Moving out is hard to do

There’s something intensely personal about deep-cleaning an apartment. You remember things you'’d forgotten, you confront things you’'d rather not. Moving is an uphill struggle through a gauntlet of densely packed realizations, each more frightening than the last. Along the way, you meet an eclectic cast of characters.

• I have an unhealthy obsession with technology.
• I have an even more disturbing habit of keeping not only the retail boxes the tech comes in, but the brown cardboard mailers as well.
• Packing peanuts have grouped themselves into little nation-states in the corners of my closet/office.
• I buy books I’ll never read because they look cool and/or people are likely to comment on them. "“Aspects of the Feminine? I love Jung!"” Yes, me too.
• I buy posters knowing I'’ll never put them up because putting them up means they'll eventually have to be taken down.
• I’m not careful enough with my clipped toe nails.
• They are currently locked in a war of attrition with the packing peanuts.
• What I thought was a big rat was really a giant red squirrel.

Those are the more mundane ones I'’ve allowed myself to own up to.

My own skeletons--now out of their closets and strewn half in liquor boxes throughout the apartment--and the scavenging rodentia are bad enough. The habits and lifestyle of my girlfriend, though, are now also cast in full and glaring relief. This is the stuff of nightmares.

Having lived with varying numbers of women (my cousin, a friend, another friend, Shannon) over the last two years, and my mother for many years prior, I consider myself used to the staggering amounts of hair shed by women on a daily basis. You find it in the usual places, balled up in every single drain, winding through hair brush bristles, clinging to lamp shades. When you really start digging though, it becomes less and less possible to think of a logical reason why anything would end up where this hair inevitably does. Entire locks of the stuff. There. And there.

Further, I found Nair tracing arcs and pin wheels in utterly inexplicable locations.

By noon yesterday, I was convinced Shannon spent her alone time chanting and tearing her hair out at the roots. She would pile it in corners while mimicking Pollock with her sugar-based hair removal paste in some Dionysian ritual of atonement for the sins of vanity and consumerism. Twirling, always twirling. I’m still looking for the remains of the bonfire of Banana Republic totes she would have danced around.

It's only a matter of time really.

“"My player is the Yamaha, and now I think it is good. Knock the wood." -- –Ali Lotfi, Café owner and former coach of the Iranian Women'’s Basketball team, ecstatic after finally fixing his Gypsy Kings CD. Sadly, his joy was short-lived.