I hear you bought a house and you’re moving again. You think here is much better than there because there are better things here than there were there. Right?
There is something in human nature which makes us want to get up and move just when were are the most comfortable. Doctors call it a bladder, but I think it goes much deeper than that.
Wherever we are at the moment (house, apartment, dorm room) we always aspire to live somewhere else (house, apartment, dorm room of the hot chick).
Ever since the beginning of time (April 14, 1972, 8:33 a.m. for me) Mankind has been trying to go somewhere else. Remember when we were just little amoebas swimming around in an ocean of primeval ooze, just waiting to evolve? Yeah, so do I. We were miserable little one-celled pieces of protoplasmic slime waving out tiny flagella around and not worrying about a whole lot because we only had once cell to take care of and even that was pretty small.
But then we said, “Hey! It’s kind of damp down here in this ocean of ooze. Let’s evolve and go somewhere else!”
So we spent the next fifty billions years evolving legs until we could finally move onto the land. Unfortunately, we hadn’t yet evolved lungs, so that move was rather short-lived.
But another fifty billion years later we were on the ground and the first thing we said was, “Hey! It’s kind of dirty down here. Let’s get off the ground and go somewhere else!”
We tried growing wings, but that didn’t fly.
Instead we moved to the trees and the moment we were there we looked around and said, “Hey! It’s kind of drafty up here. But we might as well monkey around here for a while.”
We never stopped moving, though. We left the ocean with high hopes and moved to land to trees to caves to huts to beach front condos to high-rise apartments to Mafia penthouses to public scrutiny to the courtroom to some back alley and then back to the ocean again, this time with cement shoes.
None of this should really concern you because you aren’t that interested in evolving at the moment. I mean, if you evolved and grew a new leg or something you’d have to buy all new pants and you just can’t afford that right now. No, you are more interested in how you are going to fit your Barcalounger in the back seat of your Honda Civic.
You better get used to all this moving around. A recent study found that the average American moves 13.5 times in his or her lifetime (the .5 comes in from all those times you “moved in” with your girlfriend for the weekend).
To move into your new place with ease you’re going to have to plan things out in detail. For example, you should have a place to move to. Packing all your earthly belongings into a station wagon and driving around aimlessly is not moving. It is called being homeless. And while it is becoming more and more popular these days, I don’t strongly recommend it.
Once you’ve found someplace to go, you’re going to need help getting there. (Helpful Hint: If you can move all your materialistic possessions without anyone else’s help then you definitely need to go out and buy more stuff. Remember, happiness is having things.)
Family members will almost always help you move, especially if it is out of the house. Or even the state. Or the country altogether. My own family members have offered to help me move off the planet…many times.
If you can’t get any family members to help you move (maybe they have to grow their hair that day or perhaps they left no forwarding address) then you’re going to have to round up some friends.
This might be difficult. The only thing worse that spending a day putting all your own junk in boxes and taking it somewhere else is putting someone else’s junk in boxes and taking it somewhere else. Your friends are going to need some incentive to help you. I recommend beer.
If you are going to offer free beer to all those who help you move, there are two very simple rules you should remember:
- Beer AFTER, not BEFORE, moving.
- Beer in your OLD place, not your new place.
Rule 1 assures that most of your belongings will be transported in relatively safety while Rule 2 assures that you will never receive any sort of a security deposit back. Most landlords don’t take kindly to finding an empty apartment that reeks of sweat and Shlitz.
I hope you enjoy being there instead of here and I’m sure your moving experience will be a moving experience…
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It surely began as a Good Idea™.
Some executive somewhere near the top of the food chain noticed that our offices are not very busy during the summer months. He noticed that the building was half empty with employees taking vacation and he couldn’t help but think about all the increased energy costs were were incurring cooling the building and paying the electric bill.
So he suggested we do something that our competition does during the summer: cut back on hours when our company is actually open. Closing the offices one day a week in the summertime would save us thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars! No air conditioning, no lights, no computers! It would more than make up the almost negligible loss of productivity. He had the numbers to support it. We could even pay the employees for the time off as a good will gesture and we’d still save truckloads of cash! It was a no-brainer!
