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I don’t quite know how to articulate what I’m feeling right now.

Sorry for how emo this sounds, but…do you ever feel like you’re doing everything wrong and can’t figure out how to get it right? Like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t with the choices you make? Like you made a mistake somewhere in your past that it’s too late to go back and fix or apologize for? Like you want to tell people how you feel but know that doing so will cause more problems than it will solve?

Yeah, you probably do. God knows that’s how I feel right now. And things really aren’t bad—I’m training for another half-marathon, chorus just started up again (and we’re singing Vivaldi’s Gloria in D, which I love), I’ve been doing a lot of fall baking (pumpkin tartlets, baked apples), and I like my job, although it certainly has its good days and its bad days.

But right now I just have this awful feeling of loneliness, in terms of both friendship and romance…and the even worse feeling that knows that the feeling of loneliness is entirely my fault.

Quote Wheels

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Since high school, I have collected quotes. My senior year, I started keeping a list of quotes inside my locker. All kinds of quotes: song lyrics, quotes from books, lines from movies and TV shows, funny things my friends and relatives said, Bible quotes, cheesy sayings that resonated with me nonetheless. As the year went on, my friends gave me suggestions for what to include, and I added to it as I went.

Before college, as I was arming myself with dorm room decorations (including a poster from the first Harry Potter movie and another of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”), I decided that I wanted to display the quotes in a more “artistic” way. So I got some white posterboard and skinny Crayola markers, traced a bowl on the posterboard, cut out a circle, and wrote out the quotes in a spiral. And thus the “quote wheel” was born!

(I’ve been meaning to write this post forever, by the way. It was Christiana Krump’s idea. She mentioned it in a comment almost three years ago!)

I just thought it would be a fun thing to hang up in my dorm room, but the friends I made throughout college LOVED it. And college lends itself to quotes—I mean, this was back in the days of AIM away messages, which were made for both melodramatic quotes and the funny things your friends say. So the quote wheels expanded, and eventually I made separate “BC quote wheels” made entirely of funny things my friends said.

Here are some notable quotables, and a glimpse at where my mind was at from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2006:

Song Lyrics

“In the end, only kindness matters.”

-My high school yearbook quote, from “Hands” by Jewel

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

-“Closing Time” by Semisonic—a standard quote for a graduating senior.

“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

-“Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon

Books

“You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it.”

-from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

“It is our choices, Harry, that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

-from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.”

-from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Movies

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.”

-from Playing by Heart

“Thank God for the model trains, because if it wasn’t for those they wouldn’t have got the idea for the big trains.”

-from A Mighty Wind

“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

-from Forrest Gump

TV Shows

“Joey takes naked pictures of us and then he eats chicken and he looks at them!”

-Rachel on Friends

“It’s like you took a gun and stabbed me in the back right in front of my eyes!”

-Shawn on Boy Meets World

“Never give up on a miracle.”

-Mulder to Scully on The X-Files

Funny things my friends/relatives say

“You should ask Caroline to show you her new breast.”

-My mom to my dad—our swim coach was showing my sister a new way to do breaststroke, and my mom didn’t realize how that sounded until I pointed it out to her.

Me: We get Easter Monday off…what is Easter Monday, anyway?
Caroline: I don’t know, I think it’s the day where everyone just kind of sat back and said, “Damn, that was a cool thing he did!”

“Damn, I would have been so cool if I had lived in the early nineties!”

-My sister (born in 1986)

Me Being Dumb

“Wow! There’s a big thing of ice!”

-Referring to a pond I saw in the distance from a mountaintop when I was skiing

“The most investigated performer…that must mean…he did something BAD!”

-Me reasoning my way through a Trivial Pursuit question

Cheesy Anonymous Quotes that Resonated Nonetheless

“Everything is always okay in the end, so if it’s not okay, it is not yet the end.”

“To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

“Don’t criticize someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and have their shoes!” (Yes, I realize this one is grammatically incorrect.)

Miscellaneous Quotes

“Be who you are and say what you think because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
-Dr. Seuss

“Sad. Nothing more than sad. Let’s not call it a tragedy; a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy.”

-Angela Carter

“People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.”

– Thomas Szasz

BC Quotes!

“There’s this girl in my philosophy class who has the same scarf as me except mine’s red and hers is blue, and I just want to go up to her and say, ‘Hey, we have the same scarf except mine’s red and yours is blue.”

“And on the seventh day, God COULDN’T rest…he created Oompa-Loompas!”

