Brain Goo
Well, it's finally locked and loaded
... my shipping crate, that is.

With a team of amazing movers, the ever gracious D, the amazing medyani, the lovely buxom_bey, the loquacious D, and Mr. Cavalry himself, zsquirrelboy, we managed to load all of my belongings into the crate in about an hour and a half. Oh, there was the disaster of the dresser -- I didn't know they even made drawer sliders with ball bearings and grease instead of wheels -- and it took me another hour this morning to get the fiddly bits (a lamp, a rainstick, a cat fountain), but as of this moment, the crate is gone and my house is left a little emptier.

This morning I arrived at work a little late and zombielike. What I forget is how exhausting moving is. Not the lifting part -- that's plenty exhausting by itself -- but the mental exhaustion. As you pack, you pack the most ordered things first (books), then easy things (clothes), then trickier bits (kitchen stuff) and finally end up with a pile of fiddly doo-dads. What do I do with my jewelry boxes, my grandmother's crystal vase, and my naiad lamp? And even worse, what do I do with the piles of leftover bits that don't even HAVE a place (a ruler, the instructions to my camera, my stuffed monkey Mojo)? The process of moving is an exercise in entropy. You remove all the order until all that is left is disorder, and this disorder persists seemingly endlessly through box after box until you have four boxes of stuff labeled simply "stuff" which you have to unpack with curiosity and a little fear later.

My room still looks a bit of a disaster, but it's an empty disaster. There's trash and dust and boxes to go to Goodwill and furniture to sell and the stuff I'm planning to take with me. This I can deal with for the next three days. But in the meantime, my energy can slowly approach calm again and one of these days my brain will be at peace enough to get a full night's sleep. Mmmm sleeeeep.