It’s not a good day today. The weather is vintage August in New York — going outside feels like a cross between draping myself in a wet blanket fresh from an autoclave and taking that first step onto the apron of the pool at the Y. The unalloyed humidity hits me in the chest like a kick. The cats don’t like it either, and they’ve chosen to register their displeasure in the form of a hissy, spitty, squally squabble that started at 9:30 AM and hasn’t stopped yet. Okay, that’s not entirely true. It stopped once, when…well, whenever the Hobe marched into the bathroom and tuned up his claws on a fresh roll of Scott Tissue. Also, I promised a bunch of people that I’d send them snowglobes from New York City, but when I went to the tchotchke store today, they’d replaced their entire snowglobe section with a ceramic-kittens-gamboling section; I got a cavity just from standing in front of it. And the allergist hasn’t called back yet with the results of my blood work. To do so would take him exactly two minutes. Pick up phone. Dial number. Listen for ringing. “Hello, Miss Bunting? You are/are not allergic to red meat. Goodbye.” See? Two minutes. And I’d like to know. I’d more than like to know; I’d like to prove to him that I do in fact have a food allergy, because his assertion that perhaps I can’t digest a steak because I “have a Type A personality” really annoyed me. I mean, I do have a Type A personality, but why would a bossy, anal-retentive nature prevent me from enjoying a cheeseburger well-done with a big slab of cheddar and a beefsteak tomato? And mustard? And shoestring French fries? Cooked with mesquite charcoal? I can live without veal medallions, but I’d like to have a good reason, especially today, when I can “look forward to” spending fifteen minutes on my knees with a coat hanger fishing postal receipts out from under the couch, because when a cat squabble starts on my desk…enough said. And then I turn on the TV to find that they’ve made Family Feud‘s big-money round even easier, which fills me with despair for America’s stupid, stupid future. And do you know what I just heard during the extended twenty-second answer period? I heard the following exchange. Louie Anderson: “Name an animal with a bushy tail.” Contestant: “Pass.” “Pass”? “PASS”? It’s called a SQUIRREL, you HALFWIT! Clearly, I must move to Canada as soon as possible. I have to start packing today. Ugh.

I do not want to start packing. I do not want to continue packing. I do not want to finish packing. “Packing,” you see, is a present participle. I want to exist in a state of past participle: “Packed.” “Already packed.” I have no interest in “going to pack,” “about to pack,” “need to pack,” or any arrangement of the verb “to pack” that does not imply that the packing has already gotten done, in a distant apartment far far away, by a person other than myself.

Maybe it’s the heat that’s got me so lazy and loath to organize, but I doubt it. I just hate packing. “It’s only three months,” I keep telling myself, and “You don’t even have to do the kitchen,” and “The couch won’t even try to kill Dad this time! Ya…ay?” but it’s not working. Theoretically, I only need to bring my computer, my cats, a few changes of clothes, and my cell phone. In practice, that’s not going to happen. In practice, only the following items will absolutely not make the trip across the border with me:

1. A little vintage ivory silk pillbox hat with a veil
2. A silver serving platter in the shape of a fish
3. Those goddamn heart-shaped “wooden ‘look'” barrettes from the Gap that do exactly nothing, and yet refuse to let me throw them away, pleading excessive cuteness
4. My tax return from 1997
5. The extra rolls of bathroom wallpaper

Everything else in the apartment is fair game. I would far rather lug an unnecessary item and have it if I need it than not lug it and regret it. See, it’s not the physical act of packing that I hate. It’s that I get all Sophie’s Choice about what to leave behind, standing in the middle of the room, clinging to a stack of photo albums and sobbing into my hand, “Take the Keroppi backpack aughggghhhhh!” It presents an existential dilemma every time — if I pack only what I’ll really need, then I don’t really need the rest of the stuff at all, right? So why the hell do I have the rest of the stuff? I mean, it’s not like I plan to turn around in the doorway on my way out of town, wave a hand at what’s still there, and tell my minion, “Burn it down and salt the earth.” I don’t have a minion, for starters, and furthermore, I like my stuff. God knows I’ve accumulated plenty. I just don’t want to play favorites with it. “No, you can’t come with me. I just don’t wear the red as often. Oh. Oh, no, please don’t cry.”

But I don’t love the physical act of packing, either. Fetuses have better developed senses of spatial relations than I do, so in order to pack, I have to pull everything out of various closets and cubbies and drawers and under-the-bed containers so that I can see it. Then the advanced Tetris game begins with everything all over the place, and renegade game pieces (read: cats) packing themselves, and me hopping over giant piles of junk and rearranging things and pulling things out of bags and stuffing them back in a different way and all the junk that already doesn’t fit reminding me of other junk I need to bring, and once I finally make it through the first round, it starts all over again with all the packed-up stuff and the car.

And the lists…feh. I make the lists. Endless, annotated lists. Lists of other lists. Lists with notary seals. The lists contain not only items, but instructions as well, instructions like “find [item] and pack it — no, not later, now,” but the lists don’t help me, because if I don’t remember to put a given item on the list, I don’t remember to pack the item in the second place, and I always forget to put something on the list, usually something major like “my stuff” or “the cats,” and I’ll get halfway there and realize that I haven’t actually put anything that I packed into the car, or that what I did pack contains a cat that now needs to pee rather urgently, or that I have exactly one pair of underwear to my name because I got the “coming with me to my new home” and “going, damp with tears, to the Salvation Army” piles mixed up and now the Salvation Army has all of my underwear. And the cats.

The piles also tend to turn into a giant Einsteinian time-suck vortex of their own. Because there’s another pile besides the “going” and “staying” piles, and it’s by far the biggest pile — the “maybe” pile. There’s also the “I don’t use it, but I got it as a gift and I’d feel bad about ditching it” pile, the “it doesn’t fit anymore, but I might get a tapeworm someday and then I’d really regret pitching it” pile, the “I spent [x] on it and I can’t just give up until it depreciates” pile, and the “the Salvation Army would make me pay them to take it because it’s so fugly” pile. In the “going” pile: one skirt. In the “staying” pile: the cats. In a large composty heap in between the skirt and the cats: everything else.

I need one of those ladies that comes over, makes fun of everything you own, and then starts chucking stuff out the window willy-nilly. I just hope I get chucked out too. It’s too hot to think about this stuff.

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