“Ben’s in Worcester and Dave’s in Washington and I gave up alcohol for Lent, so I have nothing and no one to do this weekend!”

Two Weeks in August

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Well, I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks—good-crazy, though. I spent a week in Dallas for my company’s national sales meeting, flew home, was home for about twelve hours, and then went back to the airport to go to DC, where Erin and I stayed with Jackie and hung out with Tiana and Pam. Here are some of the highlights from the past two weeks:

    • ·         I ate an insane amount of Tex-Mex and cheesecake in Dallas and drank a ridiculous amount of free alcohol.
    • ·         I learned that putting my right thumb on top when I cross my hands makes me “sexy” rather than “sneaky.”
    • ·         I toured Dallas Cowboys stadium with my work team. I admit that I wasn’t that excited about it when I first heard about it, but being out on the field in this HUGE stadium was actually pretty cool.
    • ·         I swam in a hotel pool that had a freaking swim-up bar! Best way ever to celebrate my sessions for the week being done.
    • ·         I crossed an item off my bucket list by riding an mechanical bull! And I have video evidence:
  • ·         I went to the Newseum with Erin and Jackie, where you can easily spend a whole day.
  • ·         Erin and I met Pam for lunch. Pam, after being surprised to hear that Dawson’s Creektook place in Massachusetts: “I don’t know things I should know.”
  • ·         Erin, Pam and I went to the Holocaust Museum, which was horrifying and intense.
  • ·         Then we decided to get pedicures, and Jackie was going to join us. After Jackie texted Erin to say that we should walk to 14thStreet, Erin said, “We’re on 7th. How far is it?” Jackie: “Well, it’s seven blocks.”
  • You know how sometimes when you’re not quite asleep, a weird thought enters your mind? Before bed, we saw a notice in Jackie’s apartment lobby that said that an exterminator was coming the next day. So, not quite dreaming, I thought, “What if the exterminator comes while Erin and I are still asleep and tries to exterminate us? Like, hmm, here are two rather large bugs?”
  • ·         The next day we met up with Tiana and went to the National Zoo, which was awesome and FREE. There were pandas!
  • ·         We also really wanted ice cream but couldn’t find any except what was in vending machines. Erin really wanted a chipwich but somehow the vending machine gave her Scribblers instead. The look on her face when she opened them was priceless.
  • ·         Then we went back to Tiana’s place to get her car and met her adorable (and HUGE) Tibetan mastiff, Kiro. He was very happy to make new friends and cuter than anything in the zoo!
  • ·         Then we drove up to Baltimore to see the Sox/Orioles game. The game didn’t go so well, but Camden Yards is a nice park! It was my first time seeing a Sox game anywhere other than Fenway.
  • ·      The next day Erin and I met up with my friend and former chorus buddy Amy, then headed to the airport to get ourselves back home.
Back to life now. Time to squeeze in as much summer-y goodness as I can before summer’s officially over!

She Has Emerged!

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Hi, blog world! Yes, I’ve been MIA for awhile, and it’s been even longer since I posted anything of substance. But never fear- substance is coming soon! And the good news is that I haven’t been posting simply because I’ve been busy having a life- attending a wedding, visiting friends in California, celebrating my twenty-eighth birthday, etc.

For now, though, here’s a picture of Juno, my roommate’s flat-coated retriever. When you can’t post anything substantial, you can never go wrong with a cute animal.

How I Really Am

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When someone asks you how you are, what is there to say besides, “Good,” “Okay,” “Fine,” or something like that? Most of the time, people are just making conversation and don’t really want to know. They just want to move the conversation along.

But lately, the truth is…I’m not good. I’m not okay. I’m not fine. In fact, I’ve been crying a lot almost every day for most of the last month, and I don’t know how to talk about it.

Don’t worry- I haven’t fallen into a black hole of despair or become a victim of any other overdramatic phrase like that. I’m not suffering from anhedonia. And while I might not be fine now, I will be. I’m doing my best to make myself feel better. There are too many reasons to be happy, and life is just too short not to spend it that way.

But sometimes, it’s hard to see that when the things that are upsetting you just will.not.leave.your.mind.

I’m not going to go into the specific reasons for why I’m upset, partly because they’re not the kind of thing I want to discuss on a public blog and partly because they sound really stupid and inconsequential if I say them out loud. It’s not as if something obvious, like a breakup, is what’s upsetting me.


