1. Wow, I worried way too much about getting out of town. With help from Sarah, I figured out that it would be MUCH easier to get on the BQE in a manner slightly less direct but INFINITELY less complicated than the one suggested by the mapping assistants. It was so easy, I actually made it too hard and had to correct a little. It took me a HALF-HOUR from my door to the New Jersey Turnpike. Even though I left at four in the afternoon, there was essentially no traffic that affected my progress at all. I did notice that just as I was leaving town, the sky was darkening like there might be a storm later.
2. What the hell is Delaware’s problem? Is the fact that they have no sales tax (or they didn’t when I was a kid) their excuse for charging me FOUR DOLLARS to drive through their state for like ten minutes? Shut up, Delaware. Go tax DuPont. They’re good for it.
3. I stopped a little more than halfway here to get some food and a Starbucks iced coffee. As I was putting sugar in the coffee, I dropped the sugar pourer, which fell onto the coffee, knocked it spectacularly onto the floor, fell itself (the pourer, I’m saying) onto the floor and broke into bits, throwing the sugar all over. It was a p Almost immediately, I heard some buttinsky lady say loudly, “Wow, THAT was bad.” Shut up, lady! Like I don’t know! Fortunately, the Starbucks lady came over right away, she assured me that it was fine, she had it cleaned up, and she replaced my drink. Sweet, sweet Starbucks.
4. I got dinner from Roy Rogers. I didn’t even know there still WAS Roy Rogers.
5. When I arrived at Music Stylist Stephen’s, where I’m camped out for a couple of days, I opened a Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat, which is officially the bestest beer I have ever had in the history of having beer.
6. As soon as I got inside and got situated, it started thundering outside. THAT’S RIGHT, NATURE. I outsmarted you.
7. Tomorrow, I empty the truck and return it. Monday, I pop up to New York on the cheap bus for the day so I can finish cleaning, do the walk-through, and turn in the keys. (I know this seems roundabout, but believe me, it was FAR better this way.)
8. But really, I’ve moved.

The update!

I was supposed to leave first thing this morning, at like five in the morning. Ha ha! Yeah. Oh, I really did try, but ultimately, I had to give up on the super-early traffic-free departure and admit that I was actually going to leave this afternoon and have tons and tons of traffic instead.

It turns out that this is a really, really, really big job. Cleaning the apartment is a big job, packing everything I own is a big job, packing it into the truck is a big job…frankly, I’m exhausted, and I’m only most of the way through the first of THREE TIMES I have to move my stuff (it has to be stored, unfortunately, for a couple of days before I can get into the new place). I had to drag to the Time Warner office yesterday lugging three heavy cable boxes and a modem, standing in line for half an hour while the lady behind the counter took her sweet time waiting on people while hassling someone in the lobby to change the channel on the lobby television, which she was apparently more interested in watching than she was in helping anyone in line.

I can totally see the light at the end of the tunnel — my target departure time was originally two this afternoon, and now it’s three. So there will be horrid Saturday-afternoon traffic, but I will sit in it happily, because by then, this part will be over and I will be sitting in an air-conditioned truck. Oh my God, you guys, am I tired. But I have just experienced that moment where you realize that your place looks mostly-empty instead of mostly-filled-with crap, so I’m totally almost done. But I also just had the moment where you realize you need to drink more water and force yourself to sit down for fifteen minutes before you continue. Thus: this entry.

Okay. More later.

When I’m trying to get to sleep and I’m stressed out, I like to watch unchallenging DVDs. Thus, I was just watching an old episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman. THAT’S RIGHT. I’m the one who owns it on DVD. Don’t take me on.

Anyway, I was watching this episode where Lex Luthor’s new nuclear power plant causes a catastrophic heat wave in Metropolis (hey, something had to), and at the climactic moment, Superman tries to intervene to stop the plant from cranking up to full power (hee hee), and Lex Luthor gleefully announces that the process has already started (hee hee). “Can your men shut it down?” Superman demands.

