The 7 Stages of Moving

So I’m in the process of moving again. And although you do things differently when you move a little bit at a time, there are still seven distinct stages that everyone goes through when transporting an entire life from one place to another.

Stage 1: Dread
Before you start moving or packing or perhaps even looking for another place to live, there is a deep sense of dread that sets in. It is directly related to the amount of time you have to find a place and the amount of crap you have to haul there. The shorter the time, the greater the dread. The more the crap, the greater the dread. Just thinking about the fact that you might not find a place to live before your lease ends, and you’ll be out on the street or couch surfing with all your stuff in some overpriced storage unit somewhere is enough to make anyone cringe. And then you experience a moment of clarity, you take an honest inventory of all the stuff you have in your “simple” life, and you consequently crap yourself while having a stress-induced seizure, which leaves you in a catatonic state for at least a week.

Stage 2: Action Plan
After someone dunks your head in ice cream, and you emerge from your dread coma, it’s time to get to work. You scour the classifieds, you have everyone you know keeping their ears open for an available apartment, and you start to get it through your thick head that you’re moving whether you like it or not, and it will be far less painful if you’re ready for it.

Stage 3: Paying a Butt-Load of Money
Last month’s rent on old place + first AND last month’s rent on new place + security deposit + rental truck + pizza for all your friends who help you move for free = your bank account all shriveled and whimpering in the corner, beat to a bloody pulp and softly singing “Amazing Grace.”

Stage 4: Purging
After your moment of insight into the truth about just how much junk you have, you decide it’s time to clean house. The organized will get straight to work on a yard sale while the procrastinators and the lazy will make a few trips to Goodwill and then leave a large mountain of crap by the dumpster on moving day because they’re just sick of thinking about it.

Stage 5.1: Organized Packing
The packing has to be broken down into two sections because that’s how it happens. In the first stage, you crank up “SexyBack” and get eagerly to work. You fold all your clothes very neatly and wrap all your dishes in newspaper or paper towels or plastic bags or whatever you have. And you feel pretty good about how it’s all going, and you think you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have hope that you might actually survive, and this continues until the moment that will inevitably happen in every move.

CRAP. MULTIPLICATION.

Stage 5.2: Throwing in the towel…with the DVDs, the office supplies and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink
There comes a point when you start to think Great! I’m almost finished. But you could not be more wrong. The moment you even think this, all of your inanimate objects will begin to breed like rabbits, and the five or six more boxes you thought you had to pack suddenly become twenty boxes, six grocery bags, a garbage bag and the sacrifice of all your exotic fish for the use of the packing space the aquarium affords. No longer do you label the boxes with helpful words like “Master Bath” or “Kitchen FRAGILE.” If anything, you start writing things like “Beth’s Miscellaneous Crap,” “Uhhh…” or “Dear God WHY?!?!” punctuated with the water stains left by the tears you cried at 5 a.m. because you were up ALL night the night before the move finishing the packing you thought was almost done last week.

Stage 6: Adrenaline Rush
You haven’t slept in two days. You don’t know where anything is. You accidentally packed your toothbrush, shampoo and every pair of underwear you own prematurely. But by golly it’s MOVING DAY!! And moving day is an exciting day. People are bustling about, there’s a lot of Gatorade, you get to drive a big truck, and at the end of the day, you know you’re going to be living in that great new place you picked out! That place that must be better than your current place or you wouldn’t be moving. And magically, you have the strength of at least three men and the energy of a hyperactive puppy on crack.

This will carry you through the moving day and perhaps one or two days following.

Stage 7: Unpacking
Unpacking takes you basically the entire time you live there. And then you decide to move again.

**In case anyone’s wondering, I’m currently in the part of stage 5.2 where you have to take a break from packing or you’ll decide you don’t need any pots, pans or kitchen utensils ever again.

