So yeah, nothing good about moving really. Moving involves a bunch of things I've already written about (and thus hate). I'll briefly skirt over what they are, and why I hate them - though, as you avid followers will know, sometimes my brief diatribes turn into full-blown magnum opii (love it) - so, as always, caveat installed (bear with me), chair reclined; ass-cheeks deflated, coke at the ready. Teeth fucked. Let's go.
1) What do you use to pack!?
This is wrong and irritating on so many levels that I can't even begin to describe the multitudinous hatred I feel towards the myriad issues here. You've got to find boxes; hundreds and hundreds of boxes... and not just any boxes. They need to be of a consistent shape and size - no rhomboids please - so that you can store them safely in your car, they need to be of a decent volume but not too much - so that you can always lift them, however full they are - and they need to be sturdy - and not a lot of boxes are. Any of you remember The Simpsons episode where they go on a tour of the 'box factory'? I wish I had gone on one of those tours, split from the party, thrown caution to the wind, and pillaged the stocks of well-proportioned, amble volume, boxes. I would've been toying with the penal system, but to hell with it, I would have gone on a rampage. It would have been carnage (don't get me started on idiots misusing this word). So you find the boxes -- and by find, I mean buy. From a store that doesn't exist. Honestly. There is no box-store. You need to hunt down an office supplies shop, and then you have to buy what is effectively self-assembly cardboard. It's ultra low-budget Ikea but without the funny names. So you've bought everything. And by everything, I mean everything. You've probably ended up with an industrial-sized stapler, post-it notes (you're the kind of person who thinks insight needs to be penned and thrown on the wall), and always always always 18m of bubble wrap; even though inside of your current dwelling is nothing worth keeping anyway, and... let's be honest: If it broke on the journey, you'd probably be better off than when it was intact. So there it is.
If you're especially cavalier, you can abdicate some of the responsibility to a trusted friend or relation; but... well, they can't do it the way you want it, so it's probably safer and more worthwhile to expend the extra hours doing it yourself. After all, it is DIY. And if that kind of misanthropic mistrust of humankind hasn't whet your hate-buds enough, you can always smash convention and find random boxes around your house: The one the printer came in, the one from Ikea that says "Blumstrong" on the side, the one that might have held the Christmas (why is this suggested capitalised by Chrome?) tree... but might have held the vacuum cleaner too - either way, hilarious domesticity - or maybe even the one that's still got nik-naks in. That's the best one. The one that has various pieces of domestic miscellany inside of it - jack-to-jack wires without the necessary attachments or equipment; extension cables that stretch up to 55m (although your yard is only 18x6); an odd shoe; a bauble for the x-mas (ha, beat that spell check) tree; perhaps a drawing you did as an eleven year old; a ping-pong ball; some kind of tennis/squash/horrid sport accoutrement; various fire-prevention paraphernalia; and always, always, a spare USB lead. You might not have the port, or even a laptop, but by fuck you've got an extraneous capacity for connectivity.
So there it is. Choose your weapon, gentlemen. It's time to embark on a quest!
2) The 'quest'.
You have to pack the car/van/lorry/bicycle. That's an awful sentence. I mean that you have to pack things into. Obviously you don't pack the car into the car. That's some kind of dimensional paradox which is bound to send me into paroxysms of confusion. Moving on. Yes. Yes indeed. It's 1984, and apparently your name is Alexey Pajitnov (anyone?). Unfortunately, because your name probably isn't Alexey Pajitnov and you are thus unaccustomed to gently rotating strange shapes in order for them to make perfectly geometrical patterns; you're bound to fail. There's no guarantee of success here. That's what sucks even more. This isn't 'getting to level 60 at WoW' - that's possible, if pointless and horrendously time-consuming - there is the distinct possibility here that you won't manage it. You might find that you've got too much stuff (is the car too small, or are you too much of a materialistic whore?), or that the boxes (you cavalier!) you've used simply don't fit in the car, in any order.
I've got a tip for you, and hopefully it will allow you to pack the car quickly, and efficiently: make someone else do it. Sequester someone who understands sequential placement and impact of objects - a chess player might be quite good. If you're anything like me, you'll just stick things in, and then shove things in on top of those, until the point where you try to close the boot ends with you covered in glass and pulling a weird constipation face. If you hire someone, you'll never have to pull that puce-coloured expression... you know the one: it's as if you're trying to forcibly eject a pineapple from your rectum. So, yeah, hire someone. Pay them. Coerce them. Whatever. Make them do it. I hate emancipation.
3) There is nothing remotely quest-like about a piddling jaunt down the bypass.
Arf. Driving. Fuck that. As some (read: none) of you will remember: I don't like driving. No, "don't like" isn't strong enough... I have an insatiable desire to destroy every car ever (except my own), and drive everyone en masse off of a very tall bridge. That's what I want to do. All the wanton phallic rubbish; horrible haircuts; clapped-out-tarted-up Saxo's - I hate it; and I hate you for doing it. Stop ruining an activity that could be fun. Quit it already. So yeah, I loathe driving because of other drivers; they're abhorrent, and wasteful.
4) You invariably get lost.
