In the New Apartment, No One Can Hear You Scream: July 13, 2004
In which I get ready to move.
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AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRR— oh, hi. Sorry if I scared you. I was just releasing some pent-up frustration there. If you’ll excuse me for just a moment, I’ll finish up quickly: —RRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!
There. All better.
You’re probably wondering what I’m so frustrated about. The more innocent readers are thinking, “How could Romy ever be frustrated? She has the perfect life!” And the wiser, more cynical readers are thinking, “How could Romy ever be frustrated? She has no life.” Well, I’m about to surprise you all, because lazy ol’ Romy has actually been up to some Big Things lately! And, as we all know, Big Things usually mean Big Frustration—well, they do in my world, anyway. Here’s a list of Big Frustrating Things I’ve Been Doing Lately:
- finding an apartment
- losing/gaining weight
- not getting any sleep whatsoever thanks to the Local Teenage Delinquents
- visiting with relatives
There. Now you see why I’m frustrated. What? You don’t see what’s so bad about all that? You want more details? Really? Okay, it’s your funeral…
1. The New Apartment
My mother started it, really. She needed to downsize to a smaller, cheaper apartment, so she started looking for a flat on the west side of St. Paul. Since she and I are starting a home business together, we’d like to live within walking distance of each other, so Tony and I started looking for apartments in the same neighborhood. After much searching, viewing, haggling, and threatening, we finally found a suitable street. And a suitable complex. And a suitable building. And now Tony and I are going to live in the same building, on the same floor, across the same hall from my mother.
This will either turn out like a sitcom or a horror movie.
There are going to have to be rules. Rules like I will move your heavy furniture for you but only if you come squish any nasty bugs that happen to get into the apartment when my husband isn’t home and I don’t know anything about home improvement so don’t ask me to put up shelves for you and if you hear blood-curdling screams from our apartment don’t call the cops because it’s just me and Tony making hot monkey love.
Especially that last one.
Moving from our neighborhood (Hell) to a place where there are sidewalks and gardens and lots of liberals seemed like a really good idea in theory, but now that I have to actually move, I’m finding that moving is not really all that fun, no, not at all. See, I’ve never really moved before. Sure, I rode from Florida to Minnesota in an RV with two grumpy parents and two howling pets and a teenage sister to boot, but I was only four years old then, so that doesn’t really count. And yeah, I did move from my pre-marriage apartment to my post-marriage apartment, but that doesn’t really count either, because I was only moving a few hundred yards away. Anything that does not involve a moving van does not really count as moving. But this counts as moving. This involves hiring vans and plotting courses and SWAT-team-like coordination, because we are all moving at once. My mother and my husband and I have to all be out by noon on August 31, which means we have to pack everything into one moving van and haul ass over to our new homes and then drive all the way back to our old homes so we can clean them out.1
I have been packing madly for the past two weeks. First I packed all my videos, which was not a problem because I don’t watch my videos a whole lot. Then I packed all my books, which was a problem, because now I have nothing to read, and so instead of spending quiet evenings at home with a good book I spend quiet evenings at home reading the backs of cereal boxes and twitching spasmodically. Also, I think I packed the cat.
2. The Weight
It goes down, it goes up. One minute my thighs feel like redwood tree trunks, the next day I wake up and I’m Lara Flynn Boyle. What the hell? Body, why are you doing this to me? Please decide whether you want to look like Kirstie Alley old or Kirstie Alley new, because I am getting sick of rifling through my closet trying to find pants that are small enough/big enough for my shape-of-the-day. And if you keep this routine up, I’m going to drag you over to the YMCA and ask my old karate teachers if I can come back and be the Human Punching Bag again. Remember what that felt like, Body.
3. The Lack of Sleep
I need a lot of sleep. If I don’t get my requisite twelve hours a night, you might as well kill me and harvest my organs, because I’m not going to be of any use to anyone for the rest of the day. So when a firecracker store appeared just up the road, I knew the organ harvest was at hand. And sure enough, within a few days the Local Teenage Delinquents2 were snap-crackle-popping away at all hours of the day and night. I’m not talking a few stray firecrackers—I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of firecrackers and other weapons of sleep destruction (WSDs). The lights from these horrors keep everyone awake, and the noise—let me tell you, I could go out and machine-gun those firecracking teenage morons to death and no one would be able to distinguish the rapid-fire gunshots from the goddamn firecrackers. For weeks upon end I’ve lain awake, listening to the war-zone noises coming from outside and hoping that the screams from outside were screams of pain and missing limbs, not screams of imbecilic joy. (They were screams of joy, sad to say.) And then comes the crowning glory—some idiot on an ATV, riding full-tilt over lawn and parking lot alike, causing cars to honk and skid as he careens along the streets. How that guy can zoom all over the place without hitting a grounded firecracker is beyond me, but so far he seems to have escaped firework injury. Do you think they sell land mines at that firework store? Because I would really like to see that guy jump two hundred feet into the air and scatter himself over a wide area of land.3
1. (The management provided us with a cleaning checklist. “ALL CHROME MUST SPARKLE!!!!” it says, to which I reply, “Bite me, you pricks, I’m not your effing maid.”)
2. Which would be a great band name. Actually, they might be a band...
3. Cookies to you if you get that reference.
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