In the vaguest terms, what has been bothering me is a large sense of loneliness to which several different things have contributed. I’ve just been feeling sad and lonely. I have some amazing people in my life who bring me great joy, but sometimes, despite all that, loneliness just still creeps in and takes over. Also, there’s the matter of blaming myself for that loneliness- analyzing everything I’ve said and done and beating myself up if I remember something that I shouldn’t have said or done.

I hesitated about whether to post this because I don’t want it to come across as a plea for sympathy or attention. It’s not. I’m sad, but it’s not as if something huge and terrible is wrong. And like I said, I will be fine. I know I will.

But for now, I am just really sick of smiling and saying I’m fine when I’m not, pretending that I’m looking away for any reason other than preventing you from seeing that I have tears in my eyes. And so, in some small way, this is out there now. Thank you for reading.

The 17-Day Diet

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Remember this post, where I lamented all the weight I’d gained? Since New Year’s Day, I have lost fifteen pounds. Ten of those were lost in the first two weeks of the year.

I’m doing my best not to sound like an advertisement (so we’re clear, I don’t do promotions, giveaways, or paid entries on this blog), but seriously? The 17-Day Diet really works!

Before you buy the book, just know this: while the diet developed by Dr. Mike Moreno is great, his writing style is kind of obnoxious and condescending. So you’ll have to try to ignore that when you read the book.

But here’s what you’ll find in there. The name is somewhat misleading, since it’s actually three cycles that each consist of seventeen days. In Cycle 1, you can eat as much lean protein (chicken, turkey, some types of fish) and certain vegetables as you want, plus two servings of certain fruits, two probiotics such as yogurt, one to two servings of “friendly fats” such as olive oil, and condiments in moderation. You also drink lots of water and green tea. You drop weight rapidly in this stage, which encourages you to keep going, but you do it healthily—no starving yourself, no following rules that are contrary to common sense.

In Cycle 2, you alternate days that follow the Cycle 1 rules with days where you can add in some more foods—shellfish, lean cuts of beef and pork, and certain starches. In Cycle 3, you can add more foods—more dairy, whole-grain breads, one serving of alcohol a day, and certain healthy snacks—and also kick the exercise up a notch.

If you’ve lost all the weight after those three cycles, you then follow one of the three cycles during the week and strategically indulge on the weekends. If you haven’t, you start again at Cycle 1 and continue until you’ve lost the weight.

I managed to stick to the diet pretty well in Cycle 1, although I admit to a bit of cheating in Cycles 2 and 3. I also could have exercised a bit more (lately, I have been so exhausted from work that I have not been doing much exercising), so honestly, I think I could have lost even more weight. Some additional thoughts:

  • Cycle 2 was by far the hardest. In Cycle 1 I kept telling myself, “Seventeen days, you can do it!” but Cycle 2 is not much different.
  • It was also hard trying to tell people why I wasn’t eating certain things. “Diet” has a negative connotation, so I was reluctant to tell too many people that I was on one.
  • What was not hard at all, surprisingly, was not drinking alcohol for thirty-four days. While I’ve never been a big drinker, I was expecting alcohol to be hard to avoid in social situations. But whenever I found myself at a birthday party or at a bar with coworkers, I just drank water and diet soda and not very many people noticed. I was dry for most of college, even living in substance-free housing for my first two years, and this experience reminded me how much I actually do like not drinking.
  • I recommend locating recipes that work for each cycle before you start them. I went through my Weight Watchers cookbook before I started the diet, so I ended up cooking a lot more.

I am lucky that I’ve never been very overweight and staying in the healthy range has never been too difficult for me, but this helped me get back on the right track. In December, I spent too much time eating crap and not exercising, so I needed something to help me stop. And this isn’t a gimmicky diet—it just takes things that you know are common sense (i.e. eat lots of vegetables, whole grains, and lean protein) and gives you a practical way of applying it.

In conclusion: I absolutely recommend this diet to anyone trying to lose weight. If you have any questions for me, ask away!

New Year Reflections

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Some years end and I feel like not all that much happened.

