Fourteen car loads and one 17-foot moving truck later I was struggling to recall what was so bad about living next door to a crack dealer, anyway.
When the futon got stuck halfway up the stairs to the third floor of the new place and my boyfriend started dismantling the banister I had a change of heart. This - this - is the best apartment ever and once that futon gets settled it is never coming back down.
Never.
Anyone who's moved knows there is a wormhole in the universe between there and here where chaos reigns and it's all you can do to hang onto your toothbrush and the cat in the midst of the swirling vortex of packing boxes and bubble wrap [NB. bubble wrap stops being fun after car load #7]. Space and time cease normal operation; random objects are mysteriously lost into the void. You are utterly removed from the day-to-day goings-on of ordinary earthlings. There are more important things to attend to. Dammit Jim, we're Moving!
An early casualty of the mission is the mass media. Because even if you could find the ________, there's no time to ________ it. I consider myself a fairly conscious consumer of the media, so I was interested to see how I fared for the week or two that the plug was pulled. No TV, no newspaper, no Sirius - no problem, I thought. It wasn't until later that I realized my folly.
In all the haphazard stumblings of the move - forgetting until the last minute to have my mail forwarded, the misplaced power drill that may never be seen again - there was one objective that I carried out with all the care and determination due a life support system: maintain internet connection. It could be no accident.
From the time my boyfriend pried the mouse out of my hand at midnight on the night before the move to the time the cable guy arrived at 2 p.m. the next day (God only knows where the dishes were but I had the desk and computer set up and waiting), I had gone exactly 14 hours without the internet. Not even a full day.
As I waited anxiously for him to perform the umbilical operation that would reconnect me to mission control (Kshh! Houston, we need a new password for this account. Kshh! Over.), I understood: not blood, but bytes course through my veins; not veins, but fiber-optic cables criss-cross my body. My brain is a CPU. I am jb6458.
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