Moving sucks. I could try to dress that up and put it more eloquently, but there’s just no way around the fact that the succinct version rings so incredibly true.
I found a new place and today I sort-of-mostly moved. I still have another haul of crap and I’ll probably sleep in the old place because it has actual bedding and that’s always nice to have, but I’m almost all moved out. Getting all moved in, of course, will be another story.
Paris blessed us with insanely warm weather on my one day off from classes. If it were any other week, I would have been elated. Instead, of course, I was sweating like a whore in church as I dragged suitcases up and down the metro stairs because I’m too cheap to pay for a taxi.
Look: I paid for an entire month of metro riding. While not free, that is already spent money. Why would I spend €20 on a cab when I have my Metro card paid for?
Probably so that I don’t end the day in this state of general exhaustion and hating the world. I hear people do things to avoid this feeling, like pay for a cab when they move instead of going back and forth with suitcases all day like morons. Or just the one moron. Me, of course.
I should add that neither my old station nor my new one has an escalator. I considered riding to a different station deliberately for its escalator, but the streets of Paris are also not particularly luggage-wheel friendly.
So back and forth I went with my gigantic suitcases, loading them up with clothes, books, shoes, and thinking to myself, “WHY DO I EVEN NEED ANY OF THIS?” I have a giant stack of kids books for my other blog, Childhood Trauma. I brought three towels. Did I bring sheets? Of course not. My clothing is almost entirely summer dresses, even though we are probably seeing the last of the sun in Paris and I’ll be screwed when I have to wear the same blazer every day for the next five months.
The best part, of course, was remembering that I panicked over the narrowing-down of all my worldly possessions into that which I could get onto an airplane just over a month ago. Re-packing and re-unpacking my life only solidifies the general feeling that I packed like an idiot.
This is the conundrum with packing, in general. I have no idea how other people do this. Matador Travel has a great list, 10 Steps to Packing Better for Your Next Trip and I have been given endless advice, but none of it seems to matter. I will always forget important things at the expense of several useless items. Granted, they too had a post recently about their idiotic packing histories — What is the DUMBEST thing you have ever packed?
As road trip queen, my strategy was always “Fill the trunk.” In high school I simply lived out of my car — I had a minivan with plastic drawers in the back that served as my dresser. Every time I am forced to pack what I can bring onto an airplane, I inevitably get it all wrong. I pack a ton of shit I don’t need and forget crucial things. (This is why the “Fill the trunk” strategy works so well. When I have the space, I err on the side of not forgetting things.)
After successfully running without getting lost yesterday (this is completely tangential to anything, I just felt the need to congratulate myself), and carrying the several hundred pounds of mostly useless crap that comprise my existence here in Paris today, I feel utterly wrecked.
I’m torn between passing out, curling up in bed with “BSC #11: Kristy and the Snobs” for Childhood Trauma, or eating an entire pint of ice cream.
Except not really because I’m in graduate school so I have the sweet, soothing words of communications theorists to keep me warm tonight. I bet you’re super jealous.
But maybe that ice cream can still be a thing.
