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The move is over — or at least Phase 1 of the move, Phase 2 being the part where I find a more permanent place to live and get my stuff out of storage. Everything went fine, even with down-to-the-wire packing and three airplanes to catch. I arrived in Charlottesville on Friday and spent the holiday weekend recuperating from the move and catching up on a massive sleep deficit. The change of setting — from gloomy basement grad-student apartment in the Midwest to pleasant little 19th-century building back east — is already doing wonders for my state of mind. This morning, I got up early and ate breakfast on the balcony of my new apartment, which is only mine for the next month, so I’m going to enjoy it as much as I can. Tonight, if I can get tickets, I’m going to go see Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Vinegar Hill Theatre. (I was so busy with moving that I missed it on its opening weekend.)

I don’t have internet access at home yet, so there will be limited bloggage for a little while. I start work on Wednesday. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Yes, it’s yet another post about packing. Sorry, but that’s pretty much all I can think of right now. Those of you looking for hardhitting critiques of academia, random poetry, or amateur music-criticism, try back in a week or so once the dust has settled. And I mean that literally: I just vacuumed under my bed for the first time, well, since the bed arrived in the apartment, and there was so much dust that my stalwart little vacuum cleaner overheated and spluttered to a stop. Killer dust bunnies. Terrifying dust bunnies. Frank from Donnie Darko dust bunnies. Bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies!

Ahem. Anyway. What I was going to say was, I’ve come to think of packing as having a depressive stage ("urgh, why bother, just pitch everything, my God why do I even have this much stuff, everything will go horribly wrong, I think I need to lie down now") and a manic stage. This evening I got some kind of strange second wind and hit the manic stage. Suddenly I was all "hey, this is FUN, this is like doing a great big jigsaw puzzle, whoohoo, I can cram the Tupperware into that stockpot! I’ll just keep going all night!" The triggering event may have been the discovery of the missing jumbo roll of tape, which had rolled under the one piece of furniture I didn’t think to look under.

I’m now winding down for the night, but I’m still a bit loopy. Imagine the Magnetic Fields‘ song "Chicken with its Head Cut Off" as the background soundtrack for this post. (Nothing like singing the chorus of that song — "Well, my heart’s running ’round like a chicken with its head cut off, all around the barnyard, falling in and out of love. Poor thing’s blind as a bat, getting up, falling down, getting up…who’d fall in love with a chicken with its head cut off?" — as you run from room to room like the proverbial headless chicken yourself.)

1. You drop off a few pieces of clothing at the dry cleaners’ and then forget to pick them up until the beginning of the following week, at which point you discover that the cleaners have closed for the summer and won’t re-open until September, by which time you will be long gone. And your first thought, after "Crap! How am I going to retrieve them?", is "Well, at least that’s less to pack."

2. You’ve lost all vestiges of self-consciousness about being seen in public scavenging discarded boxes. Sure, people occasionally give you weird looks, but so what? If they have no idea why someone would want to economize on their moving costs, well, that’s their problem. They’re probably the same people who live in the quarter-million-dollar houses on the edges of town, keeping the property values astronomical and contributing to the ridiculously high cost of living in your area. You dislike these people anyway, with their SUVs and their expensive all-natural hemp-fiber clothing and their bland privileged cluelessness. Il faut épater le bourgeois! Or so you tell yourself as you duck down another alley in search of another promising stack of cardboard.

3. You would ordinarily be happy at the thought of your 19 or 20 smallish cartons of books, because rooms with lots of books in them make you feel at home, and you know that once everything’s out of storage, they’ll be one of the first things you’ll unpack. But now you lie awake worrying about how much they’re going to add to your moving bill.

4. Upset at the fact that you’ve managed to lose a jumbo roll of packing tape somewhere inside your small one-bedroom apartment, you wind up on all fours peering under furniture muttering "I just saw it ten seconds ago, now where did it go?" and also "What the hell is wrong with my BRAIN, I’m coming down with ALZHEIMER’S, I’m having a senior moment and I’m only twenty-nine, aaagh," and — hey! There’s still no sign of the tape, but a search under the sofa turned up a missing tin of shoe polish and a copy of James Elkins‘ Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (highly recommended, by the way) that you thought you’d lent to someone and never gotten back.

Somewhere in one of Margaret Atwood’s novels (Cat’s Eye, I think) there’s a passage about the Madonna of Lost Things, who looks after objects that have gone missing. I’ve a feeling I’m going to be invoking her a lot in the near future. Madonna of Lost Things, pray for my missing roll of tape! Our Lady of Objects That Disappear, keep the books safe on their long journey to Virginia!