It Must’ve Been the Rum

I dreamed just now that I’d befriended a family that had two sons. The sons were significantly younger than me, but somehow, we’d still grown up together. The younger one was probably 11 or so, and the older one was 18 or 19. I don’t know how we’d grown up together. Maybe I was younger in the dream. Anyway, the older one and I had memories of playing together as children, but still, I know I was older than they were because I had some sort of authority over them. Not sure how that worked.

Anyhoe, we were at what I thought at first was a high school football game, which would have made sense considering the crowd and the fact that everyone on the sidelines was wearing football gear, but it actually turned out to be a high school ultimate frisbee game.

Well, the boys got the idea that I needed more spirit, I guess, so they snuck up behind me with some green hairspray and sprayed stripes in my beautiful locks. I don’t know if they’d been getting on my nerves for a while or what, but apparently this was the last straw. I took the little one and left him with his father, the coach. Then I took the older one and made him stand facing the fans in the stands with his arms crossed behind his back (as if that’s even possible), holding the railing.

He, of course, would have none of it, and the moment I left, so did he. I felt bad about humiliating him like that, so I went to find him and apologize. I found him up on a roof somewhere, talking on his cell phone, and the whole time I was apologizing to him, I was trying to find a chair to sit in that wasn’t broken. I finally found one right as I finished my spiel, and right then Yam (from Caswell) came in with a ceiling fan he’d bought for my grandmother’s house. It was a super-high-tech kind of deal that she would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS put up in her house, but we told him it was cool.

Then he sat down on the sofa that had magically appeared on the roof, took off his shirt and suddenly turned into George Castanza in the episode of Seinfeld where he poses for the racy photos.

Well, the next thing I knew, George Castanza and the 18-year-old (whose name I don’t know) were reading through a script the kid had written, and it was then that I knew everything was going to be just fine.

She’s Done It Again

Friends, Emily Furr Hogan has once again sent me the most amazing internet treasure, and although Madame has her own blog, for some reason, she doesn’t post these things, but sends them to me instead. And I then have the pleasure of passing them on to you. And believe you me, it is with great pleasure that I give you what she informs me is an actual news story that her boss’s family saw on the air. On the real TV news station. Made by real, professional TV news people. Behold!

I don’t know if my favorite part is the bear “climbing the tree,” “escaping into the woods,” or sitting calmly by while a woman speaks rather excitedly about his poop. But let us not gloss over the tone of irony, slight annoyance and general feeling of I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-this-voice-over-my-career-is-ending-here-and-now conveyed through the words, “This is what the bear probably looked like…except real.”

Database 5.0

Ladies and Gentlemen, today I inaugurated the fifth in my line of Databases. Now, to the uninitiated in the ways of the Database, it appears as though they are just journals. But friends, that is where many are mistaken. These are not just journals or notebooks, not just pieces of paper bound together with glue or spiraled wire. They are records of my entire life. They contain thoughts and reflections like any good journal, but they also contain everything else. Recipes, article ideas, rough drafts, driving directions, to-do lists, notes from church, notes from professional development workshops, letters that will never be delivered, photos, drawings, rockin’ t-shirt designs, lesson plans, the list goes on…

It always makes me happy to begin a new Database. It’s like New Year’s. You get to start fresh knowing everything you learned with the previous Database and excited to start again with the new one. I was so excited about this one that I wrote it a letter telling it as much. I wrote it in the Database, of course. DB5.0 and I are going to have SO many grand adventures together! And it’s perfect because it has a world map on its cover. Granted, it’s in French, about 300 years old, and only of North and South America, but still. By the time our journey comes to an end, DB5.0 and I will have explored so much more of the world that he might decide a new graphic is in order! That’ll be up to him, though.

Oh, it is exciting indeed.

It is past my bedtime, but…

I wanted to write SOMETHING because I get better numbers on the Google when I do, but I really have to go to bed. A thousand apologies for not having anything to say earlier. My mama’s in town, and we’ve been hanging out all day, so I chose to neglect you all. Can you blame me? Mama…internet…mama…internet. I think we all know what the wise choice is here.

