Dear Tell All: School's over, which makes me ecstatic. But my heart sinks when I realize what comes afterward: moving! I've moved every year that I've been at the U, and it's always been a nightmare. The thought of moving again scares me to death. Do you have any advice to make the job easier?
Rolling Stone
Dear Rolling Stone: The difficulty of moving is directly related to the amount of crap you own. When I was in college, I could cram all my stuff into one car, including my king-size futon. Of course, it helped that I drove a Pontiac Catalina, a car so big that it could hold Angelina Jolie, her freakishly large lips and all 27 of her children.
It only gets worse as you get older.
Several years ago I had the pleasure of helping my father move out of his childhood home. It was a three-story, five-bedroom, Victorian eyesore packed to the rafters with a lifetime's possessions. I swear that several rooms had never been cleaned. The rest hadn't been touched in the last few decades. So my siblings and I spent six consecutive weekends hauling out bat turds, bird carcasses, not-so-secret stashes of liquor bottles and unidentifiable blobs of hazardous waste that I'm sure at one time, long before Scrubbing Bubbles were invented, resembled something quite desirable.
Tucked in a corner of an upstairs bedroom, we found a refrigerator. The last time it had been used was when my dad rented the room to a college student. That student had dropped out of school, skipped out on the rent and slipped away in the night...leaving the refrigerator filled with food. That was in 1982. Sometime in the ensuing decades, someone had unplugged the fridge, leaving the contents entombed in the dark. Now, over 20 years later, we came across the remains. When we innocently cracked open the door, we discovered a sight so foul, so utterly disgusting, so fuzzily grotesque that all we could do was gently close the door and quietly leave the room.
We debated for days what to do with this biohazard. I wanted to simply leave it and claim ignorance. My brother wanted to hurl it out the second-story window. We made one vain attempt to carry it down the stairs, but as soon as we tilted it on its side, a black, primordial sludge oozed from the bottom. Again, we simply turned our backs and quietly left the room. In the end, we hired some furniture movers to take it away. Whatever they charged us, I'm sure it wasn't enough.
To help make your move easier, I've assembled a few basic tips:
- If you haven't used something since the last time you moved, pitch it.
- Scour local copy shops for boxes weeks before your moving date.
- Throw a moving party and invite everyone you know.
- Respect your friends' time by boxing everything up before they arrive.
- Spend a few bucks to rent a U-Haul. It'll make the job a whole lot easier.
- For God's sake, clean out the fridge.
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