I am still in Brookline. This is wrong; I was planning to leave today. But the project of packing and loading the car has taken eons longer than intended, and it's still not quite done. I was all set to blog about how I was such an old hand at these cross-country moves and had car-loading down to a science, but, like a textbook on evolution in Kansas, science seems to have gone out the window.
A major error was the premature loading of the Body Bag. The body bag is an enormous duffel bag I bought in the luggage neighborhood in Paris (yes, they have a special neighborhood in Paris for luggage, somewhere slightly south of Gare de l'Est) back when my old French boss had stiffed me on sending my things back to the US. In making alternate arrangements I was apparently really concerned with getting all my belongings into the same vessel, and apparently not so concerned about how I would manage to carry said vessel. The thing is huge. You could put (note: this is a speculation, not a request) both my sister and me into this thing, and we'd still have room left over for an intimate party of 12. What I typically do on these moves then is put all my clothes into this bag and then lay it out on the back seat. This approach means that my wardrobe can never consist of more than would fit in the bag (although in the interest of full disclosure my jackets and sweaters are in other containers). But that was ok; my wardrobe did need some culling. In particular there were lots of more dressy clothes languishing in my closet that I just couldn't keep. Well, I had to keep lots of things I hadn't worn recently because when I go back to work I'll probably need more in the way of office-safe clothes than I did in law school (gosh I miss the Dot Com boom, when showing up to work in anything short of full frontal nudity was totally fine). But some of these things I've had since high school. Which wouldn't be a problem, unless you consider that I was in high school in the 1980s. 70s retro may currently be in, but it will be quite some time before any of these things say "hip, happening, suave professional" as much as they currently say "fashion-impaired laughingstock." Then again, they may always have said "fashion-impaired laughingtock," given that my fashion sense is normally equivalent to that of a fashion-impaired laughingstock. But in any case time has not done anything to minimize the effect.
So where was I? Oh yeah - Brookline. Where I put the Body Bag in the back seat and buried it with book-laden xerox boxes before having optimally filled the foot wells. So now I have pockets of unused, now-inaccessible space, with lots of things that could have used that space waiting to be loaded. So much laborious shuffling may need to take place tomorrow morning to rectify this shortcoming.
Can't say I'm looking forward to it. The laborious shuffling has gotten really old. I have some things that have been shlepped back and forth around the country so often I've lost count. I move it in one direction only to need to soon move it back in the other. It's the very definition of futile. Even Sisyphus himself would gladly push his rock around rather than have to carry my boxes to and from my car and erstwhile abode yet again.
At this point, so would I.