The List

I am still typing this from a computer keyboard perched atop my dresser.

In the dark.

All the books have a home but cd spindles, pens, checkbooks, and documents do not.

We eat off tv trays.

In the dark.

And there's a really ratty piece of torn carpet that serves as a runner.

With so much work completed, it's hard to believe what remains. In my notebook I wrote down all the things we would need and how urgent those things were: the runner was a least important, a desk was the most important. Most of the things on those lists have been crossed off, I swear. But I still don't have a garbage can for the kitchen.

And as I've mentioned there's a little bit of a light issue all around. Lamps are definitely our nemeses.

Then there's the little matter of my desk. As those who know me well can attest, I have a little bit of an orange thing i.e. I love orange things. Six months or so ago CB2 had a bright orange desk. When I mention I don't have a desk yet, many well-meaning friends suggest this bright orange desk they remember seeing in the CB2 catalog. They don't have it any more. Now the options are chartreuse and black. And it's not so much a desk as it is a piece of metal on casters. Which may have been easy to overlook had the metal been orange, but without that sweetener, it's a $150 metal piece on wheels. The trouble is, I haven't seen a desk at any price that I like. It is true, I want a cheap desk, but at this point, the right desk would be worth some money. Considering, as I mentioned before, that my current desk is a dresser. I sit sideways on my chair because there's no room for my legs - there are drawers there. It is true, when we were at United Housewreckers, I gave some thought to the old-timey desk; something with a roll-top or a banker's feel, but those things are heavy and I have a feeling I would get tired of one sooner rather than later. On the other hand, the monstrosities that pass for modern efficiency desks are little more than tinker toys writ large. I'm considering saving the money on a desk and buying a laptop instead that I can rest on one of the tv trays (though I still have one monster of a printer that would need a home - it's one of the other things that hasn't been unpacked because there's nowhere for it to live). Also, while a laptop would solve the surface area problem of desks, it wouldn't solve the drawer problem: the drawers I intend to use for cd spindles, checkbooks, and pens.

I've tried to downplay the desk problem because it is so far less interesting than the prep kitchen table problem. After all, I can currently use my computer, and if I wanted to, I could simply unpack the pens and cd spindles into one of the dresser drawers; whereas I have no room anywhere to make ravioli or puff pastry. Still, as the days turn into weeks and the cooling weather reminds me of the passage of time, prosaically, I realize this desk thing too is a problem that needs attention. So if you see something that doesn't suck and doesn't cost more than a laptop, please send it my way. My thighs are cramping!


Apropos of nothing, I'm preserving for posterity examples of people on Metro North attempting to hog seats. This one was a special favorite though, in gross foot man's defense, when two legitimately elderly frail looking people got on the train he did let them have his seat - that smelled of feet. I wish I had a picture of the seat I took yesterday afternoon - I had it picked out as the train was still rolling into the station: a woman in a three-across seat sitting in the middle seat with her shit on either side of her. She was not pleased I thought to take one of the THREE seats she had selected for herself. Remember, fellow commuters, I am on the lookout for the most selfish among you to be my seatmate. Prepare to be maliciously inconvenienced and, I hope, chagrined by your own truly laudable spatial parsimony!

An Open Letter Composed While Unpacking Books

Dear Amherst College,

I get it. I really truly do. After ten years in which I didn't give you more than a passing thought, you have reasserted yourself into my thoughtscape. We didn't get along, you and I, something you repeatedly told me was "my problem." Ok, time heals most wounds. You gave me my life partner and that's no small feat, so, um, thanks for that. I never thought my single on the 2nd floor of Stearns would yield a suitable mate, and yet twelve years later...yes, we're all bored with the twelve years later story. But, I always felt as though there was something more, something you were forbidden from openly disclosing, but something so important, so mania-inducing, that you nearly burst from the pressure of holding it in. And now, as I stand in a sunny office in my new dwelling in the Amherst College-appropriate location of Greenwich, Connecticut, I understand what it was you were trying to tell me those four (ok, three) years you had me in your boring, icy grasp.

