March232011
first world problems
I’ve diagnosed myself with post-partum depression. Don’t think I’m obnoxious even though you know I didn’t just give birth, ok. Hear me out. I just moved. Some of my more transient friends put their entire lives into Hefty bags and move in 3 hours and never look back and indeed do it again in a year. Me? No. I haven’t been able to do that in some time. I prefer to move only when it’s absolutely necessary. In fact I have often stayed longer than I should because I am risk averse and change avoidant and everything else you’d imagine a spoiled homebody to be.
So, yes, we moved. I found an apartment while my boyfriend was out of town and then we moved in right before he left town again. It was… challenging. We moved two planters half-full of dirt after realizing we couldn’t get them anywhere while they were full of dirt, a professional mover took pity on us when I had lost patience with our queen-sized mattress, the dog screamed for 3 days while I jammed hummingbird feeders and chef knives into the back of my hatchback. I love my boyfriend, I love Oakland, our new neighborhood is great, but holy shit. It was a trial.
We laughed our way through it. Sure there was a moment, when Christopher was backing the rental truck under an old, low-hanging tree in our new narrow parking lot, that I thought it was all going to end really badly. But it didn’t, and good humor triumphed over the hellaciousness of Moving Day. As if the universe was annoyed that we found it all to be pretty funny, everything really got bad the first night in our new apartment. Our heater didn’t work and it was one of the coldest nights of the year. I felt like a fucking refugee. And it turns out our landlord is just like that aunt who would come over to teach you how to drive stick shift and instead drops off 5 boxes of Hummel figurines. Useless. By the time the heater was fixed a week later, I was alone in the apartment, and freaked out. Everything, not just the heater, was broken. I couldn’t open windows because they were painted shut, I was afraid to turn on the apocalyptic heater, the plumbing in the kitchen went out, I had no idea where the breaker box was. Aunty Landlord was even less informed. Men in workboots entered my kitchen at 8am. More screaming from the dog. On our third day alone together the dog really lost it and dismantled the mini-blinds in the living room with her teeth. I seriously considered taking smoking back up about 15 times. Instead, I figured out how to use a drill, I wandered Home Depot, I eventually remembered the word for “to fix” in Spanish. Right now, as I write to you, only one window in the apartment is unworkable and I can run water in the kitchen sink. Remarkable.
So after all this, I should be happy it’s done. Instead, I find myself listlessly wandering from room to room, tempted to kick over the gigantic stack of unpacked boxes JUST CUZ. Yesterday I moved Christopher’s skis from their leaning spot in the middle of the living room to a more appropriate location in the garage. After knocking myself in the face so hard I saw stars, I put the unwieldy skis down and cried.
Why do people move? I think some people move because they think it will solve their problems. But I’ve always known moving doesn’t solve problems; it just creates new ones. My problem is that my life is getting harder. I can’t tolerate a slumlord anymore, so I get upset and feel compelled to force people into fulfilling their obligations. At 22, I would’ve shrugged and smoked a cigarette inside, paying the rent on the 21st, after the notice. Now, I expect more out of life. Shit should work. It should be pretty. Close to the train station. I need to open my bathroom window or there will be mildew. The realization that I have to deal with this non-operational bullshit, despite now paying the rent on the 1st and not smoking and generally being a fairly decent human being, is a terrible one. Everywhere I go from now on, there will be problems. No longer is life whatever I can get, that’s fine, I’m cool, it’ll all work out. Instead, it’s what I need, what I don’t have, what I have to email someone and ask for. The constant drill of logistical challenges to keep up my quality of life. Or, to try to keep up my quality of life. How fucking mundane. How fucking endless. It takes so much to accomplish so little. All this and all I did was relocate. Why did we move?
We moved because of increasing expectations. Christopher and I expect more personal space. I need somewhere to put my gigantic bourgeois bicycle. We wanted nicer neighbors. A charming piece of scenery to call our own. So we set out, we went through all this shit, to meet growing expectations. And I’m depressed about how hard it was. How hard I know it will continue to be. How impossible it now is for me to cram it all into a Hefty bag and haul ass to the next camp. There is simply too much, life is too big, and I, incredibly, want more. Every day the expectations mount and the inevitable blowback of the mediocrity of first world existence just gets stronger. We own too much shit. We want too much shit. We absolutely cannot get everything we want. We can barely get our windows open.
