moving.

I’m currently in the process of moving. Moving to a new apartment. New city. New country. New continent. It all sounds very exciting and glamorous, but what it really comes down to is a whole lot of boxes.

Of course moving is hell, that is in no way meant to be a profound statement. There is less than nothing fun about arranging one’s whole life into a series of boxes and suitcases. What manages to drive it into an even deeper circle of hell, however, is when the time comes to move and you realize that you never bothered to unpack your stuff from the last time you moved.

In sorting through some of the old boxes in an effort to condense all the contents into a series of smaller, more efficiently packed boxes, I started the great moving purge. Pretty much everything that gets pulled out of a box has approximately four seconds to convince me that is has some sort of fantastically useful role in my life, or is teeming with sentimental value. If it fails the test, it is tossed mercilessly into the general direction of a garbage bag which, due to a combination of sheer volume and bad aim resulting from lack of sporting involvement as a child, quickly becomes a large pile about the size and shape of a small Mayan pyramid,

After about an hour of rummaging and purging I stood in the shadow of my Mayan ruin-esque pile of rejected belongings to survey the small selection of objects which had won over my sentimental side with the fond memories attached to them. A quick inventory showed that my memories came from an engraved flask with a pink suede case, a silver cocktail shaker, art deco swizzle sticks, and a set of martini glasses. The thought that I might in fact be a raging alcoholic in training had just begun to cross my mind when I was thankfully distracted.

The light caught one of the martini glasses at just the right angle to show a jagged crack essentially breaking the glass in half. I was dismayed. As a bit of a persnickety sort, there was no conceivable way that I could keep an incomplete set of glasses. They were all doomed for the trash now, or as hand-me downs to someone who wouldn’t shudder at the thought of an awkward trio that had once been a quartet.

As I sadly surveyed the broken glass I wondered how something that I had valued so much had been so carelessly broken. Recalling the day of my last move, I think I managed to pinpoint where things started to go awry. As I’m not really one for lifting or doing any sort of physical labour, I had recruited my personal-trainer brother to help me move. Seeing him as something of an ox capable of carrying heavy objects with a minimal amount of complaining, and requiring modest compensation only in the form of food, the prospect of me delegating and him doing everything else had seemed like a perfectly symbiotic situation at the time. Then I remembered watching him carelessly carrying a stack of boxes out to the van. I watched with my head jutting out the apartment window as he crossed the parking lot in a jolty manner and I recall yelling out, “Be careful with that box – it has stemware in it!” He turned awkwardly and with a bewildered expression yelled back, “What the hell is stemware?” Without waiting for an answer he continued in his choppy gait in the direction of the van.

Turning the broken glass over in my hand for the last time before I tossed it into the trash, three thoughts were running through my mind. First, I hope to God I don’t have to move again in the foreseeable future. Second, never be so naïve as to expect a man’s vocabulary to include such words as stemware, pashmina, merino wool blend, and commitment. And finally, what are the exact parameters of the term “alcoholic”?