AbsurdBeats

Let the great apartment hunt of 2009 begin!

Yes, it’s official. I will ONCE AGAIN be moving. Lessee, that’ll be 1, 2, 3, 4, ah, my 5th move in 2 1/2 years. I’m about on the same schedule in NYC as my first years in GradCity.

I’m also almost twice as old and have more than twice as much shit. And I don’t have grad school friends who are willing to move me in exchange for 1) pizza and 2) a willingness to help them move. Which means movers. . . .

Sigh. Actually, I’m going to try something new, this time around. My last couple of attempts at both finding and moving into an apartment have been terrifically stressful—which made no sense to me, given how many (25? 30?) times I’ve moved. There’s nothing new to this: get boxes, pack boxes, find movers, move, unpack boxes. Simple.

But the last search left my stomach muscles bunched and the move itself led to a brain-crushing migraine that let up only slightly over the following few days. I would like to avoid that.

So this time around, I’m going to avoid all mention of the search and the move, treat it as just another set of tasks for the month. Hey, I don’t mention trips to the grocery store, do I? Making the bed? (Okay, so I bitch about grading and laundry and the cat box, but. . . pssshhhhht, let it go, all right? Allow me to pretend that I greet each day with equanimity—please?) Yes, I understand that talking things out can lessen the emotion around those things. I don’t understand how that works, but I know that, sometimes, it does.

But not always. My transition into my current apartment was difficult: however straightforward my roommate and I thought we had been with one another, it was clear that what each heard was not necessarily what each had said. This was upsetting to me, and I mentioned to a few people how unreasonable I thought she was being. Then I reconsidered: well, she probably thinks I’m being unreasonable, too. So I stopped discussing it, saying only that it wasn’t a good fit. The situation was tense enough; why feed it?

And then, at some point, things eased. Yes, behavioral changes on each of our parts were key, but I don’t know that I would have been prepared to accept those changes had I not stopped fulminating against her.

Similarly, in grad school: my adviser and I were not a good fit. Oh, at one point, I took too much pleasure in the thought of leaping over his desk and strangling him with his tie, but once I settled down, I turned my attention from him to the dissertation. He was polite, I was polite, and I got through my defense.

And the lesson is? I don’t have a damned lesson. Sometimes it helps to talk, sometimes it doesn’t. I couldn’t shut up about the last move, and had a miserable time, so this time, I’ll try the opposite.

In a few weeks, I’ll let you know how—if—it worked.