Just ran across this article on the psychology of moving in the NYT. It is, no doubt, a bourgeois diatribe that will cause my eyebrows to rise and my forehead to crinkle. Perhaps I should read it before I judge. It’s just that the NYT, one of the few pop culture institutions I plug into at all, is often written in a slightly smug tone that suggests that we, its readers, are all in on the same pseudo-liberal secret regarding how the world operates. We aren’t.

Maybe that’s why they’re broke.

Okay. I read it. Vapid. “I can’t move right now” when he has felt trapped for three years. Hmm. Almost as good as “love and light.” I’m not sure negating feeling by rephrasing is necessarily the best therapy.

Why doesn’t he sublet and live somewhere else? Co-op boards allow it.

It’s an interesting subject that wasn’t explored much at all in the article. There’s a lot to be said for what comes up during a move. Jungians have painted the psyche onto a house. Different rooms symbolize different aspects of being. Basement = subconscious. &c. There are also the factors of Home. Safety. Risk. Community. Change. Loss. I always lose something beloved in a move. At any rate, I’m grumpy. I need to eat something.

Good things to come. Stop resisting.

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This was my bookcase in Astoria, early 2000, shortly before I packed up and moved to Uzbekistan. View it larger for all the little details, if you’re given to that sort of thing. Less clutter in my place now. Less stuff in general—fewer spectacles, cameras, letters, paper, etc. Okay, maybe the same number of cameras. But more things I love.

Oh, moving. Illness and grief aside, what’s harder? I’m packing up again for the first time in seven years, packing up the first place that has ever been a real home. I don’t own much stuff, considering, but what I do own, I love. Packing away photos, books, and negs to sit, homeless, in boxes does not feel nice at all. Oh how I resist change, even when much needed. Slowly, but surely.

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