And then the delicious Lex Luthor, played by the really-perfect-for-this-part John Shea, says, with great relish and delight, “No! Once the sequence has started, it’s physically impossible! It’s one of the safety features!”

That DOES sound like a kick-ass safety feature on a nuclear power plant, you have to admit.

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.

I found the mouse poo graveyard, and I think I am scarred for life.

It’s better than finding the actual MOUSE graveyard (Joe and I agreed that the landlord could be responsible for checking the glue traps he insisted on sliding BEHIND THE STOVE after our first mouse sighting), but the mouse poo graveyard and the volume contained therein has made me think absolutely terrifying thoughts about how much time mice were spending between our refrigerator and the wall.

Clearly, this was where they had their parties.

OH MY GOD.

I know you think you’re tough, with your DRIED SOAP BITS and your occasional SMOODGE OF PETRIFIED SHAMPOO and your GROUT FROM THE 70s, but you know what? I am tougher than you.

Do you hear that, bathroom floor? I have Tilex Mold & Mildew, and I have a bucket of soapy water. I have a scrub brush and a sponge and some paper towels and even with my WEAK GIRL ARMS, I have already taken five years off the life of your pitiful ’70s grout. It may be 2008, but IT’S 2003 BETWEEN THE TILES, you hear me?

You are NO MATCH for me, Bathroom Floor.

You either, Kitchen Floor, so you BETTER run.

That’s what Joe said on his way out the door the other day: “A good year, I think.” And it wasn’t “I think” in the “er, Ithink” kind of way. It was “I think” in the “I’d say” kind of way.

It has taken me a while to get to that point. Obviously, I moved here not thinking it would turn out like this. I moved here thinking that I wanted a really different ending from this, and honestly, if you’d told me then how it would all turn out, I would have curled up in a ball on my couch and started sobbing. Not just because I’m not staying in New York, but because there are things I would have known I’d miss about how my life was then, and about work I did, and about people I was working with. I had certain notions of maybe how things were going to be out here, and it just was not to be.

I’m not going to lie to you — especially at the beginning, the bullpen was the happiest place on Earth, to me. It was me, Joe, Dave, Tara, and Sarah (and occasionally our Exactly Two Bravo Friends), and I swear to God, I would laugh so hard my stomach would just ache. Generally, even when it was really stressful, it was still great. I have spoken several times about the day I saw this picture on Cute Overload, and I started to laugh. And every time I looked at it, I would laugh again. And I laughed harder and harder, and then Tara started to laugh, and if you’ve listened to the Overwhelming Positivity podcasts, you know that Tara has this infectious laugh, so the more I laughed, the more hilarious Tara thought it was that I couldn’t stop laughing, and I swear, I was literally incapacitated for what must have been five minutes, and if you think about how long five minutes is, it basically made that picture and my own ensuing collapse the funniest thing that has ever happened to me.

(I think it’s the Krispy Kreme donut dog, combined with the french-fries dog. It’s the way they are dogs DRESSED UP AS PEOPLE dressed up as food. Something about that is so unbelievably great.)

So I miss that, and I really, REALLY miss working with the writing staff. I edited Smallville recaps and Top Model recaps and House recaps and 24 recaps, and when you have a job where you can pretty much count on the fact that every day, you will open documents that will basically jump out of your computer and do tricks, that’s pretty awesome, too. I liked doing the picks, I loved doing liveblogs with Joe for awards shows and with Sarah for the Elvis-a-thon, and I still loved writing recaps myself.

But it didn’t work out for me to stay, so I quit, and much to my own shock, I have not looked back on that decision with even a whit of regret, even once. Normally, I would expect to have a lot of second thoughts and worries and second-guessing, especially with a decision that was so difficult at the time, but I have had no regrets. I have never, ever, ever thought to myself, “Maybe that was not the right thing to do.”