Unfortunately, the Good Idea had to face people for whom “no brain” would be a few rungs up on the intellectual ladder. Like every Good Idea, it was doomed from the start.
You see, the Good Idea had to be brought to a Committee of Executives. Committees of Executives earn their six figure paychecks by beating Good Ideas to death with a stick. At first there was resistance to the idea. Some Executives hated it simply because they didn’t come up with it. Some Executives loved it because they needed to practice their backhand.
There were debates. There was cajoling. There was yelling. There were threats. And, finally, after the flurry of flying fur and feathers fluttered to the floor there sat the twisted, bastard child of the original Good Idea. The child was named Compromise.
And Compromise is always ugly in the corporate world.
The beautiful Good Idea of “closing on one day a week in the summer to save money in energy costs” was long dead. In it’s place was something horrific that I hope none of you ever have to face:
Our office is open every single day during the summer. But now half of our company employeess gets one Friday off, while the other half of the company gets the alternating Friday off. This goes on through the end of the summer, flip-flopping Fridays. But a second part of this plan requires that every department must be open every day during the summer, so each department only has half a staff on every Friday.
This also means that each Friday we only have 50% of the employees in the building. And, on almost every Friday, we have about half of those people who are supposed to be working really out on their own vacation days. That leaves our company with 25% of all its employees disbursed throughout the building.
And that leads us to the ugliness of Compromise: we cool and light our entire multifloored building for 25% of the people every single Friday. Productivity is actually right around zero because there’s not a single project that can be accomplished without the assistance of someone who has the Friday off.
The end result, of course, is some darn fine poker tournaments in the lunchroom, plenty of quiet time for reading and napping and three hour lunches… more than usual, I mean.
So I get every other Friday off work and during the Fridays where I do show up I get paid to do nothing for eight hours while my company burns truckloads of money keeping a large building open.
And you know, I think this plan is actually working. I feel like I’m conserving a lot of energy.
Now let me get back to sleep…
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My wife is a little more than five months pregnant now and she’s beginning to feel the baby moving around inside her. She tells me this during dinner.
“Ugh… ” she says. “Either I just felt the baby kicking or I have some nightmarish gastro-intestinal problems.”
“Ohhh…” I say, thinking about opening a window, just in case.
“Yeah, I think that’s the baby.”
“Feel anything like Alien?” I ask.
“It feels like little bubbles bursting in rapid succession…”
“Ahh…” I say because there’s not much more I can say.
Over the past several weeks the kicks have apparently gotten harder and harder or my wife is getting wimpier and wimpier. We’ll be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly she’ll go cross-eyed and put her hand on her belly indicating that the child either has soccer ball in there or, at the very least, is practicing karate.
My wife is now translating these kicks and punches into what the baby likes and doesn’t like. We now know, through the amount of kicking my wife receives, the the baby likes pizza, ice cream, watching Alton Brown, watermelon, granola bars, bagels, going grocery shopping, chicken, pasta, watching Bobby Flay and malt liquor.
Ha! I’m just kidding about that last little bit. The baby hates Bobby Flay.
Of course I can’t feel any of these kicks so all I’ve been able to take away from these observations is that I should probably be diverting half of the kid’s college savings towards a future membership in Weight Watchers.
Sure, my wife and I have both seen the ultrasound videos and we’ve heard the heartbeat on a microphone, but part of me always wonders if that stuff is all just some elaborate ruse put on my doctors to make a little extra scratch from the insurance companies. It would probably be pretty easy to rig up a DVD player to look just like an ultrasound machine and then just have a video playing each time the nurse moves around the wand on my wife’s belly. I mean, if the Hollywood special effects wizards can give Tom Cruise an acting career then they can surely fudge an ultrasound machine.
But after all these months of videos and recordings it is finally reassuring to have some sort of physical evidence, no matter how small, that a live baby really is bouncing around in there…
…And that my wife isn’t just getting fat from eatting all that pizza and ice cream.
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