Emchap's Shit from the Internet 02/27/19 🍠
Tomorrow I move to a new apartment. (Or tiny house, I guess.) I hate moving, which of course means I do it constantly; the longest I've lived in any one place since I moved out of my parents' home at 18 was a two year stint at my place in Brooklyn.
Otherwise, I managed to hit a different dorm every year for three years, an apartment with a sorority sister for a year (with truly loud neighbor poodles), a post-college crying studio (solo, 300 square feet, furnished poorly and topped with an ill-advised full sized loft bed), a house I was in for a year and a half with a rotating cast of women until the owner kicked us out to sell it to his friend (I loved that garbage box house and the $325 a month I paid in rent), and a four-month hop into a two bedroom apartment in East Atlanta before I signed my lease over to a phone sex worker and a college student and skeedattled out to New York, where I lived in the same spot for two years before I moved out here, first to an AirBnB and then to my current one-bed.
I've been in my new place for 13 months, which means that it's time to shove everything into boxes and pay some nice day laborers to drag it a mile down the street, where I will be moving into a bungalow complex which has two households of friends already established. I'm very excited, except for the actual moving part, which of course has turned my blood to cortisol soup.
Talking to friends about moving highlights the ways in which I am perhaps Unusual. One friend cheerfully reminisced about how he had a night-before-moving party, tossed everything he owned in trash bags the next day, and found new movers day-of. Another told me how she's never had a move where she wasn't up until 2 am the night before. I have been packed for three days, and am still wandering the house thinking of worst-case scenarios of how my cat might run away and the movers won't show up and my computer monitor will break etc. etc. etc; the friends who know me well have spent much of the last week talking me down from my brain trying to destroy itself with fretting. The same skills that make me actually pretty good at moving make me psychologically poorly suited to the experience.
But! I am sure it will be fine, and if it isn't fine it will at least be over, which is its own sort of relief. I am excited for my anxiety to die down or find some new and exciting place to route itself, and to eat tacos tomorrow night, and to embark on a new adventure. (Where I will hopefully stay for at least a few years because I swear to Christ I hate moving so much.)
Shit to read
Don't put your kid's shit online. Your friends are almost certainly lying to you about how much they like it, and it robs your child of a self-directed personhood.
So apparently there's a Mormon alt-right.
Man this woman's husband seems terrible? I go back and forth on these articles: is her husband terrible, or is this the sort of bullshit that I'm going to wind up having to put up with should I choose to pursue male partnership? Can I safely ignore these articles because the sort of women who become full-time freelance writers on the personal essay beat probably in general are making a whole host of choices I think are suboptimal, starting with their choice of employment? I don't know!
Remember, when you see "AI", what that really means is "we paid a bunch of humans not very much money to do something horrible." No one's tech is actually very good.
I am obviously obsessed with these people who live at malls.
Shit to eat
Order $30 of Taco Bell.
Split it up into 6 meals.
Eat Taco Bell twice a day as you slowly pack all your earthly possessions into boxes.
Watch your skin erupt into acne, and blame it on your medication rather than the fact that you quiero an actual nutrient after six meals of Taco Bell.
On the day of your move, eat actual Mexican food at a taco stand in a liquor store parking lot. Feel good about your choice.
Shit to listen to
I've been listening to Rumours on loop for like three days so you know that's the space that I'm in.
Shit to buy
I think I'm going to get this cyanotype print for my new place.
I am obsessed with vintage punch bowls. I love this green glass one, and this cut crystal, and this Swedish ceramic, this stoneware situation with ladle, this west German ceramic, and this sort of hodge podged set. I will be shocked if I don't end March owning one of them.