Anyhoe, a quick story for you. We played Scrabble. I didn’t win. J/k that’s not the story.

A 21-year-old friend referred to me the other day, in a conversation with another one of her 20/21-year-old friends, as “the lady who was sitting across from you at dinner.” Hahahahahaha…lady. I love it.

The End.

Looky here.

Hey y’all. I’m in the process of revamping Onward Hoe!, and I’m working on the blogroll, so if you want me to link to you or not, let me know. That is all.

Heart.

It’s So Hard Knowing What You Want

I know I have complained in the past about not knowing what I want in life, but honestly, that’s the easy road. When you don’t know what you want, you just try everything, and you have a grand time doing it. But when you know what you want, and you can’t find it, well that’s when things really get frustrating. And I’m just talking about a bag.

I’m looking for a bag, and I can picture pretty clearly what I want. I just can’t find it in a reasonable price range. And I keep looking at the sewing machine that is sitting in my room and thinking, I could just make one. But there are two possible problems associated with that.

1. I will never make it.
2. I will make it, but it won’t turn out the way I’d hoped, and then I will have wasted time and fabric, and I’ll still have to go shopping.

So I’m just going to throw this out there, and if anyone sees this magical bag I seek, do scare it my way so I can grab it as it passes by. I’ll do my best to give you a good mental image.

1. It must go across my body like a beauty queen’s sash.
2. I’d prefer it to have a pretty wide strap so it doesn’t cut into my shoulder with the weight of all the crap that is sure to go in it.
3. Patchwork, applique or funky print are all good signs. If you find something with a funky print, though, I don’t want anything too loud or busy or geometric. No annoying florals, no Vera Bradley-esque prints, and no animal prints, for the love of God, please.
4. I generally prefer neutrals and jewel tones and anything that looks like it’s been waiting for its comeback since 1976.
5. Canvas or cotton. Maybe corduroy if everything else is perfect.
6. Hobo style is best, although I would consider a messenger-type deal.
7. Lots of pockets = BONUS.
8. Under $50.

I think that’s about it. Just imagine if someone over at Lucky or Fossil had been the unofficial bag-maker for Woodstock. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand GO!! Report back with your findings.

Personal Theme Song

In college, my friends and I used to imagine that whenever the guy we had a crush on at the moment came into a room, time would stand still and everything would go all hazy except for the two of us as we crossed the room, a slight glow emanating from us both as we gazed into one another’s eyes and embraced. At one point for one of us, the crush-of-the-week’s song was the Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms.” For some other guy, it was Bad English: “When I See You Smile.”

But it never occurred to us to come up with our own personal theme songs to be played from some mysterious source over some mysterious speakers every time we entered a room. Now, I know that this is not necessary for me as I generally come in singing something from Legally Blonde: The Musical anyway, but it’s fun to think about.

For sure, my theme song would change daily if not hourly depending on my mood, which would be extremely helpful to those about to interact with me in said room. But as I was encouraged to consider it this afternoon, it hit me. My theme song of late. Here is the annotated version:

Do you know what you want? You don’t know for sure.
You don’t feel right, you can’t find a cure,
And you’re gettin’ less than what you’re lookin’ for.

Man, ain’t it the truth? Aren’t we all looking for something more? But we don’t know what it is until we find it?

You don’t have money or a fancy car,

Amen.

And you’re tired of wishin’ on a falling star.
You gotta put your faith in a loud guitar

Now I don’t know about putting my faith in a loud guitar. I don’t think that’s quite what it is that I’m looking for. But perhaps the giver of it? We’ll get there momentarily.

If you wanna be a singer, or play guitar

Or write a book about two immigrant families that you will later turn into a Neil Diamond musical theater EXTRAVAGANZA.