It would be easier to sit around thinking that I never should have come to New York in the first place, of course, but I don’t think that either. I absolutely don’t wish I were still lawyering. (Sorry, lawyering: I do not miss you.) I do wish I lived closer to my folks and closer to Jeff and Lora and M. Edium (hee), but you genuinely cannot have everything. This brought me substantially closer to my nephews, who I think now see visits from me as much less of a major event and more of a part of their routine, and that’s been great. I know who’s on Not-So-Little A’s baseball team; I know my sister’s friends. I’ve seen more of my sister in the last year than I ever would have if I’d lived in the Midwest.

The thing is, it probably took something as great as TWoP — something I loved THAT MUCH — to make me get up and change direction, which was really, really the right thing to do. And then it probably took that job becoming completely untenable in order for me to leave, which was really, really the right thing to do also. So there’s this weird way in which this entire unpredictable and often very difficult sequence was the only way for me to get from where I was a year and a half ago to where I am now.

I haven’t missed it — like, the job itself — as much as I thought I would. I mean, I still see and talk to the people I was closest to, so that part isn’t so much an issue, but I really thought I would feel very weird after I left. I thought I’d miss the association with it more, and I think I’d feel much more professionally adrift than I actually have.

This is all hopefully going to make more sense soon when some percolating things actually launch, but I’m basically able, at the moment, to just…write. I don’t have an office, I don’t have a boss (well, or I have several, depending on how you want to look at it), my routine changes every day, and I get to work for places that I really like. I’m strapped, but I can do it.

Freelancing is not for everyone. You’re on the hook for your own insurance, which just plain sucks. You don’t have the comfort of a biweekly paycheck that you know is going to directly deposit itself into your account on a predictable schedule. You have to become a businessperson, at least a little, with invoicing and tax crapola and a lot of other things it’s easier not to think about. The 1099 world is a miserable conk on the head compared to the W-2 world. More than anything, it is a hustle, and I don’t know anyone among the multiple freelancers I am acquainted with who enjoys the hustle.

I was reading The Vine the other day, about the lady with the children’s book manuscript who basically thought that getting a hold of Writer’s Market, not to mention an agent, was more trouble than she wanted to go to, since all she wanted was to get her children’s book published. It’s nothing against her at all, but it just reminded me once again of how hard it is for people to understand that the hustle is…the whole thing.

It never becomes, like, a luxurious way to live. I’m sitting here in my own place as a self-sufficient writer only because I continued my law career full-time for three years and part-time for three more after I became a freelancer, and then I finally got a full-time editing job, and then I left that, and that’s how we got here. I consider myself a good writer, and I’ve also been very, very lucky, but this is not a life everybody would want. I have gotten up at five in the morning to write recaps because it was the only time I had; that routine is not just for glamorous novelists. Even when I was an editor, I worked late nights AND early mornings AND weekends (just like the rest of editorial), because…that’s what we did.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the glamour of creative jobs is way overrated, and hustling and breaking in and trying to make connections with people and get work is not something everyone wants to have to do. It’s not just, “Whee, fun!” Some days, it’s like, “Oh my God, what can I POSSIBLY have left to say about tribal council?” But it works for me, and I’m not confident that there’s any other way this could have gone where I really would have wound up in this situation.

Besides, I firmly believe that almost everyone could benefit from a year in New York. Maybe not forever; it doesn’t have to be your life. And I’ll come back later with a post about how much I adore the city, just so this one isn’t EVEN LONGER. But living here is so different from living in other places I’ve been. It’s really like being in a different country, I think is the best explanation. It’s a totally different sort of society from the suburban environments I was in until last year. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come back. But even if I don’t, it really was great, just being here. I was coming home in a cab the other day because I was toting all those boxes from The Container Store (how much do I love The Container Store?), and I had the window down, and we’re sort of zipping through the city, and it’s hot out, and I just…you can’t not think it’s great. You can’t not periodically think consciously about how much you love it, and I’m not sure that’s true everywhere.

