Housefrau

[jethrien]

I spent the weekend feeling like June Cleaver.

Seriously, we did practically nothing all weekend but housework and yet were bizarrely excited by it. "Honey, look how clean this door is now!" "Check out the bathroom!"

This was sparked, of course, by our roommate moving out.

For the last year, Chuckro was living with a friend of his. I moved in with them (it's a really large apartment) in July, and on Saturday the roommate moved out.

Let me preface this by saying that he's a really nice guy and we both like him a lot.

That said, this was a move that demonstrates how not to move, unless you want to piss off your friends.

He hadn't packed anything. Seriously. The friends who were helping him move showed up with the moving van, and pretty much all of his stuff was still on the floor. We finally ended up sending the van off with a load of furniture, and then Chuckro and I and one of the helpful friends started just shoveling things into boxes and bags.

And vacuuming.

My personal favorite part was when the homeless guy came by the van and started trying to convince us to give him roommate's shirts. I mean, on one hand it was sad and pathetic. On the other hand - this guy had serious chutzpah. We even told him they weren't our shirts and we were packing for a friend and he wouldn't leave us alone. It was just so bizarre as to be funny.


After moving everything out, we took a break and went to a play being stage-managed by one of Chuckro's exes.


It was this show being workshopped, that was about a Jewish girl's search for a soulmate. Now some of you may remember my encounter with workshopping shows from a few months ago, when I did crew for "Swimming Upstream". I think (I hope) that show will be my standard for bad theater for a really long time.

I will admit that "Soul Searching" was not as bad as "Swimming Upstream". ...but it was pretty damn bad. It's a rock opera, with absolutely no dialogue. Which is a shame, because maybe if there was dialogue we could figure out who everyone was and why they were doing the inexplicable things they were doing. And why some of the songs that should have been happy sounded so angry.

However, it could not have explained why they cast all of their guys to sing parts that were clearly not in their range. And why two of the guys with long solos didn't really have that great a sense of pitch. (I mean, c'mon. It's New York. There's like a million starving actors and singers. Surely you can manage to cast six or seven men who can all hold a tune.) It could not explain the TVs being used as backdrops. (I suppose they were supposed to be clever and deep. They were more just precious and pretentious and occasionally confusing.)

The fact that the ending totally sucks doesn't help.

Ah well. It was somewhat amusing. And said ex (who I'd never met before) was sweet and charming, and lacked any illusions about the show's brilliance. So we didn't have to dance around the topic. (All I could think for the first act was "What are we going to tell her? This show is wretched, but it's her job. What are we going to tell her when she asks what we think?") And hopefully we'll see her again. I rather liked her. (Actually, I've rather liked all of Chuckro's exes that I've met. And I'm really good friends with some of them. After all, he A) has good taste in women and B) manages to have relationships that are functional enough that when they end, neither party hates the other.)


So with lots of free space all to ourselves, Chuckro and I went on a cleaning rampage yesterday. We swept/vacuumed/dusted/mopped/disinfected/scrubbed the newly empty bedroom and bathroom. We rearranged all the cabinets, and a bunch of the shelves and furniture. By the end, my hands had a funny texture and his smelled like bleach. (Still did somewhat this morning.) We have a list of new furniture to buy. We now have the beginnings of a guest bedroom laid out.

We're so domestic it sometimes frightens me.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I once spent my free afternoon in Athens moving other people's luggage from the sidewalk into my hotel room so that no one would steal it. You see, the bus driver had just dumped the stuff and taken off and the other people on tour assumed that someone else was handling it and went to explore the city. Someone else was handling it. Me and about four friends. This is why I haven't been to any museums in Athens.

And when these people whose luggage we had guarded returned, they yelled at us.

It was then I realized that no one else will ever care as much about your possessions as you do yourself, and if you don't want bad shit to happen to them, you have to handle it.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I think handling everything yourself requires a level of foresight that was lost this past weekend. If you want to do all of your packing yourself, you have to do it before the short window when you'll actually be moving.

But by the same token, you trust your friends not to give your stuff to random hobos. Several times when jethrien moved out of dorm rooms, she had to be at something else during the move-out window. She packed everything that was critical in advance, and then her parents and I boxed up everything else and packed the car. And there was no need to give most of it to hobos.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

It does help that hobos generally stay away from Princeton dorms, unless you count some of the creepier guys on campus...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Not having parents in the immediate vicinity, and not wanting to abuse my friends too much, I've always done 90% of the packing and moving myself. Can't claim that I don't procrastinate, though. I didn't start packing senior year until after graduation. I had to pull an all-nighter. Which is about the point when possession-despair sets in and you'd just rather throw everything you own out a window and go to sleep.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

90% of the stuff from my dorm room was gone by class day. I sent a load of furniture and stuff home [mostly to Brooklyn, since I signed the lease that week] at the beginning of dead week, then everything but a few clothes, bedsheets and my computer went home with my parents after baccalaureate. After graduation, we took a few photos, put the last of the stuff in the car, and left.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

In my admittedly limited experience, moving everything yourself requires *less* foresight than getting friends to help you, provided you're willing to undergo the horrific last minute rush, with many delays and much junk being thrown out. It only requires less foresight because, well, you don't want to aggravate the friensd too much.