Squatting

Now that I have moved out of my apartment in Athens, I am alternating between couchsurfing and squatting. With Lil Sis out of town, I have her entire apartment to myself. Got most of the stuff tucked away, but I still need to go through it. By Saturday, I was pretty much just dumping crap into boxes and bins and driving it over. So I need to sort out all of my remaining Athens stuff. Make sure I return all my library books. All in anticipation of my Big Blowout in September. I have already warned my family that when I get back to NoVA, I am dumping all of my earthly belongings in one place (the basement) and I am just going to take a day to sort/cull/pack. This will be my third out-of-state move in 2 years, so all of my stuff has become jumbled. Distance and space has dictated what goes and what stays. And now that distance is at a maximum and space is at a minimum, it is really time to prioritize.

Squatting in a house with no TV kinda blows. Like I could drive over to Smokin' Fairy's place and chill on my couch, but that would be a little weird for his roommate. Besides, sometimes I just want the ambient noise or leisure of lounging on the couch in my jammies flipping channels. All the more time to catch up on my reading list, I suppose.

And here's my other rant. With caveats of course. I move alot. Which is funny, because a) my parents still live in the house they brought me home from the hospital and b) I don't particularly like moving. Besides the whole college/summer thing, when I graduated, I lived in 3 different places the summer in Williamsburg. Then Cheese Fiend and I backpacked and Eurailed for 9 weeks. Parents' house for 3 months. Massachusetts for 3 months. Parents for 3 months. Surrogate parents for 2 months. Random house in Falls Church for 3 months. That was just 2002. In 2003, I moved to Charlottesville. Then I moved IN Charlottesville 3 times (1st apartment, then better apartment, then house to accommodate 3rd roommate). Then Chicago, which involved living out of my car for a couple of weeks. Athens for a year. Now I am still in Athens, squatting in a different apartment for 2 weeks before more backpacking. Then couchsurfing different family members, driving cross country and living in CA for what will hopefully be a while.

OK. So in all the times that I have moved, only 2 people ever helped me move out. Sure, roommates moved their stuff out, but I was always the last one out and the one who moved all my own boxes. Not that I can't do it, just that it sucks. So this time, I had some veritable strangers move 2 pieces of furniture. But all the rest was me and the Civic.

But the exceptions are kind of surprising. One was Mom#2. She helped Cheese Fiend and me move (packing the kitchen, which I HATE), and she helped me move my own crap (PFM was busy with all of Cheese Fiend's books). The other was Kallisti. Who cut out of work early, took the L to my stop, walked the mile from the stop to my house to help pack my car in his nice work clothes in the August heat.

The other part of this is how many times I have schlepped the crap of others.

This isn't to say that people haven't helped me. Mom drove a van of my crap to Athens, and has taken boxes of my crap back to NoVA as a prelude to my moving. She will also be driving me and said crap cross-country. And then there are the siblings who unloaded it, the college roommates who put up with it, and the other roommates who accommodated it.

I think I need to stop moving so much. Or at least stop moving in freakin' August.