Man, you gotta sweat or you won’t get far,
‘Cause it’s never too late to work nine-to-five.

Hooboy, I tell you, this one is what really got me. You’ve got your whole life to work a boring desk job, and while I don’t know why you’d ever want to, that will always be an option if you live long enough. But why take the risk of working the crap job now and not having the chance to live the dream later? It’s never too late to work 9-5, but it might become too late to do something you really love.

You can take a stand, or you can compromise.
You can work real hard or just fantasize,
But you don’t start livin’ till you realize - “I gotta tell ya!”

Here it comes…

God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you,
Gave rock and roll to everyone!
God gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to you,
Put it in the soul!

God gave rock and roll to you (to everyone he gave the song to be sung)
Gave rock and roll to you, gave rock and roll to everyone
God gave rock and roll to you (to everyone he gave the song to be sung)
Gave rock and roll to you, saved rock and roll for everyone
Saved rock and roll!

And my favorite part:

I know life sometimes can get tough! And I know life sometimes can be a drag!
But people, we have been given a gift, we have been given a role
And that role’s name is…
ROCK AND ROOOOOOLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now everybody go out and live the rockin’ life you were born to live. It’s in your soul.

Sister Mary WHAT THE?!?

You know, some days I just run out of things to say to you. They are often the same days I come back to class after the break and don’t know what to do for the last hour. It is on those days that we play CatchPhrase. I think that if you are exceptionally good at CatchPhrase, you might make a good ESL teacher. I just made this connection today when we were playing. If you can look at a word and immediately think of at least three ways to explain it without using the word itself in the explanation, you can teach it to anyone. And if someone looks at the word and says, “Umm…woman…emm, catolica…black…” and you know this is a Spanglish description of a nun, then you can probably work with internationals. So if this describes you, and you want to learn more about how you can become an ESL teacher, let me know.

Oh! Speaking of nuns, I do not think it will come as a shock to anyone that Whitney and I had a most ridiculous conversation last week that involved one.

It all started when she cleaned out the refrigerator, and IT WAS AWESOME. I twittered at her and told her she was awesome, and that Demi Moore had nothing to do with it (an allusion to this SNL digital short). Well then later, we started talking about Demi Moore’s IMDB page, which she’d been looking at even before I mentioned her. Weird.

Anyhoe, she was telling me about how DM apparently had three cameramen present at the birth of her first child, Rumer Willis, in 1988. I asked if she was credited as herself in that role, to which Whitney responded that no, that information was in the trivia section, not the filmography. Well that, friends, is where the conversation went nutty.

Imagining that the Willis-Moores did have their personal home videos credited in their filmographies, we did a quick run-through of the stars. Demi Moore as herself. Rumer Willis as herself. Baby Rumer as…herself. Bruce Willis as himself. Ms. Moore’s vagina double…none.

Then I said, “Well, you know…not A NUN.”

Ah, the hilarity.

Schmesh-from-the-dentist clean

Is it just me, or is there anyone else out there who DOES NOT UNDERSTAND AT ALL what the toothpaste people are talking about when they say “fresh-from-the-dentist clean?” When I leave the dentist, my teeth don’t feel any cleaner than they did when I went in, mostly because when I went in, I’d just brushed them. This, to me, is much like cleaning your house before the cleaning people come, but that is a different post.

What eludes me even more is why a toothpaste would boast about making your teeth feel the way they do when you leave the dentist. I don’t know about y’all, but my teeth always feel really itchy and out-of-place for at least 12 hours after I leave the dentist. I do not care for it. If my toothpaste made my teeth feel that way, I would burn that toothpaste and then write a blog post about it wherein I refer to it as the devil and yet remain surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing. Hmmmm…this is starting to sound a little familiar…

Anyhoe, my cavity-free teeth are back to normal now, and I would like to make them feel fresh-from-the-garlic-bread-smothered-in-homemade-tomato-sauce clean very soon. Can I get an amen to that?