You love Proust.

You love him like chocolate and ponies and sunbeams all rolled into one.

The hard-on you have for Proust is so enormous, not even the lofty yet architecturally derivative Johnson Chapel could hope to contain it.

You cannot, for love, money, or your own sanity, get enough of Le Monsieur des Madeleines.

Though perhaps I go too far. You didn't seem to have much use for, by my count, 1,934 of his pages (and let's be fair, you didn't really seem to ever get past the Combray section of Swann's Way, so let's make it an even 2100). But those 150 pages, by Vishnu, did you collectively experience the mother of all petits morts every time you broke the spine!

How else can I explain the sheer number of copies I am currently unpacking? It is true, I read about all of Marcel's diarrheic dyspepsia long before I trod your hallowed halls, and I maintain that it is entirely possible that by slogging away through Cities of the Plain, I successfully read more of this pile of fumier de cheval than any of your tenured professors (in my edition, boys, it's in the second volume). One of your shepherds of my mind didn't even bother asking us to purchase the complete book, but assigned a Vintage Classics copy of just Swann's Way. What can I take from this decision? It couldn't possibly have been your concern for my or my fellow student's pocketbooks (Amherst students don't have those kinds of concerns, and god help you if you were a scholarship student attempting to major in a frickin' science), and were the book as monumental as its repeated inclusion on syllabi all but assures, why wouldn't I, a fertile plain in the hands of a seasoned farmer, derive much from further reading. Having gotten so much out of the mere first book of this treasure trove, wouldn't you want me to inflame my passions further over the summer by completing the book? Yea, wouldn't my education be woefully incomplete without having this experience?

I contend that your frequent repetition of this tranche, was intellectual fraud of the lowest kind; a poseurism so devoid of artifice so as to convince the onlooker that it was sincere all along. The transparent attempt to make one's faculty seem hyper well-read by assigning and reassigning a book which, had any of the faculty ACTUALLY read would have obviated the need for even contemplating instructing others in its self-indulgent onanistic crapulence, was a masterstroke simply because it was so obvious as to not possibly have been true.

And for ten years, I bought this line of thinking. I couldn't imagine that the 150K or so your bachelor's degree was valued at in the late 90s was the product of the selfsame bombastic bullshittery we students so excelled at (excelled at, as luck would have it, in the very courses that taught Proust). No wonder students and faculty got along so well - all of us were talking utter gobshite about books we had never read!

But it leaves me with quite a conundrum. I have not even reached the halfway mark of my book unpacking and so far I have:

1. The first copy of Remembrance of Things Past, hardcover, two volumes, I ever bought, circa 1994 at a used book store, quite possibly in Hadley, Mass (this should have clued me in come to think of it);

2. The Modern Library hardcover edition of Swann's Way assigned by a professor who obviously thought my upper body strength could use some work, and that I should use those dollars I had earned art modeling for something more important than cigarettes;

3. Volume 2 of the old Vintage Edition whose existence is suspect to me as it does not contain the inimitable Swann's Way, leading me to believe volumes 1 and 3 are lurking in another box;

4. And of course, the Vintage paperback of just Swann's Way.

I shudder to think how many others are waiting to join these already shelved. Sure, an astute observer would wonder why a student would continue to purchase the same book when she had purchase it a semester or two previously, but there's the rub: had I known I would be assigned the book again, I might have brought it back to school with me. Without that foreknowledge, I was consigned to the Soviet-era booklines like all my classmates rather than suffer the indignity of showing up to class without the book while my put upon mother ransacked the house to find it and send it up.

