The movers came today in a flurry of boxes and paper, some Spanish and English, and all manner of truck packing efficiency. I placed some stickers on various possessions, then stood by uselessly as they rolled everything in acres of brown paper and miles of tape.
“I found it illuminating,” a designer in the Zurich office had to said to me over IM, in reference to my disconcerting cataloging of possessions, some of which I had no idea I owned. It’s true, you don’t know how much junk you’ve collected until you are asked to write it all down and put a price on it, and if you find it strange to put a price on 94 pairs of socks, perhaps it’s not because 94 pairs of socks is possibly worth $300, but because you have 94 pairs of socks.
Then there is the issue of the wrapping. The movers will wrap your $1500 dining table as readily as they’ll wrap a box of Kleenex with two tissues in it that you forgot to throw away. Your efforts to toss things out will become even more futile as you realize you haven’t completely finished sorting through various boxes of possessions, and then when cornered with a question in broken English about what you want to bring, what you want to put in storage, and what you want to throw away, you inevitably err on the safe (read: crap prolonging) side of the situation and tell them it’s going with you. They’ll invariably give you a confused look, then snicker snidely in Spanish, and the object(s) you can’t bear to part with until you figure out what they are will go into a wad of brown paper, into a brown box, and into the rental truck, never to be seen again, possibly even when you arrive at your destination, as they are now contained in one of those mysterious boxes you don’t open for the next five years.
And if you’ve been wondering what a 5 foot wide bean bag looks like wrapped in brown paper, here you are:
