I don't like moving house. Apart from the obviously annoying aspects like the cost and the inconvenience, plus the realisation that I own far too much random stuff, I find it demoralising and generally sad.
I should say thoughm before I get too maudlin, that this post does, of course, have an uplifting moral. It's not quite all doom and gloom. Not yet anyway.

Anyway, partly this is because when you live in a sharehouse, as I have done for the last four years, you're mostly contained in one room (other than some spillage into the bathroom and the kitchen). That means that as your belongings are packed and put away you realise that your life is reducible to 10 cardboard boxes. Disposable, movable, and held together with cheap masking tape.

Well, maybe 15 boxes, but that's not the point.

Also, it makes you realise, as you pack box after box of aforementioned random stuffs, that you could have been spending your money on better, more worthwhile random stuffs all along. But for the record, whenever I move on I donate lots of things to charity (that I could make good money for on eBay!) and I leave things on the street.*

It's sad too, to be moving when you don't particularly want to.

But as I threw things out and tried in vain to compress my wardrobe with those vacuum-pack bags, I started to think about the other rooms I've lived because they all have memories attached to them. Good and bad. Well, some mostly bad...

First there was Mulwarree. An experience to be sure, but my god the room was massive. We had a balcony and a possum, and I had a semi-built-in wardrobe. Life was mostly good, although among the 12 other people who passed through the place while I lived there whoa we had some shockers. Honestly, how is it possible to go for three months without changing your sheets? Shudder.
After Mulwarree was Uppsala. I won't say anything about htat, apparently I talk about it a lot or something. Actually, I will say some things: I had my own bathroom, a huge room, and fully built-in wardrobes and storage. Plus a number of amazing corridor mates. It was the only place I've lived where I never had the urge to stab someone's eyeballs out with a blunt pencil.And then came Coogee. Packed up and moved out of there last week. It was noisy, expensive, dirty, the landlord and agent were corrupt and the room was miniscule. It had no wardrobes or storage and when I think about it lately I just feel generally angry. Although the location was great.

Who knows what the new place will be like. All I really know so far is that it has a built-in wardrobe. And experience has shown me that wardrobes are a good indicator.



Oh yes, the non-maudlin moral I promised. Moving can also be a liberating thing, not only do you shed many random stuffs, but you turn the page on to a new leaf. And then you mix many metaphors to make an uplifting kind of moral statement. For you see, it is called moving on for a reason. Though it may be stressful and sad and expensive, you meet new people, you redecorate, and you unpack your containable life and start it up again. Unfolding it out of the cardboard boxes, taking it out of hibernation, and letting it grow in a slightly different way.

And you get to buy new things from Ikea, so really, it all works out in the end.




*Thus continuing the cycle of procurement of random free stuffs that has helped furnish my, and many thousands of other, share-houses throughout the long and varied history of the domesticated man.