Lifestyles of the Poor and Stressed

I have a part of me that wants to drive around picking boxes out of the recycling dumpsters at Acre O’ Offices down the street — there are ALWAYS boxes just piled in them — and a bigger, lazier part of me just really doesn’t like that idea. Big n’ Lazy noticed a recent comment suggesting Costco boxes to be cheaper. BnL also likes the internet, so surfed off to the costco website.

They have moving kits that are roughly a third of the cost of the same thing you’d get at uhaul stores. (By the way? You don’t have to be a Costco member to shop at the website. You, too, can buy your moving supplies, pens, electronics or books, with a small markup over what a member would pay.) Yes, I could get those office storage boxes — but I’m thinking here of hauling hanging clothing for a couple hundred miles, plus loads of breakables and whatnot, and so a kit of wardrobe boxes plus a kit with various sizes and packing material and tape will do it — I don’t really need so many boxes, since so much of my stuff is still in boxes and the electronics will fit in their own boxes, which are currently jammed in nooks and crannies awaiting their call to duty. The kitchen is always the worst part of moving and I’ve got very little kitchen unpacked; Roommate’s stuff has been in use for the past couple of years.

I did a purge a while back, getting rid of roughly 200 pounds of dross (odd clothing, bits of office supplies/craft crap/cassettes I never listen to/shoes I don’t fit into any more) and also reorganizing things into more compact packaging. I have the feeling another purge is imminent, especially as I am in the throes of “OMG I will have money! Real money!” and the old work clothes are not looking so great. This urge is being pinned down and beaten soundly by the old Scottish auntie part of my brain that wants me to wash tinfoil for re-use and save empty butter tubs. I encourage the beating, as footing the rent myself, plus the utility and internet connection (I don’t call it a telephone line, I use my cell phone and let the answering machine talk to the telemarketing industry), plus the entirety of the food bill (Roommate let me mooch quite a lot because he has this habit of picking up more than he needs — it’s a single person’s lot to be consistently buying more of everything than we can possibly use before it grows its own civilization of bacteria), plus OMG I have no furniture! will add up to probably about the same amount of free cash I currently have, which is to say, six dollars and fifteen cents.

This is actually a true representation of my mental state. I am, in fact, thinking in run-on sentences. Also, I nearly forgot to show up for my Saturday gig, which involves me lecturing to a roomful of desparate parents who are totally angry with the family court system and bursting to prove it. I certainly won’t forget this week as I’m carrying the next session by myself, without the seasoned therapist who’s co-leading it. By then, I will have said farewell to the part time job(s) and begun to pack boxes with unessentials. God knows where I’ll store the boxes but I know better than to put off the packing til the truck shows up — oy, oy, oy. Most of it will be books. Some of it will be the contents of a chest of drawers I think I’ll ditch.

Add to that the sheer terror that I’ll pick an apartment next to the guy with the biggest stereo and the paranoid barking dog and nocturnal habits, who parties every day except Tuesday when he has his girlfriend over and they practically knock through the wall into my space, and we’re not looking at much of a joyride.