This year….yeah, a lot of stuff happened! And most of it was good. This was like my Energizer Bunny year—I just kept going and going, trying to accomplish as much as I could. Here’s some of what I did this year:

  • Got a new job that I really, really wanted.
  • Moved! I still live in the same neighborhood, but this new apartment is just a better living situation for me in every way.
  • Ran two half-marathons, one in Boston and one in Florida
  • Did a few other runs- the Harpoon 5-miler, the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge, and the Jingle Bell Run 5K
  • Went to Disney World
  • Went to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
  • Got my wisdom teeth out. Please don’t kill me, those who have had painful wisdom teeth experiences, but my teeth were only on the top and not impacted, so getting them out was just like having any other teeth pulled. I was conscious through the procedure, didn’t take anything stronger than Advil, and went out to 90s Night the same day I had them out.
  • Joined the bone marrow registry
  • Had a fun Valentine’s Day with friends
  • Had the absolute best weekend of my life at my five-year college reunion
  • Went out to Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding, where I had a lot of fun and met a lot of cool people
  • Saw Celine Dion in concert!
  • Had a really fun birthday party back in July
  • Went to my cousin Ryan’s beautiful wedding by the ocean in South Dartmouth, MA
  • Played on my office softball team
  • Made some new friends at work
  • Went to Aruba with my family for the second time, and I crossed an item off my bucket list by going parasailing
  • Joined 20sb and discovered a great community and lot of great blogs
  • Continued singing in my chorus and had a couple of solos in the concerts
  • Did a lot of exploring around Boston—places like the Arboretum, the Boston Harbor Islands, Castle Island, and the Franklin Park Zoo
  • Did a day trip to Portland, Maine
  • Went to several churches of different denominations—this will be discussed in an upcoming post, because I’m still not quite done with the project
  • Somehow, without even trying, managed to break my bad habit of watching reruns of old TV shows when I could be doing something more productive
  • I am actually astounded at how much my anxiety has improved. It has been a long time since I had a major anxious freakout.

One bad thing that happened this year—I didn’t blog about this when it happened, but my paternal grandmother died at age ninety-three back in May. Thank you to Megan and Cat, who were with me in the T station after a softball game when I returned a call from my dad and found out. It was sad and I miss her, especially at family events. But she was a wonderful lady who had a great, fulfilling life. Her health had been declining and she really missed my grandfather—her husband of sixty-six years—who passed away in November of 2008. So as sad as it was, I’m at peace with it. And I do have to say, deaths in the family really make you reflect on the family you have. I am very lucky to have such a large extended family that I’m close to both literally and figuratively.

Some disappointments in the past year:

  • I HAVE GAINED SO MUCH WEIGHT. I weigh more now than I have ever weighed in my life. I know everyone says this, but this year I am going to try to make eating healthier, exercising more regularly, and cooking at home instead of eating out big focuses of my life.
  • While I blogged a lot more, I am still having trouble motivating myself to get back to my fiction writing. I don’t know why.
  • I wish I had more money saved, but at least the reason I don’t is that I spent it on some fun stuff last year—like going to Florida, Las Vegas, and my college reunion.
  • My trip to New York.
  • Dating! More than anything, I want to find the man I will spend the rest of my life with, but dating just sucks so much. I only went on about four first dates and two second dates in the last year, so in 2012 I’m going to try to step it up, but I am starting to wonder if there really is just no one out there I would be compatible with.
  • I do not get nearly enough sleep because I stay up late for no reason. This is another terrible habit of mine that I need to break, and it’s probably one reason why I gained so much weight this year.
  • The Killing. Lesson learned: do not blog about a show before the season finale. Worst season finale EVER! Everything they said had led us to believe that we’d find out who the killer was by the end of the season, but a last-minute loose end meant that we didn’t, and it annoyed the crap out of me.

I don’t know if I’m making any resolutions per se, but here are some things I’m aiming for this year:

  • Successfully completing the 17-Day Diet
  • Much more cooking and baking
  • Completing an open-water swim
  • Running another half-marathon in November
  • Making it to New York for a weekend without being interrupted by a hurricane
  • Taking trips to both Southern California and Washington DC
  • Adopting a cat! I have been an aspiring cat lady for years. I adore my roommate’s dog Juno, who has convinced me that for the rest of my life I’m always going to have to have pets, but if I’m getting my own pet, I will start with a cat because they don’t require quite as much time.

I do have to say that overall I am very happy and very lucky, and I do appreciate that. I have a lot to be grateful for.

But This Is My Song

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I don’t think I’m a very nice person. Really, I don’t. If you’re reading this thinking, “Oh, but I know you and you did/said this one nice thing this one time!” or “But I’ve been reading your blog and you seem like a nice girl!” I thank you for that, but I would like to think that I know myself better than you do and, really, I don’t think I’m very nice.

Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize until they get to know me better: I am constantly angry. It goes hand-in-hand with my anxiety, which is actually about a million times better than it used to be. But although my angry thoughts are generally not as intense as they used to be, anger is one thing I can’t seem to shake. If I’m mad at someone, I don’t just think, “I’m mad at you.” Instead, I jump to all kinds of hateful thoughts that I don’t really mean, but feel like I mean as I’m in my anger.

