I think would be an incredibly handy trick if we ever need to get into an exclusive nightclub.

As much as we try to not to pick up crap that we don’t need, I think that it’s impossible to have a home without at least some crap you don’t need in it. In fact, “home” is Latin for “place to put novelty pencil sharpeners, back issues of Maxim, commemorative coins/plates, etc.” We keep these things around because we know we’re going to be in one place for an extended period of time, and that’s sort of the base definition of what a home is, when you take out all the sappy poetic stuff. People don’t put down roots so much as they put down crap; moving said crap is what makes life so difficult, and that’s why people are so reluctant to leave home. In a few months, in order to make my new apartment home, I’m going to have to help move a couch up a flight of stairs.

Buddhist monks, of course, have no couches…

Truman Capps has just realized that he’s going to repeat this move in/move out cycle at least three more times in the coming years, a thought scary enough to make him sleep with the lights on.