The Chronicles Of Jessica

We moved into a new apartment just over a week ago, and there are still many things that need to be unpacked. Unfortunately Paul has been enslaved to the democrats so he hasn't had much time to devote to the project (have I mentioned that Paul has a new job working for a presidential candidate? I'm not sure I'm allowed to get into specifics but let me give you a hint - it's the woman!) Moving is hell. I'm sure this is a truth universally agreed upon. There is absolutely nothing about it that is not a huge horrible hassle. How do two people - two actors, no less - accumulate this much stuff between them? We must have had fourteen boxes of books alone.

I'm telling you, literacy is overrated. When I left Chicago to move to New York six or seven years ago, I pruned out all but the most sacred books in my collection. (Yearbooks, diaries, and anything by Danielle Steel.) Somehow they multiplied, not unlike Gremlins or dust bunnies and now we have three sets of bookshelves literally sagging under the weight of our collective habit. It's ridiculous, really. We don't need two Complete Works of Shakespeare AND a single edition of each and every play. I suppose the subconscious thinking is that if we ever got divorced we'd each be able to find comfort in the Bard without having to hit the library, but it seems a remote scenario.

I have books that I have literally moved thousands of miles back and forth across North America and have never read. "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck, for example. What is it? I have no idea. What is it about, and why haven't I read it yet? If I've gotten this far without it chances are I could go another few decades in blissful ignorance, yet there it is, taking up space on the shelf. I also have a tome entitled "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Overcoming Procrastination" which has also never been read, but at least that makes for a decent punch line if things get dull over cocktails.

Anyway, we hired movers to get everything out of the old apartment and into the new one. We've long since outgrown the youthful tradition of bribing our friends with pizza and beer to help us move. We don't have that many friends here and the ones we do have don't like us nearly enough to install us in a third floor walkup. But the movers never came to check out the apartment to see what was in it, or bother to ask what the new apartment was like, so consequently they were horrified to learn that we were on the third floor and that our furniture was not made of rice paper, as they had apparently imagined. I had looked at the apartment for the first and only time so long ago that I'd completely forgotten it was on the third floor, since we looked at several places in the building, and they never asked. Well, they threw a grand-mal hissy fit when they got here and realized how much work it was going to be getting everything up the stairs. My mother (God, if you're reading this - you need to put her on the admission list to Heaven) had driven up from Richmond to help me, which was supposed to mean simply telling me the best place to put the couch and putting down shelf paper in the kitchen. But the movers were frantic, saying they had another job they had booked too close to this one and that we (me and Ma) would have to pitch in to get everything off the truck so they could leave.

This presented quite a dilemma. On the one hand, I'm paying these dudes to move our things from point A to point B and I think that if me and my middle-aged mother (sorry, Ma, but I'm constructing a narrative) have to hop in and start hauling stuff off the truck that the arrangement has gone somewhat off the rails. On the other hand, everything we own is in the back of their truck and I kind of, like, need it. Really we had no choice but to pitch in, and I have to say, the money and time I'm putting in faithfully at the gym could obviously be better spent on Popeye's chicken and Quaaludes because after two trips up those stairs my legs were shaking and I was sucking breath like an asthmatic ostrich. It was a nightmare. The guys hated me, they hated our possessions, I was the only one there to take the heat (thanks, anonymous-lady-presidential-candidate) and I almost broke down in tears more than once. And somehow, I still wound up paying them the regular hourly rate because I felt guilty. Guilty! Over the fact that they had to lift heavy things! They are moving men. That is what they do. Now if I'd hired them to clean my teeth and they wound up straining a hamstring under the weight of my micro-suede sofa, that might be a reason to feel guilt, but this should have been considered the normal course of events. Instead it became fraught with tension, guilt and hate. You know, emotions you normally associate only with the holidays.

In any case, we're here now, and we plan to raise our children here because obviously we can never move again. If we get rid of the Shakespeare we should at least have room for a bassinet.