there’s no place like home
29 May 2008I spent several hours of tonight returning my blue living room to its original off-white state, followed by several minutes of tonight picking dots of paint out of my eyelashes. The rest of me, I think, escaped unscathed, but I’m sure I’ll wait until I’m in some Meeting With Important People to glance at my reflection in a conference room window and realize I have a Pepe Le Pew streak in my hair.
Parts of this move have certainly been funny, and they’ve almost managed to be fun. Packing my books up was distressing but funny–I feel like I’m sending my kids away to boarding school or something, but it was funny to see how many things I had reshelved after only reading part of them, leaving makeshift placeholders (magazine subscription cards, movie stubs, baseball tickets, post its with random lists, pieces of yarn) between whatever pages were too boring to hold my attention. Forwarding my 12 magazine subscriptions was kind of funny, if only because I have so many and they range from New York Magazine to Seventeen to Real Simple to (hah!) Runners World. Throwing my living room rug out was pretty funny, especially since the underside of the rug managed to have stains that were invisible on the rug-side, which completely grossed me out, and because I got across-the-hall team Tammi and Linz to help me toss it down four flights of stairs and drag it around the corner to our garbage area, which we managed to do while giggling like the sorostitues we were a mere 5 years ago and wondering what it would be like if we were professional movers (“hiiiiyeeee! We’re here to move all your stuff for you, and stuff! Look, we have matching tshirts!!”).
But mostly it’s not fun, or funny. Despite what anyone who knew me when I was 12 will tell you, I’m not really much of a crier– these days, it takes something pretty massive to set me off, usually something like watching the end of Field of Dreams or The Parent Trap (the lindsay lohan one, not the pollyanna one. sue me). But getting ready to leave here has turned me into the Biggest Effing Baby in the world, and I was ready to blame this on all of the annoying administrative stress associated with this (do you know that you can’t just throw paint away? You have to make it dry up first. And if your address is associated with a business address of the same street number, the way mine is because it’s above a pizza place that’s been closed for three years, then you can’t forward your mail online, you have to go to an actual post office to do it, but you won’t find this out before you spend an hour there getting a PO box to which you’ll be forwarding said mail, because that would just be too fucking easy, wouldn’t it, and besides, who doesn’t enjoy multiple trips to see the happiest government employees alive? I mean, shit, sometimes I go to the DMV on my lunch hour and just stand in line there because it makes me happy) but I’ve had this move planned for the better part of a year and everything is (KNOCK. ON. WOOD) going well enough so far. Tonight I started doing the Little Annoying Things part of moving, like wrapping up all of my extension cords and putting them in a shoebox and taping it shut and writing EXTENSION CORDS on the outside and then allowing myself to nod in a self-satisfactory way, and I took down the map of Central Park that I’ve had on the door of my coat closet since the first year I lived here, and I folded it up and threw it out and then started crying, and wound up taking it out of the trash and saving it even though it’s ripped in about 9 places and I’ve finally stopped getting lost in the park on my way to the office after years of occasional calls to my boss’ voicemails that went something like “I thought I knew where I was going but now I’m in Strawberry Fields… uh, I should be there in 20 minutes.” And then I pulled myself together by playing that ridiculous Bleeding Love song that appears to be about self mutilation (or love, I can’t tell. Six of one, half a dozen of the other) back to back with the cover of that Don Henley song that they keep using in the sex & the city movie trailers, making me, I’m sure, even more popular in this building than Fake Orgasm Girl who lives in the building next door and refuses the close the window to her bedroom as soon as the temperature clears 50 degrees outside. The first time I heard her work I thought someone was being murdered and I wondered if it was going to be like the Kitty Genovese case all over again and that living here must have hardened me since I wasn’t really considering calling the police, thinking that it was probably just a cat in heat or something, before realizing I was only half right. Anyway. Then my mom called and I started up all over again.
She asked me if I wished I was staying here and I said no without even thinking about it. And I don’t– it’s time to go, and I’ll be happy to be done here. I’m going to let myself be a little bit sad for a little while, though. I didn’t realize that I had so many attachments to the word Home since I don’t ever use it to refer to a specific structure, it’s always just meant “new york” when I was in new jersey (as in, “I’d love to hear you complain about the dog all night, dad, but I need to go home”) and “new jersey” when I was in new york (as in, “I’d love to support your foray into naked performance art, but I’m going home for the weekend”). I don’t play the “you’d never understand because your parents are still actually married {freak}” card very frequently, but you have to have been in joint custody to have the experience where you accidentally called one of your parents’ houses “home” while in the presence of the opposite parent and knew immediately that you’d done something incredibly wrong and hurtful just by being lazy with your word choice, and swore to yourself that you’d just drop it from your vocabulary entirely if that was the best way to keep someone you love from looking like you kicked them in the stomach because you had an off Dororthy Gale moment. The time I’ve spent here is the longest I’ve lived any one place since 8th grade, and it’s the first place I let myself use that word for in a long time. And it’s time to go, but I’ll miss it here.
3 Responses to “there’s no place like home”
May 29th, 2008 at 4:43 am
What did you do with the bathroom light switch plate?
May 29th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Do you mean the one of the cat playing a saxophone that came with the apartment, or the one I made out of a playgirl magazine during college? I took a picture of the cartoon cat so I can always remember it, and I threw out the naked guy. I’m all grown up now, dad.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
No! Kyle is gone?! Wasn’t his name Kyle? Now who will turn him on?