Catharsis
I’ve been listening to cathartic music to help deal with the last few days/weeks – and I thought I might do some cathartic blogging as well…
We are slowly moving our crap out of Elmwood – the emphasis is on slowly. The mental and physical effort has been pretty extreme – dealing with emptying a house that has piles of great memories, but a fair whack of bad ones as well, is hard.
When you move everything you have to deal with all the things you’ve been trying not to look at, all the stuff others have left behind them that has been sitting in the bottom of wardrobes in the “too hard” pile. Not to mention all the things that were planned but not completed – ingredients for exotic meals now past their use-by date (though good food was actually an area where we did pretty well), gadgets that were never quite made to work, renovations that are only being done now we are moving out and can no longer enjoy them.
And it doesn’t help to have a series of hard deadlines – none of them avoidable, but every time we think “oh well at least we have 3 weeks to go” it turns out that some new deadline crops up and forces a short-term sprint. Mind you, given how close to the wire things have ended up, it’s probably a good thing that we’ve had deadlines to force us to get this far. But it’s exhausting. Thank goodness we didn’t try to stick to the original deadline of this Saturday for first opening!
Our current deadline is that we need to get things just about perfect this weekend. The house gets a final final clean on Sunday, and the photos get taken on Monday; we can move bits and pieces after that, but will have to be mega-careful about keeping the place spotless. Ideally everything will be perfect by Monday, and we won’t have to do anything but water the plants and air the place after that. (oh, and unpack the boxes that are swamping our house, and find the household paperwork, and the like…)
First opening is on Saturday the 11th, then every Saturday and Sunday until the auction, at 11am on the 11th of March. It’s a long weekend, alas, but the following two weeks are the Commonwealth Games, so the 11th is our only option. We were hoping for the 4th, but that would have been insane.
So, currently I’m staying sane through cathartic music, as I said. My rough playlist:
- The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree. I will get through this year if it kills me. More appropriate for 2005 than 2006
- The Dresden Dolls, self titled. Madness and chaos.
- The White Stripes, Get Behind me Satan – more dance than cathart, really.
- Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine and Broken – good ol’ Trent.
- Eels, Blinking Lights and Electro-shock Blues – Mr. E. can give Trent a run for his money when it comes to real crises. And he usually manages to end on a positive “life goes on” sort of note.
- And finally, to sooth things down, some Pink Floyd and the Doors… the old masters.
The theme seems to be “listen to people wwith real problems to give my suburban chaos some perspective” 