An Incomplete Move Feels Like Indigestion

You're waiting for your tummy to resolve, but you never know how long that mild discomfort will last...

This Super Smash Bros. game is an adequate metaphor for the events described in this post. If you want to leave to watch music videos or something I don't blame you.

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Man oh man. How I wish I were typing this from my computer instead of my cell phone.

So I moved to New York. I flew in on Thursday and my taxi driver shared my excitement about moving to the city. I told him about my move. He told me about a reality show he's developing where he'd film how people would spend $100K in 4 days, barring investments in real estate or stock market. Classic exchange. By now, I'm still excited, but I'm also exhausted. My feet are wrinkled and cramped from how much they've carried me. Not that I'm moving around a ton, but compared to my life in San Jose, where I lay down 70% of the time, this has been intense.

The actual move happened the next day. Friday was supposed to be smooth--we had everything figured out, and my friends' old lease was up by Saturday at noon--but the building notified us 2 hours before our move that we were missing certain insurance required to move in heavy furniture. Heaped onto that was that our move had to be done between 8am and 4pm on a weekday, and then onto that the hubbub of my friends' subletter moving out the same day.

Chaos ensued—9 brutal hours of gut-churning wheeling-and-dealing, matching the nonstop anxiety of Uncut Gems, where we juggled canceling the movers and finding new ones, persuading the building management to let us move after hours (unsuccessfully), holding three phone conversations at the same time while dodging moving furniture, packing up last-minute belongings, finding out with a sickening feeling that the new movers did not have the special insurance either, having them come anyways at 3:45pm, sneaking our move to the new apartment after hours, haggling with the doorman the definition of a “move” and how garbage bags and luggage and even new bed frames don't count, losing the argument and getting stonewalled, scrambling to get sleeping supplies from friends, and waiting until Tuesday for the movers to bring our stuff from (thankfully free) storage to complete our move.

TL;DR: we're crashing on sleeping bags on the floor.

In addition to this high-stakes plate-spinning act, our Internet won't set up properly, so here I am writing everything on my phone late on a Saturday night. I'm tired. I was looking forward to sleeping on a mattress. An incomplete move feels like indigestion to me: unresolved and anxious.

But one funny thing that gives me hope is how fervently our movers fought the building management on our behalf to let us move in after hours. We chatted during the move, fuming about the absurdity of the moving rules to relieve frayed nerves. The lady in charge of the move, Victoria, was so vehement about pushing back against the building's rules that I grew suspicious of her. What did she want? Why is she fighting for us? What's her motive? But by the time we returned to our place, worn out from the day's events, we didn't have the energy for that kind of thinking. We had pushed through the day, and after a quick celebration, we slept grateful for what we'd accomplished.

Is this what New York is like? Probably not. Its probably just our move. I want to be slow to generalize this huge new city. I don't want to jump to conclusions even if they're true, even if extenuating circumstances require some extrapolation. I want to figure it out for myself. So far, this feels like a maddening place full of people I can trust. Hopefully, I'll have more to say next week once I can think again, after my heart stops pounding and my bed finally arrives.

Other Things Of Note

Really only one thing of note today, and that's MovRoad Express Moving, who hooked us up with a free storage deal during our time of distress.

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—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)