Moving isn’t fun, except when you discover treasure

I never have enjoyed moving. I think I’ve moved my personal belongings six times in the four… I never have enjoyed moving. I think I’ve moved my personal belongings six times in the four years that I have been in college. Now I’m in the process of number 7. On top of that, I’ve had to help my mom move twice in the same four years, and I’ve helped my older brother move three times in the span of two years.

Needless to say, I should be an expert at moving. However, I still don’t like doing it. We have to burden ourselves with getting a U-Haul, lugging all of my furniture — couch, love seat, bed, futon, 36-inch television and a coffee table — out of a house that it shouldn’t have even fit into. Then, we must lug it into our new house, which, thankfully, is a lot bigger than where I have been resting my head recently.

Yesterday I started packing things in my bedroom, which is as small as some people’s closets, and to no surprise, the bulk of what I boxed up were CDs and DVDs. But while packing, I realized that I hadn’t cleaned my room too much in the year that I have been living at 305 Lawn, because I found old class assignments and a few songs that I wrote on scrap paper and have since transferred to song books. Not that there’s much to clean, because there isn’t, but it brings back memories of cleaning my room when I was younger.

I remember my mom would always yell at me, telling me that my room needed to be cleaned because she couldn’t stand to look at it. My response was always, “Then don’t look at it.” That never went over well with her and always led to me walking upstairs and cleaning my room.

But while cleaning my room, I always found things that I hadn’t seen in a while. I would find a CD that I hadn’t listened to in forever because it was buried under a pile of papers or wedged between a book and my radio. I would find that set of baseball cards that I hadn’t touched in a year and start looking through them again.

Finding random treasures in my room was great. After finding these treasures, I would stop cleaning and devote half the day to reorganizing my baseball cards, deciding that they would be more accessible if I put them in alphabetical order by team and name instead of alphabetical order by team and lumped together by position.

These things mattered back then.

Now I don’t have my card collection to distract me. Instead I have MTV “Cribs.” And even though I had already watched the episodes that were on, I still stopped packing to watch them. Then when a commercial came on, I’d go back to packing.

The last time we helped my mom move, I told her that she had to stay where she was, because I wasn’t moving her again. I’m starting to tell myself that too, because the older I get, the more things I have to move. I had a lot of stuff when I was younger, but now my stuff is bigger. I own couches and televisions; I didn’t own these things when I was younger.

But I still came across random treasures that I forgot I had, such as the Coheed and Cambria CD I bought six months ago, never opened and just found today in a stack of CDs in my room. I took time out of packing to open it up and give it a listen, delaying my moving process and making me think back to my younger years when my mom would come up to my room three hours after I started cleaning and ask “Shouldn’t you be done cleaning already? What have you been doing up here all this time?”

I could never figure out what to tell her except that it would get done, “Trust me.” Now I can simply say that I’m reminiscing, and that’s enough.

Between finding new CDs and dreading lugging his TV out the front door, Brian is always trying to find something to delay his moving process. Delay him a bit by sending him an e-mail at bkp8@pitt.edu.