I’m thoroughly in moving mode this week and feeling more than normally irritable because of the whole affair. I’ve moved a lot over the years—some quick back of the envelope math puts the lifetime value at around 23 so far—so I’ve got a good sense of how many boxes l need to buy and how to stagger the process so it doesn’t turn into a last minute race against the clock— Christ, was there ever a boy more fated to become a project manager? At least the ill-fated mariner got to harass wedding guests—but that has the unfortunate side effect of creating an extended in-between phase—call it the teenage phase of moving—where your home is partially dismantled, you’re sick to death of boxes and packing tape, and still there is more to pack.
I’ve always tried to keep myself relatively lightweight—a choice that fit in well during the college years when nobody had much of anything and seems more and more out of step as people acquire mortgages, Midcentury Modern furniture suites, and season passes to the Met, but my people have always been oddballs—but l am also very much a hobbit (perhaps branched off from old Bullroarer Took) so l have many books and a host of kitchen tools and very much enjoy creating a cozy home, and having it all in such disarray leaves me grumpy, scattered, and deeply introspecting into the arc of my life.
Here I could add some bullshit about the cycles of life, unto every moment a season, and blah blah blah, but I am just too grumpy right now to savor the sublime tension of life and will have to settle for savoring grumpiness.
Comparative Siblingology
From the “You think you’ve got it bad” department, after my recent overwrought retelling of meeting my long lost sister, fortune intervened and I discovered that a friend of mine is actually one of fifteen children spread across several continents. Moreover she met a brother for the first time only a few months ago right around the time the long lost sister was reaching out to me.
I was grateful to get to compare notes with somebody going through a similar experience. I don’t think most people are really able to conceptualize what it’s like to meet a complete stranger who is also deeply connected to you. I suspect most people try to put it into the context of meeting, perhaps after a great pause, their own sibling with whom they share formative experiences and deep nostalgia neither of which apply when meeting for the first time as an adult. My friend shared a similar experience to me in feeling no immediate rush of recognition or joy or any of the standard Disney trappings. Instead, in both cases, we met our siblings as strangers with an open and friendly curiosity about a life that might have been. Amusingly enough, my friend and I were both clearly the weirdos in the encounter.
