Charity

There comes a time in the packing nightmare when you either (a) don't care anymore and feel spiteful and want to throw everything in the trash or the charity bin; and/or (b) give up on any semblance of organized packing or cleaning out of your crap and just throw everything in the nearest box so you can go through it when you're moving in.

I'm pretty sure this happens to most people. I keep cycling between (a) and (b). I go for (a) when my tiredness hits me stronger, and I go for (b) when I'm bored and sick of this whole thing. I just don't want to regret throwing something away that I might later really want.

I have hazy memories of trying to move out of my senior year room at Yale. The dorms had this terrible policy where you had to be out of your room, completely moved out, by 12 noon the day after graduation. Painful, if you ask me. Especially since you want to spend the night of graduation saying goodbye to your friends who you might not see for a really long time! I'm a slow packer, so needless to say, despite my parents' 3 car trips to pick up my stuff and putting some stuff in my uncle's van, I still wasn't done packing near the deadline.

The pressure was high to get out of the dorms, and I had my parents yelling at me for not doing it earlier and for having so much stuff left that it might not even fit in the car. I was sort of going crazy at that point, because I worried that something really important might not make it into the car! I figured that, worst case scenario, I'd carry as much as I could handle with me on Metro-North and my parents could drive the car.

We did make it out of there (although it was after noon) with everything in the car, but I remember a big trash bag and me just tossing stuff in there out of spite. Like, "you say I have too much crap and want me to get rid of stuff? Fine! I will!" But no one suffers from that except me. The next year, I remember looking for something that I was so sure I had at Yale, but couldn't find anywhere, and the only conclusion I could come to is that I must have thrown it out in the moving. I was sad. I had regrets about speeding through and trashing everything. I wished I had paid more careful attention. But sitting here today, I have no idea what that thing was.

This time, I started piling up the finished stuff in the intersection area of the apartment and let the finished stuff curve around the wall into the living room, going across and up the wall. Then I realized there was a big problem. There's barely enough room for us to walk by the boxes, much less carry the futon. And the furniture has got to be what goes first. So, since we're not done packing, we have to finish... and then move all the boxes across the room, so we can disassemble the furniture and carry it out.

And my goodness, it's 4 am. I think I want to cry. Sigh.