What Makes a Microcosm

It's funny the things that you can obsess over in moving. Today marks exactly 14 days to the move, and I'm in what I think is a good stage of packing. In a day or two, nothing you say about this will convince me that I am, in fact, in good shape.

But aside from the couch and what it says about me in life, the thing that is truly funny is just how obsessed I've become with what goes in the bathroom.

That's right: I'm obsessed with designing my bathroom.

I won't try to count up how many trips I've made to the Target bathroom aisles trying to decide what shower curtain I wanted. It has become a topic of dinner conversation. Multiple dinner conversations, in fact. And that I actually had a 20 minute discussion about what type of bath mat was ideal with someone probably makes me a candidate for Chief to help poor old McMurphy me out of this pickle once and for all.

And I've been debating it, to be sure. If the big guy won't bring the pillow to put me out of the misery of becoming fixated on things like this, I'm clearly going to have to do it myself. This is not who I am. I mean, I almost never have anyone over (I could probably count on one hand the number of people who've actually sat and talked with me in my apartment in the last four years). And yet, here I am.

What I think has happened is that in all the chaos of the move and fighting with the university and having the roommate come home and explaining to my parents that coming to visit me during a move is the worst possible time is that the bathroom of the new apartment was recognized as the one part of this move that is of a size and complexity that I can actually think about and still feel like I'm on top of it. One of the frustrating things about these moves is that, inevitably, you want them to be perfect: to land you in the perfect job, in the perfect city, etc, etc. I've moved enough though - and this doesn't have to be about what places I've moved to: just the process of moving serves for this example - that I know imperfection is a part of the game.

In the end, I did decide on a shower curtain and a bath mat. And I've bored more than a couple of friends talking about it (and now, I've bored you, folks of the Intertubes). It helps, though I still haven't decided what kind of soap dispenser to get.

Kidding.

I think.