It's impossible to find where you're going, even when you've been there a thousand times. If I was moving from my old house, to my old house (confusing) then I would still get lost, even though both of those houses have occupied my entire life's worth of shelter. I would still get lost. It's about 2 km between those places, too. I'd still get lost. I could use GPS, sat-nav, a 1970's A-Z of Worthing and Brighton, I could shout angrily at my passenger and berate their woeful incompetence at navigation. I'd still get lost. Taking this truthism (because it's not at all true) as demonstrable fact (which we're going to!) then you can guess how bad it was having to move 50 miles. Jesus. Logistical nightmare. Eichmann had a significantly easier job in planning and implementing the genocide of 6mil-jessers than I did choosing, planning, and driving a route. It's impossible. There is no physical way of getting from A-B without going via Q. And where's U? They're meant to be together. Dictionary lie! DICTIONARY LIE. Christ I hope we filled up with petrol. We didn't? GET ME HESS!
5) You arrive.
You've made it! Bedraggled, riddled with self-loathing, your passenger slumped dead in the co-seat - the oddly sat-nav shaped lump in their gullet still trying to move down --,... your face covered in sweat, the clothes stuck to your back, hate etched across every line of your body. Who cares! You've arrived. Congratulations. There's never any kind of celebration though, is there? Never a kind of 'new house inauguration'. I wouldn't even mind a Bushlation. At least he got something; admittedly it was derision, the hatred of millions, death threats, and shit thrown at him; but it was something. Where's the trumpets? Where's the generic silver-fox holding an over-sized cheque?! Where are the hordes of children running over the roof-tops!? Why isn't this 1940's post-WW2 Britain!?
(Sidenote: Don't you hate it when you get a little speck of something on your glasses, so you rub it, and then it's made exponentially more awful with each stroke? Fuck that. *Contacts.*)
6) Guess what?
That's right. You have to unpack. No, I'm not kidding. That 14-year-logistics-seminar you attended; the twelve-day drive; the death of your friends and family; the requisitioning of the world's supply of boxes. All of it for this. To unpack. What a horrendously beautiful irony.
Please follow these steps to ensure that you don't have fun, and that the next time you go to move, you have as hellish a time as you did on this one:
A) Make sure at least one 'industrial strength' box caves in on the way through the front door - preferably the one which doesn't contain any bubble wrap. For extra points, make sure the priceless Ming was wrapped in newspapers - the additional congrats from me are for both the stupidity of thinking newspaper would protect anything that was dropped (it's paper... seriously), and for losing your kids' inheritance.
B) Lump everything in different rooms, so that whilst you're unpacking it seems like you're making progress, but you're not.
B i) Inside each room, try to put at least 8 or more boxes. When unpacking, always take a break after each box, so that you can't notice any difference - this adds a whole level of macabre to the proceedings, and invariably leads to a contemplation on the futility of life. That's great fun. Seriously though, try it. It's the moving equivalent of when you leave the washing up for four days, and it's as if you'd opened a nationwide soup kitchen for a weekend.
C) Make sure you scrape something along one of the walls when moving in. You have to do this one; the ruined aesthetic is entirely intrinsic to making this experience indescribably painful.
D) Leave something behind. If you don't do this, you won't have to hate yourself forever. You won't have to rue the day you decided that I) Moving house, II) Going on holiday, III) Moving to uni IV) et al. would be a good idea. We cannot have a lack of rue. That would be a coq au vin sans jus. Mmm, food jokes.
E) Ask for your friends' help, and then have them let you down. This is pernicious, although it might not seem it. If you want to cultivate that perfect air of irritability and fruitless angst, you must be let down by someone you trust and who is responsible. Naturally, they're not to help you unpack - they're not qualified for that - no, they're the English Poles who are merely to provide strong-backs, and rippling muscles.
F) Struggle to park outside your new house. This is soooo useful for making you hate life. It's an exponential equation I would plot if I had the wherewithal for 'graphing'; the farther the car from the front door, the less exciting moving is, and the more enraged you become. Perhaps some kind of haunting Venn diagram is necessary at this juncture? If anyone reading this is good at maths, feel free to write in your self-penned Venn diagrams.
G) Make sure the house isn't as good as you remember it being. There is nothing more satisfying for world-hate than a crushing disappointment, and a depressing anti-climax. Try them. You can either get a venereal-diseased ridden whore to get you to climax, and then demand return cunnilingus for your orgasm; or you can move house to somewhere that becomes boring after minutes. I don't know which one you prefer; there is a vaccine for AIDS now anyway - so perhaps you're better off with plunging the crispy-clunge. I dunno.
H) Neighbours. This one gets special mention. The best way to ensure maximum antipathy to the new surroundings, is to avoid asking what kind of neighbours you're going to have - then it's a case of sitting back, relaxing, and praying that you move into a house that borders one of the following:
i) Hairdressers.
ii) Kids.
iii) Crazy animal person.
iv) Students.
v) Old people.
Do this to enable cruise-control repugnance.
I) Although you obviously haven't carried out a structural survey, do check that the walls are paper-thin (hey, maybe you can wrap your glasses up in them? They're bound to be safe).
J) Never check whether your gas/electric/water companies charge rateable prices, or metered. Also, try to get as many different amenity providers as is possible - the more bureaucracy you might have to engage with, the more hateful you can be. If you have to call any of them out in the first week because your boiler doesn't work, you get extra acclamation from the Board of Hilarity.
K) Accidentally recycle the boxes you moved in with in the first place. That way you can make the whole process cyclical :).
So yeah, I moved into my new private uni house today. It's actually really nice, and the move went without a hitch :).
Follow my advice. Never move house.
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