Moving Targets

"Everyone always loves you when you're on your way out the door" Girlyman

I haven't told anyone at work that I'm leaving yet. Well, I've told a few people, when it's been necessary. My major adviser was the first to know and Amy and Katie have been great help. I could make a production out of leaving. Or, maybe I'm making a big production in a non-traditional way. I suspect this is the truth and I'm reticent about it. My plan is to clean out my office early in the morning next Wednesday and leave. Leave. Perhaps this will cause a greater stir than if I had spilled the beans earlier. Maybe that's the point. Still, it will spare me from hearing people making insincere statements about their allegiances to my memory. Or, that's what I'm afraid of.

Perhaps I am wrong, afraid of nothing and I will be remembered often. In the future I will be referred to as the Second Crazy. When I moved into the office, the first story I heard was that of Michelle, crazy Michelle, who was my desk-predecessor and who just up and left one day. I inherited many of her books, and have since added to the collection. They'll be passed to the next unlucky student to have the Cursed Desk of Craziness.

I spoke with one of my committee members today about my official leave of absence. To make a long story short: She told me that grad school isn't any better any where else, and that I'm too good to be taking a job that's not...Science.  Then, maybe because she's a nice person:  She told me that happiness is a moving target.

Okay, I'm following it to Switzerland.

When I was young, I would pack for camp at least two months early. I would start the count-down to camp at least three months before that. Now that I'm a little older, I'm doing okay at 8 days from departure. I've got a few piles. They're getting taller every day, and I'm getting more worried about the corolla volume: stuff ratio I've got to work with.

das erste

Greetings! Here we go, off to what will be a rickety, creaky and hopefully not too painful start. Anna says we will all shed our possessions and walk free in this life. I think she was trying to be funny.

Shedding possessions is much more difficult than one would imagine. Anybody want to buy a futon? Fund my road trip? Apparently not.

I'm at 9 days until my departure from this culturally wretched place and the process of shedding Things has become more like an archaeological dig than I had anticipated. It's awful. In the past two months I've gone feral--where ever anything lands, that's where it stays. Dishes get done when I can't fit anything else in the sink. Food gets removed from the refrigerator when the stink is too unbearable to open the door for much longer than 30 seconds without causing the first layer of epidermis to peel off... In my bedroom, the strata are particularly fascinating: The superficial layers are of paper, below that we find layers of dirt from the kitten's plant-excavating hobby. Below the papers and dirt I've found a downy layer of dog hair and even further below that is the layer of important-things-I-thought-I-lost.

I've got to fit everything I want to keep in my Corolla. Even then, anything I take with me will be stored for at least a year while I'm off traipsing about Europe. I suppose if I can live without it for a whole year, I probably don't really need it. This new transient lifestyle I'm embracing is exciting--and I'm lucky to have transience as a choice.

So as the week goes on, Things leave in trunk-loads, never to return. It's liberating.