Anyway, it’s a time of lots of change and couch-killing, and really, I’m partly just procrastinating so I don’t have to pack boxes. And I wrote the first draft of this post while waiting to watch Camp Rock, and SHUT UP, because it’s only so I can join in the cultural conversation about it. In other words? “It’s for work.”

No, lawyering — I would have to say I do not miss you.

A good year, I think.

Knock wood, et cetera, but this has actually been a pretty good move so far. (I don’t actually leave New York until ass-early on Saturday morning.) I’m actually that person, this time around, with the spreadsheet and the numbered boxes, and just as I always say I SHOULD, I am actually taking the opportunity to prune my possessions and get rid of the stuff I really do not need. Throughout the year, I felt like a jerk for never, ever getting around to breaking down and throwing out my FreshDirect boxes, which sat folded up against various walls in our apartment forever. Now, I feel like a GENIUS, because I only had to buy about half as many boxes at the Container Store.

Part of the result of this is that many of my boxes are very uniform, which pleases a weirdly symmetry-liking part of my personality very much. I have stacks of identical FreshDirect boxes, all of which sit on top of each other perfectly, and then stacks of identical Container Store boxes, which: ditto. Everything is labeled with a permanent marker on every side, so that no matter how you look at the stack, you can see every box’s number. I KNOW!

Buuuuut now, I have reached the part of the packing process where disorder becomes unavoidable. I’m going to share with you a picture I took at someone else’s house while helping with a move, because I found this to be the quintessential Box That Inevitably Happens:

My favorite part is that it says, “Office Printer, Cereal, Lamp, Etc.” Like, “and also other things such as office printers and cereal.” I have reached the Office Printers And Cereal portion of my move.

Things just get more and more obscure. What I have to pack goes from fairly easy things (washcloths) to things that are more perplexing (food processor blades that didn’t make it into the box with the food processor). Soon, there are going to be big boxes that say, “Sneakers, mixer, battery recharger, soap dish.”

I’m sorry: “Sneakers, mixer, battery recharger, soap dish, etc.”

It turns out that I am CRAZY PSYCHIC, because I was in the middle of posting some rando Eef-Barzelay-ana when I realized that his new record officially came out two days ago. (I’m not saying I already have it or nothin’, just that I didn’t realize this was the official date.)

The record, she is divine. You can find out a bit more about it over here, although I’ll warn you that for now, the track listing stuff all goes to the same video — what’s up with that, 429 Records? Anyway, you can pick it up on Amazon or iTunes, and I encourage you to, if you do nothing else, try a few songs — seriously, I like them ALL, but “The Girls Don’t Care” is probably the most entertaining, while “Make Another Tree” makes me feel like a curled-up kitten, while title tune “Lose Big” is mighty catchy and “Song For Batya” is one of the greatest and saddest grief songs ever. That’s four dollars, people. You spend four dollars, and maybe I turn out to be right, right? And now for what was originally this post…

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When I moved into this apartment, the movers were thisclose to announcing that they simply could not put my couch in the apartment. Too big. It was too long AND too wide for the door, and in this particular apartment, when you stand facing our front door from EITHER inside or outside, your back is nearly against a wall, so there is almost no room for improvisation. But they stood at my door for probably an hour — no kidding — and they eventually wiggled it through the door. In the process, though, some scraping took place at the doorway that I absolutely did not want to repeat.

Furthermore, this couch has been the bane of my moving-related existence for quite some time. I don’t like it that much, it really wasn’t chosen (in 1997) for any reason other than low price, and it has absolutely zero appeal other than functionality. So I decided, as I sat on my couch in my otherwise unpacked apartment on that first day, “I am not moving that couch again.” I thought, “That couch is going out of here in pieces.”

Big talk, of course. That couch was built like a TRUCK. It had a HIDE-A-BED. It weighed about ten thousand pounds (approximately). Heavy, heavy thing, and never a whisper of an interruption in its structural integrity. It was one of those couches where you think, “After nuclear war, it will be just cockroaches and this couch.”

I thought about giving it away, but how do you give it away without moving it back through the door? So, as much as I hate waste: no.