I have written here before about how a Brandi Carlile song applies to my life. Well, here goes a post about another one, “My Song.” Specifically, the last lines:

Here I am
I’m so young
I know I’ve been bitter, I’ve been jaded, I’m alone
Every day
I bite my tongue
Don’t you know my mind is full of razors
I’m not sure I can take it
I’ve nothing strong to hold to
I’m way too old to hate you
My mind is full of razors
To cut you like a word if only sung
But this is my song

I love this song because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt those words. I do feel like my mind is full of razors. Good example– remember this post? I stand by that post completely because I was actually pretty calm when I wrote it–I purposely waited until I had calmed down to write it because the actual thought I have when someone’s cigarette smoke blows into my face is a lot worse than wanting to push a button to wipe smokers off the face of the earth.

I don’t like being this way, and I am constantly struggling against it, trying to be nice when being nice does not come naturally to me. Despite this, I do believe that most people really are nice. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite books, and I love what Atticus tells Scout at the end of it: “Most people are [nice], Scout, when you finally see them.”

The problem is, though, that being nice isn’t “cool” in our culture. People always tout their sarcasm as if it’s a positive trait when a lot of times they use it to make fun of people. So much of the humor we see on TV is mean-spirited and at other people’s expense. Women will label themselves “bitches” as a reclaiming thing, but rather than use the word to mean “strong, opinionated, outspoken woman,” they embrace the worst connotations of the word “bitch”–the unapologetically catty, mean parts.

We condemn bullying in schools and cyberbullying among teenagers when we perpetuate it ourselves online. Jill wrote an excellent post recently about how the fashion blogging community can seem like high school. Nicole recently saw firsthand how uncharitably people react to news stories they really know nothing about. In college, I interned for a parenting author who, among other things, ran a message board for moms, and I saw how even women who should be setting good examples for their children could turn on each other and be petty and mean-spirited.

And this week, I saw it at 20sb–a very cliquey group of people ganging up on others who have done nothing to hurt them. Specifically, one blogger I admire a lot was very hurt by what went down.

And this really saddens me. I’ve written a lot about how in the past year I’ve connected with many great, talented bloggers, and the behavior I just described is not what I want that community to be. I’ve discovered a lot of kind, positive things that have come out of the 20sb community, like More Love Letters and Let’s Drop a Love Bomb, not to mention the friendships and connections that have developed.

Yes, we all need to vent sometimes. Yes, a little snark can be fun sometimes as long as it isn’t hurting anyone (Childhood Trauma and Television Without Pity are two good examples of this). Yes, you are allowed to rant about how you hate [insert overexposed celebrity here]. But saying mean things about people who haven’t done anything to you and who you know may very well be reading what you write…no. Just no.

 

It can be hard to resist cultural norms that say it’s okay to insult people and, in my case, to resist cutting with the razors in your mind. Not to be cheesy with a life-is-a-song metaphor or anything but to bring this post full circle, this is YOUR song. You decide how it goes, and it’s always better to do your own thing and go on singing no matter who it is who bothers you. Although I struggle with this, I try not to let those who bother me get the best of me. It’s my song, and my life.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahi09hiGDbo]

1/2 + 1/2 = ?

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Yesterday, I completed my second half-marathon, this time in Boston. Megan also ran it—her first half-marathon—and did awesome!

Here we are at the finish.

This course was hilly and difficult, much harder than the Princess race—the hardest part of that one was getting up at 3 AM. But I’m really happy to say I finished with a respectable time, although it wasn’t as fast as I wanted it to be due to the heat. I really do not do well exercising in heat—that’s one reason I did swimming for so long, I think! But yesterday was unseasonably hot out—80 degrees in Boston in October! WTF? I want my nice fall weather! So while I made really good time for the first eight miles, I hit a wall when we had to run uphill over a bridge where there was no shade, and around Mile 11 I threw up. I think I may have had a bit of heat exhaustion—it wasn’t until after I finished and got some Gatorade that I started to feel better. As much of a pain as training in the winter for the Princess race was, it was MUCH easier than running in the heat. But I’m really happy that after that unfortunate detour I was still able to finish!

