Stored up

My contract ends this Friday, which means that Moving Day is upon us once again. I'll be staying with CameraMan for about 6 weeks, and then it's on to New York for 2 months, so the next time I'll have ready access to all my stuff is March. I've spent the past couple days purging: magazines I'll never read again, clothing I'll never wear again, and what seems like mountains of trash. Then comes the sorting game, deciding what goes into storage and what goes with me to CM's place. The process of packing up my apartment was so much simpler in the summer; it's easy to streamline when everything has to fit in your car. When I'm in Houston, I end up making all-too-frequent trips to my storage unit, unpacking more boxes, accumulating more stuff.

I spent a good hour in aforementioned storage unit this afternoon, digging through boxes to retrieve my KitchenAid mixer (for holiday baking), ornaments (for the Christmas tree that I'm wishing for), and a few pieces of my favorite cold-weather clothing that I thought were lost forever. Finding things in there and then rearranging the boxes is like a giant puzzle, except that the pieces are really really heavy and when you're finished you are never left with a pretty picture. Add to that the annoyance of a motion detector light that doesn't detect your motion if you're inside the unit, "climate control" that most closely resembles a sauna, and U-haul boxes that are just barely hanging on after making about 3 moves too many, and what do you get? That's right, a nervous breakdown.

I haven't been doing it long, this living out of boxes thing. Really, it's been only a little over a year, but I'm done. I'm over it. I hate that my permanent address is a UPS store. I hate that I have every kind of baking dish you can think of, but I can't use any of them. I hate that when people ask where I'm based, I have to give some lame answer like, "Well, Houston, sort of, but really nowhere." I hate that every corporate apartment I stay in feels so...corporate. I hate that every 2 months like clockwork I have to go through several days of hell packing up all my stuff, only to do it all over again for the next contract.

Usually I like to end a post like this with some kind of decision, a positive step, something to make this more than just a complaint/rant, but in this case there's really nothing to be done about it, not yet. I'm looking forward to the day I can put down roots and make a home for myself, but the earliest I can foresee that happening is Fall 2009.

And in the meantime, thanks for listening.