I thought about other ways of getting it out of the apartment besides the front door. Which would put the ten-thousand-pound couch…on the deck. Absent a winch, that is no help.

I thought about setting it on fire. You know, not seriously, but I thought about it. Exactly this much: “I could always set it on…well, no…uh, just kidding!”

This occupied my mind, in a back-of-your-mind, annoying-worry kind of a way, on and off all year. I thought about killing that couch constantly. What in the hell am I going to do with the couch? Time to think about moving…the couch. Time to think about my new apartment…without the couch.

I had these fantasies about just hacking it to pieces, but with the bed inside it, how was that going to work? The impeccable solidness seemed to have something to do with the fact that half of the thing was a giant metal bed frame — a factor that also seemed to be part of the reason it was so heavy. (It also has a more substantial mattress than most sofa beds, and that undoubtedly was not a help.)

At some point, I got up out of bed while lying awake thinking about getting rid of the couch — I told you I gave it a lot of thought — and I inspected the connections between the bed part and the wood frame of the couch, and that was when I decided on the two-part plan. First, I would try to remove the bed from the couch. I would try to ultimately lift out the entire metal bed, leaving some kind of a wood skeleton, which I figured I could…maybe take apart? At least I’d be closer.

You have to understand, the other objective was to hopefully wind up with a set of pieces I could move myself, so that I could avoid hiring moving guys just to put my broken-down couch on the curb. Absurd.

So today was the day I set to kill the couch, because I’m not moving for a week, and Joe’s out of the apartment, so there’s more space, and trash day is tomorrow, meaning big and cumbersome furniture can go to the curb tonight.

Job one was to remove the bed. I unfolded the bed, then removed the mattress to make it all easier (and ultimately lighter).  From there, this part was easy. Five Phillips-head screws attaching the bed to each side of the couch, and when they were removed, it lifted right out. It made sense that it would be put together that way, but I was still kind of surprised.

So I was like, “Hooray! Hooray!” And then…”Okay, now what?” Because I am here to tell you, the wooden frame still was put together like the same truck, it appeared. Nothing budged. There were no evident screws, nails, or fasteners of any kind. Removing the bed hadn’t — as I’d secretly hoped — made the rest of the frame get all flimsy and easy. It was still alarmingly solid.

And then I found the vulnerability.

While the rest of the thing is like a block of cement, the piece that runs along the front of the couch is a complete wimp. You know what I mean, right? The piece that would be behind your feet if you were sitting on the couch. That piece has NO GAME. Which I discovered when I put my foot on it (the couch was sitting on its back by now) and cracked it in half.

It was kind of promising, but it was really not obvious that it was going to matter. “What am I trying to do?” I asked myself out loud. “Well, fuck with the structural integrity, anyway,” I answered myself, also out loud. So now, the thing was sort of semi-collapsed, just a little. At least the two end pieces were sort of leaning toward each other, owing to the broken piece.

This was when I realized that the upholstery was helping hold the thing together, so I started doing surgery. I picked up the tiny Swiss Army knife that was my five-year gift at my first law job (thanks, Minnesota House!) and started to slice open the fabric. Took most of it off the back. Made cuts down the sides in a few places. You know how, when you cut up a whole chicken, you can get to a point where the skin is what’s in your way? It was like that.

At this point, the thing began to surrender. Once the fabric was off the back, I was able to defeat one of the end pieces until it was pitifully hanging on for its life. A few more well-placed jabs with my foot, a few more cuts, and I had it. My couch, in pieces, just the way I’d always dreamed. And I could lift all the pieces.

I HAVE BEATEN MY COUCH AT ITS OWN GAME.

I’m pitching in at Vulture this week, so keep an eye out over there for some ramblings. Yesterday, I covered The Happening and Lindsay Lohan; today, so far, I have been on the Mike Myers beat, and there’s more to come. And in a little more than a week, I move. BLEAAARGH, I am stressed to the teeth.