I have to say, though, it will be awhile before I attempt another half-marathon—I’m thinking next fall I might do one in Newton, but my next athletic attempt will probably be an open-water swim. While I was training for this race, I ended up neglecting other forms of exercise I love—swimming, yoga, Zumba, classes at the gym like Pilates and abs workouts. While I enjoy running, I don’t live and breathe it like a lot of serious runners do. I’ve heard people talk about getting a “runner’s high,” and I have no idea what that is. Actually, when I run I get more angry than anything else—my mind tends to wander and I imagine scenarios, and by the end of the run I’m mad at someone for something that never happened.

This is the thing, though: never in a million years did I think that I’d be someone who completed two half-marathons in less than eight months. If you check my bucket list, I talk about the open-water swim and eventually a triathlon (although I have some serious catching up to do with cycling before I can do one of those), but nothing about running. I did JV track for three years in high school, but I never thought of myself as A Runner. As a kid, I knew adults who were serious runners—so serious that they wouldn’t do a popular two-mile race in my hometown because “it’s only two miles,” and I used to roll my eyes at that. Now, I can actually relate to that mentality.

I wish someone would tell this to high school and college students. When it comes to sports, it’s so easy to feel like whatever you are as a teenager is what you’ll be for the rest of your life—in my case, mediocre swimmer and girl-who-only-does-JV-track-so-she’s-doing-something-during-the-offseason. But none of that really matters after you graduate—after that, you don’t do anything for scholarships or to get colleges’ attention, but just because you want to. Look at me—I always thought of myself as a terrible athlete as I was growing up, and I still don’t consider myself a good one, but here I am doing two half-marathons in a year, thinking about doing another one, and hoping to do at least a couple of shorter road races by the end of the year.

If you didn’t know me, you might think that perhaps I actually am A Runner. I certainly don’t think of myself that way, but the point is that if I wanted to be A Runner, I could be.

A Moving Story

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On Labor Day, I was sitting on Boston Common reading, and I was getting a little claustrophobic. There were people everywhere. Whenever I got up, I felt like I was going to trip over people.

Labor Day is a mystifyingly popular weekend for tourists to visit Boston. Personally, I can’t think of a worse time to visit our fair city. There are something like fifty colleges in or right around Boston, and over Labor Day weekend, the students at all of them are moving their shower caddies and extra-long twin sheet sets into their dorm rooms. Not to mention all the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are just switching to new apartments with 9/1 move-in dates.

I challenge you to find one twenty-something who has lived in one place for the duration of his or her twenties. I’m certainly no exception. I turned twenty just before my junior year of college, when I lived on campus in a four-person apartment. Over the summer I moved home, and senior year I lived in a different, six-person apartment. The following summer, I worked an on-campus job and lived in a different dorm room. Then I moved home for a month, after which I moved into my first apartment. After two years there, I moved to Davis Square. And at the end of July, I moved again, still in the Davis area.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to blog about this. Maybe because even after nearly two months, I’m not completely settled in yet. I still need a bookshelf, a dining room table, to get a few small boxes into my room, to give away some of the books I didn’t want, and to get rid of the boxspring that’s sitting in the dining room. Oh, yeah, did I mention? My new bedroom is up a flight of stairs, and I should have realized beforehand that my boxspring wouldn’t fit up those stairs. So I ended up having to sleep on just my mattress for a month, then figure out a time when Ikea could deliver a platform bed, then figure out a time when my dad could help me put it together.

Here’s the thing: even though I’ve moved twelve times, including in and out of dorm rooms, since I turned eighteen, I absolutely suck at moving. I can never figure out the most efficient way to pack. I always end up with random objects that don’t fit anywhere. I underestimate the amount of packing space I need, largely due to the hundreds of books I own (and my refusal to buy an e-Reader). If I’m using a moving van, I never get everything packed in time. If I’m using a car, it ends up so full that things fall out when I open the doors.

Is this a skill you can get better at? I like my new apartment, but I’m definitely not going to live here for the rest of my life. Am I always going to be moving-deficient, or is it possible that things could go better next time? (Actually, it would be hard for things not to go better—when I moved, due to sheer bad luck, it was literally the hottest day of the year.)

In the meantime, I love my new apartment. I’ve got a nice, quiet bedroom, Comcast cable with a DVR, a nice porch out back for reading the Globe on weekends, a very cool new roommate, and this lovely lady greeting me every day when I come home:

Yep, my new roommate has a dog! Juno is a three-year-old black furball (probably with a lot of flat-coated retriever in her) who loves everybody in the world almost as much as she loves attention. I love to pet cute dogs. She’s a cute dog who loves to be petted. It works out great.