Everything's coming up Milhouse
Jun. 1st, 2004 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupCentipedes are the creepiest of household pests. I'd say I see one every other year. Having to kill one this morning was not an auspicious start of the day. Also not auspicious: the dog retching all night, necessitating a visit to the vet.
That's one $75. Then the next is the call to the Mac repair shop. The good news is that the iBook problem I was having -- funky monitor output, followed by a crash -- is a problem with the logic board that Mac knows about and will fix for free. The bad news is that the machine died before I could back up the baby photos and whatnot. So they'll charge me $75 for a data transfer.
Stupid carrying costs of life are one thing when you have a lot of money in your bank account. They're another when you are looking at emptying said bank account to buy a house.
And that's another tsuris. For some stupid reason I decided to finance part of the down payment by selling some of this stock my folks bought for me twenty years ago. As seems to always be the case with these house issues, the thing you think will be the simplest turns out to be the most complicated. It turns out that in this era of Internet transactions, the way you sell stock is to mail in the piece of paper saying that you own the stock, and wait a couple of weeks for them to send you the check... and the closing is not that far off.
An extra measure of drama was added by my realizing this at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. I nearly killed myself to get to the one post office in town that's open late. Now, they told me to send the thing registered mail-return receipt. The folks at the post office tell me that will take weeks, and I don't have weeks. So I reluctantly go with Express Mail, feeling terrible that I am sending this document away, with who knows what will happen.
Then these idiots attempt to deliver the package on Saturday and also on Sunday. Well, amazingly enough, no one was in the office to receive the package on Sunday. (The form for "no Sunday" is hard to see, and I guess I figured they don't deliver then anyway.) Now the fucking thing is sitting around in some post office room for five days until it gets sent back to me, when I get to repeat the whole experience.
And I am thousands of dollars away from being able to close. I need that money. I suppose the backup is to go to my parents and ask for a loan, which will do wonders for my project of convincing them that I am a mature individual who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
--------------------------------
To prepare for my third move in four years, my life fills with boxes. We can't actually move shit in until the 23rd, so "moving" now means boxing things up and then stacking them to the ceiling.
So far I seem poised to improve on the time-honored "throw-it-into-a-black-trash-bag" method of moving beloved by junkies and homeless people everywhere. I am now sitting surrounded by the contents of my closet, which was the repository for every useless object I acquire in life. Things are sorted through and then placed into boxes, where they will be put into an attic, and be unopened for what I hope will be enough years to forget why I bothered to keep them.
Moving is a really hard thing for me to do, because I am a terrible pack rat. I can't bear to get rid of shit. And since moving means rediscovering things you haven't used in years, throwing things away is like the final stage in a referendum on your life. Here are those posters you haven't seen in ten years -- maybe someday -- well, nah. Those books about that project you thought you'd get to. That doodad that goes with the other thing you haven't seen in years, but you never know.
That's what moving is. Well, you never know... might want this some day. Except that when you move and you find things untouched for a few years, you need to confront the fact that no, you never will do that thing or find that other thing or start that project. They've become so remote that you can't remember being interested in them. (Although I think that after ten years I can finally throw out all the blurry pictures and negatives that didn't come out.)
I am already used to this to some extent with academic detritus. See, they encourage you to build a big library of every book or journal you might possibly want, since some day you will be given a nice campus office. And we all want to emulate our professors, whose offices were crammed with books. So -- twenty issues of Political Theory. Seemed like such a find when they were rescued from the faculty office! Now they are on the curb along with old student evaluations and old copyediting manuscripts.
And so it goes. It is hard to consign my intellectual life to the same level of ephemeral whims that is represented by the rest of my outgoing junk, but I am slowly getting used to it. It's harder to realize that although I am unaware of any change in my own life, 95% of the things I possess -- that I "treasure" -- are things I haven't looked at since the last move, or never use. They really do belong to some other person, who I know a lot less well than I used to, just a few years ago.
That's one $75. Then the next is the call to the Mac repair shop. The good news is that the iBook problem I was having -- funky monitor output, followed by a crash -- is a problem with the logic board that Mac knows about and will fix for free. The bad news is that the machine died before I could back up the baby photos and whatnot. So they'll charge me $75 for a data transfer.
Stupid carrying costs of life are one thing when you have a lot of money in your bank account. They're another when you are looking at emptying said bank account to buy a house.
And that's another tsuris. For some stupid reason I decided to finance part of the down payment by selling some of this stock my folks bought for me twenty years ago. As seems to always be the case with these house issues, the thing you think will be the simplest turns out to be the most complicated. It turns out that in this era of Internet transactions, the way you sell stock is to mail in the piece of paper saying that you own the stock, and wait a couple of weeks for them to send you the check... and the closing is not that far off.
An extra measure of drama was added by my realizing this at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. I nearly killed myself to get to the one post office in town that's open late. Now, they told me to send the thing registered mail-return receipt. The folks at the post office tell me that will take weeks, and I don't have weeks. So I reluctantly go with Express Mail, feeling terrible that I am sending this document away, with who knows what will happen.
Then these idiots attempt to deliver the package on Saturday and also on Sunday. Well, amazingly enough, no one was in the office to receive the package on Sunday. (The form for "no Sunday" is hard to see, and I guess I figured they don't deliver then anyway.) Now the fucking thing is sitting around in some post office room for five days until it gets sent back to me, when I get to repeat the whole experience.
And I am thousands of dollars away from being able to close. I need that money. I suppose the backup is to go to my parents and ask for a loan, which will do wonders for my project of convincing them that I am a mature individual who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.
--------------------------------
To prepare for my third move in four years, my life fills with boxes. We can't actually move shit in until the 23rd, so "moving" now means boxing things up and then stacking them to the ceiling.
So far I seem poised to improve on the time-honored "throw-it-into-a-black-trash-bag" method of moving beloved by junkies and homeless people everywhere. I am now sitting surrounded by the contents of my closet, which was the repository for every useless object I acquire in life. Things are sorted through and then placed into boxes, where they will be put into an attic, and be unopened for what I hope will be enough years to forget why I bothered to keep them.
Moving is a really hard thing for me to do, because I am a terrible pack rat. I can't bear to get rid of shit. And since moving means rediscovering things you haven't used in years, throwing things away is like the final stage in a referendum on your life. Here are those posters you haven't seen in ten years -- maybe someday -- well, nah. Those books about that project you thought you'd get to. That doodad that goes with the other thing you haven't seen in years, but you never know.
That's what moving is. Well, you never know... might want this some day. Except that when you move and you find things untouched for a few years, you need to confront the fact that no, you never will do that thing or find that other thing or start that project. They've become so remote that you can't remember being interested in them. (Although I think that after ten years I can finally throw out all the blurry pictures and negatives that didn't come out.)
I am already used to this to some extent with academic detritus. See, they encourage you to build a big library of every book or journal you might possibly want, since some day you will be given a nice campus office. And we all want to emulate our professors, whose offices were crammed with books. So -- twenty issues of Political Theory. Seemed like such a find when they were rescued from the faculty office! Now they are on the curb along with old student evaluations and old copyediting manuscripts.
And so it goes. It is hard to consign my intellectual life to the same level of ephemeral whims that is represented by the rest of my outgoing junk, but I am slowly getting used to it. It's harder to realize that although I am unaware of any change in my own life, 95% of the things I possess -- that I "treasure" -- are things I haven't looked at since the last move, or never use. They really do belong to some other person, who I know a lot less well than I used to, just a few years ago.
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And that's the joy of old friends...
Date: 2004-06-04 07:18 am (UTC)