And of course, the kicker is, no matter how much I know I will never read any part of this book again, not even in French as practice; no matter how many copies emerge from my boxes, I know they will stay, year after year, as part of the Yelena permanent collection because I suffer just like you, my wayward profs. I know in my heart of hearts the simple truth you tried to impart to me those many years ago:

only the lowliest of Plebes, the least accomplished Lord Jeff of them all, would dare do something as crass as to throw out Proust.

Yours repetitively encore et encore une autre fois,

Yelena

My Stuff and Where It Might Be

We have been here 36 hours. Number of boxes unpacked: 0. We did find the alarm clock this morning because it went off, thereby leading us to its hiding place. Our move took about three times as long as I thought, mostly because I thought we had less crap. Our movers were terrific and did not demonstrate that they were put out by the fact that a 3 hour planned move took 8 hours. In fact the only thing that sucked about moving day was my car.

My brand new, first ever car that I love dearly even though we have been together a short while. The spiffy red car that has miles only I have put on it that I swore I would not park on the street in my neighborhood Friday night. No, said I, I would not permit my lovely new car to be sat on my hooligans, broken into, or stolen outright (though I might enjoy watching the mouth-breathers from my neighborhood attempt to drive a manual); instead, I would put it into the only reputable looking garage in the neighborhood, pay the 20 bucks for safety and security, and pick my car up in the morning no worse for the wear. I have just now returned from the Port Chester train station in his car, after dropping him off because my car? Still in the garage. Why, you might inquire, is your car still in the garage when you have been a suburbanite for 36 hours? That is an excellent question for which I have a terrible answer: the elevator at the garage is broken. So my shiny car is on level 2 with no way of getting to level 1. They don't know when the elevator will be fixed and given that the garage is located in my old neighborhood where things operate on UST, Uptown Standard Time, it could be many a moon before Big Red (not ACTUALLY the name of the car because I don't name cars or private parts) is reunited with me. This sucks.

Our living room and bedroom are the only two currently functioning rooms. I say this because I am typing this port from a computer that sits atop my dresser. As the movers were planning to move my desk out of my old bedroom, we realized it was no longer structurally sound and left it there, leaving me one desk short. The dresser desk is a temporary solution which is hard on my knees (they are what's currently pressing against the drawers). Instead of unpacking, yesterday we shopped, and for the most alluring of items: laundry hamper, trash bags, shelf paper, garbage cans. The shelf paper is what is confronting me today. This is an older house and before I go unwrapping all our gear, I'm going to repaper all the shelves - this job fills me with so much apprehension, I'm considering calling my mom for help (I'm not really great at a) straight line cutting or b) adhesives).

I'm also debating the Great Book Unpacking of 2009. Even with the 300 or so books that didn't make the cut - I'm looking at you high school copy of Macbeth - there are a number of boxes of books. Our movers commented on this several times. What stops me from diving straight into the books is that, technically, this room, my office, can stay unpacked longer than, say, the kitchen. It's not an essential room. as is obvious from the fact that it is an office with a dresser for a desk. The kitchen should be dealt with because it helps us eat; on the other hand, nothing in my office requires shelf paper.

My early review of this house is I love it. It's definitely big enough and I foresee lots of multi-level shouting since his office is downstairs and mine is upstairs. It had been raining quite a bit preventing us from doing all the backyard frolicking I had foreseen (the presence of neighbors with children will most likely prevent all the types of frolicking that could go on), but I smoked my last cigarette in the backyard right before bed on Saturday, and it felt nice to have a before bed outdoor area that didn't have other people blasting music in it. The living room is shaping up nicely. We liberated a chair, ottoman, and rug from my "mother-in-law" and as soon as we locate a rug pad (oversight, I know), I think the rug will be a welcome addition. It's seriously ugly, but in a way that completely matches the room (the room isn't ugly per se, it's just very retro - I promise pictures when things are better looking than they are right now).

So I commence papering. This is a lie. First I am going to unpack the espresso machine and have a cup of coffee; then I am going to contemplate the great papering. I just thought I should be honest.