NRKANGEL'S BLOG
Preparing for Storms...(yeah, suuuure)
Thursday, July 29, 2004 6:50 PM
63 days left...You know...I told myself last weekend that I was going to start packing and ended up going to the beach with a couple of friends instead. I have to say, I'm not very impressed with my sense of commitment here...(lol!)
Still, it hit me again last night. Every once in awhile, when the world just stops for a moment and I have the time to sit and reflect, I look at what's going to happen over the next two months and I feel like there's a tidal wave just over the horizon bearing down on me. I can't see it, but I feel a vibration in the back of my head almost like tremors in the water filtering up through the deck, warning me that time is short. There's no way to avoid it. Two months to get my ship in order. Two months to prepare for storms.
To do list: part 1 of 5 - start packing, give notice on the apartment (beginning of Sept), find time to go down south and look over new apartments and sign a lease, sell my older car (I had just gotten a newer one early this year.. my timing is, as ever, impeccable). Health ins paperwork, 401K paperwork, yadda, yadda, yadda.
If you add to this the need I have to try and button everything up here at work so I leave things as well done as possible, the tingle in my head starts to feel more like the hum of a live wire...
Still, there's nothing to do for it but to bear down and do one stupid thing at a time. Frettin' won't finish anything. (Strangely, knowing that don't keep me from frettin'.) Frettin'... fret-ting. To fret. Where the hell did THAT come from? Who was the first person who said, "That looks like a FRET to me..."? (Mystery of the universe #99,802,519,763-b)
One thing at a time.
Start with packing? For the last two or three years I've been trying to make it a point to cut down on the amount of possessions that I have. To live a slightly cleaner and simplier life. (This is no easy task if you've never tried it.) I have a rule about clothes...I buy something, I have to throw something else out (or give it to goodwill). That means that a new shirt has to replace an old one. Same with jackets, shoes, yadda yadda. You get the picture. This has actually helped quite a bit.
As for other stuff, I've been slowly going through boxes and tossing out the unnecesary ballast of the past. I even got brave enough to chuck out a box containing my old high-school yearbooks and other memorabilia. Yeah... I know... I may really regret that later, but being honest with myself, I haven't kept up with almost anyone from that time with all of the moving and such that I've done. Besides, I haven't opened those boxes since before I moved into my current apartment, making it over five years - I guess I really never have been one to do a lot of looking back. But, then, that's not true either. I still have a soft spot for the people I met and the places I went to as an exchange student in London. I have a box of great memories that made the cut. (London when you're student-poor and far away from home - REALLY FAR AWAY for the first time in your life. Books, booze, babes and Buckingham Palace...I have to write about that one of these days...but that's for later.)
One thing at a time.
The weird thing is, as much as I'd toss out stuff, something would appear as if by some mystical property and claim a patch of shelf or space in the closet. You ever notice that? This memento, that keepsake, 'oh hey-that was a gift from'...
Of course, my furniture is practically junk. You could look at my apartment and believe that a college grad student lives there for all the sophistication the furniture exudes. However, the electronics - computers, stereo equipment and such... now that's a whole other story. Let's face it, the embarassing fact is that my electronics are all newer than any of the furniture. I've told people jokingly that if I buy nice furniture I like and get involved with someone, she'll make me toss my stuff out anyway, so why bother? But the real truth of the matter is that, for most of my life I've felt as if the apartments and moves and life chang
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