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Monday, November 11, 2013

literally onward and upward

in t-minus four days i will live in an entirely new part of Brooklyn. woot!

thus my current status is: moving.

aside from feeling sentimental about leaving my adorable apartment and my heart of gold landlord who took such good care of me all these years, the actual process of moving is rather awesome. life looks so totally different when you are neither here nor there.

this past week, i've done so many things i'd never normally do.

did you know that when you're moving you can walk around your house with your (grubby NYC) shoes on? also, you don't have to make your bed and you can leave candles burning for days on end because, damn it, you're not packing a quarter to the bottom candle. and who knew dollar store votives lasted so frickin' long?!

funny how sometimes it takes moving to make you appreciate where you've been. on all my neighborhood walks this past week, i thought, Gee, it sure is nice living here. it's so convenient. and pretty. and safe. huh.

this weekend, my boo and i hit up all our favorite neighborhood eateries one last time. which yes, means the deli-counter Mexican place on 21st that's open 24 hours and makes the BEST chilaquiles ever. primarily, it means we hit up the Chinese place on 9th Street. we've ordered take-out from there three times over the last forty-eight hours. we're maybe a little addicted to the shrimp toast. it's seriously injected with crack. in fact, thinking how i'm not going to be eating it tonight for the fourth night running, i'm getting twitchy. it could be that my body's blood to salt ratios are realigning or that there isn't anything not addictive about perfectly crispy fried white bread filled with yummy shrimp bits.

oooo gawd....

if only i could travel back in time.




aside from shrimp toast and The Office marathon on Netflix and chilling at home with my beau whilst we did sexy things like sort through our dishware, the other great thing about moving is...wait. i can't keep it up any longer. i gotta be real. moving su-uuuuuucks.

this is what my home looked like at 10 p.m. last night:

even i don't know what this is a photo of...

it looked like this despite two days of doing nothing but packing. despite my entry way being filled floor to ceiling with boxes and my little front room, too. despite there being so many black plastic bags in my apartment if you squint your eyes just right it looks like an oil spill (which in a way, it is), DESPITE all this, everywhere i look there's more to do.

and it's the no fun jobs like: clean out refrigerator. 

granted, it is nice sorting through old crap i haven't looked at in five years and minimizing ten boxes down into nine. i mean, who doesn't love coming across stacks of old photographs from ten years ago and be reminding how attractive they weren't. 

tossed.

who doesn't love discovering the same years amount of old bank statements and credit card bills? the fact that i currently don't have a kitchen table (but do have one on order. woot!) means i most surely don't have a paper shredder. so who doesn't love shredding by hand ten years of no longer important documentation that has your account number on every single page? let's just hope that whole "people steal your identity by digging through your paper recycling" isn't a real issue.

where did all this stuff come from?

apologies in advance, but chances are if you gave me something for Christmas in the last decade, i no longer own it. ha ha! and though that's not something you admit on your blog and i've had too much caffeine, please don't be mad, i ditched lots of things i would rather have kept, like these babies:



yes, they are yoga pants/sweatpants that i've owned for i dunno, eight years. yes, they became nine feet long when the elastic waist band wore out in year five and dragged behind me when i walked like Dopey's sleeves. yes, they were covered in holes and cinched at my waist with a hair rubber band and had a bleach spot hand print on the butt, but i loved these suckers... actually i have to stop writing about them right now or i'm going to...excuse me...*roots around in trash*

ahhh...where was i?

the other fun thing about moving is that so few useful things are available in your house for the last remaining week. pans, for instance, with which you're supposed to heat up the left over Chinese food you're supposed to be subsisting on because heck no you're not buying groceries.

when i wrote to my guy and asked if i could use his hot pot to reheat my dinner. (no, not this hot pot, this hot pot.) he wrote back: "use the flat thing" by which he meant the one cooking implement we hadn't boxed up:

chow mei fun pancakes, anyone?

but since he didn't respond immediately and i'd started using the hot pot anyway and nobody knows how to reheat Chinese food on a griddle (ha ha! hiii baby!) i realized i was missing an even more basic utensil to eat my food with, that being, a utensil to eat my food with. ha... huh?
 
after three days, i got so sick of consolidating and moving crap from bags and boxes into different bags and boxes, and shredding, and donating, and selling (or rather not selling) things on craigslist, and responsibly disposing of all my plastic, paper, and home goods, that i did a truly terrible thing.

now, i say truly terrible in all seriousness. i don't even want to post the picture lest i lose your respect, but well, i just ate week old pumpkin bread slathered in peanut butter because the only utensil in my house is a knife and i was hungry. so when i saw my old cell phones in a drawer, i knew i could bring them to the new apartment and wait until an electronics recycling day cropped up 30 miles from my 'hood or i could do this:


so i did that.

i know! i'm sorry. please don't scold/hate/disown me.

if it makes any of us feel any better, it was a terrible experience. see that little blue phone? it was my first cellphone ever and it did not enjoy getting environmentally-irresponsibly drowned. it protested the entire time. first it showed me my contacts. then it simply wasn't having it and indicated it was powering down. then it changed its mind and whirled to life again and showed me the photos i had tried to see only a few minutes before but didn't because i couldn't remember how to turn the damn thing on. and then it buzzed, angrily, underwater, for ten minutes straight.

i felt like i was in Toy Story and i was drowning Woody.

but before you stop reading my blog forever because i just added to the massive mountain of tech garbage that's piling up off our eastern seaboard, please know i salvaged things, too.

since i bought Gorilla Glue for my Thorrie costume, i could now finally re-attached my little elephant keychain's body to it's head. i also had two, count them, two, ceramic birds that needed their tail's reattached:

better than white goo coming out your butt. soo uncalled for.

errr, yeah. you can thank me later.

but if moving is crummy (and it wasn't that bad, except for the whole packing part) what is the other option? not move and eat the same shrimp toast and chilaquiles for five more years? wait. damn. make a bad 'what if', Corrie.

but no. it's not that there's anything wrong with where i'm at now. it's simply time to have new adventures.

so the movers are coming at 10 a.m. on Friday to load up our junk and essentially steer our lives down a different path. so goodbye my sweet little apartment. thank you for sheltering me these last five years. thank you for the memories and the toasty heat and the quick to heat up shower and the no roaches and the utter lack of creepy-ghosty feelings that some apartments have. and thank you,  Marie, my dear friend and my amazing landlord, for having me. i will cherish my memories and truly, very much, miss you.

but now it's time to move to the second floor.

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