Minor Annoyances

I leave in a week now, more or less. I've never experienced anything like separation anxiety or a sense of foreboding, in part because I've never lived more than a half-hour from home. I think mentally my subconscious is just preparing myself for going on something of a long vacation. Also, none of the chairs in this house are quite high enough for me to rest my wrists on comfortably while I write, so I have to sit on like two or three pillows. It's not that I'm too short, it's that the chairs are too low and the tables too high. For instance, my desk in my room (soon to be former room) is situated at the highest point on my sloping floor while the chair is at the lowest point. It is not an ergonomic situation. I mention this because I am downstairs at the dining room table writing on my old laptop (which I've been too lazy to bring upstairs. This heat is not especially intense, but it's quite draining). That was a random and unrelated aside, but this is my adventure journal, so I can do whatever the hell I want. I could write about how I think zebras are soooo great and how we should keep zebras instead of dogs and then we should all move to Montana and depopulate the whole United States except there and how we should all wear clogs instead of shoes. But then you'd just think I was a crazy person. Well you know what? Fuck you. And you too. And especially you.

So... I spent most of today packing up my room. I hate packing. I always have more stuff at the end than I did in the beginning, and however I arranged my things while packing the first time doesn't work the second time. It's like doing a puzzle with one of the pieces missing. Or worse, it's like having several different puzzles that could all be interchangeable, and you've mixed one or two pieces from each set by accident. In the end, everything is slightly wrong, and you recognize this, but you don't know how to fix it. That is why I don't do puzzles. Also, I've decided that rather than put much of my stuff in storage, stuff that is generally useful to other people, I'll be lending out various things. For instance, my current house and the house I'll be in the spring have tons of couches, and so I've lent (Martha's) Ikea couch to my friend Nelli, who genuinely has use of it. And I hate shirts with tags goddamnit. They poke me in the most annoying ways. Is it so hard to stitch the whole tag down, or even better just print the information on the fabric with ink? AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhh!!!!!

This is turning into a bitter rant. The humidity is causing my brain to fry slowly. Okay, so I need to finish packing, I leave for Chicago on Tuesday night, get there early Wednesday morning, leave Thursday afternoon, and then I have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday at home. Then, I leave Wednesday afternoon. In Chicago, I'll get my visa processed, and then when I get back I'll put together a couple of suitcases and set aside some boxes with stuff I might want later on in the year. I also need to get a Eurail Pass, because this has been recommended to me by all my friends. What else do I need to do? Nothing, I suppose. I'm set other than a few little details. Cool. Vive la France. I'm hoping for minimal striking.