The Gang Makes A Move

I am writing this amidst a mountain of boxes. I had no idea that poor college students could accumulate so much crap, albeit overwhelmingly cheap crap. I apparently need twenty-four boxes and ten bags worth of stuff, plus furniture. That's right I counted. And that was only my room.


On Moving Day the streets are choked with trucks and the dumpsters with abandoned furniture. All the hippie-hobos of Davis come out to scrounge college-kid refuse. I myself acquired a broken dresser and a couple of chairs.

We began packing boxes Friday night so that we could empty and fill them again that night. Saturday, the Uhaul truck was so big it took us most of the day to pack and unload and by nightfall the toll of the day's labors weighed heavily upon us. I responded by drinking heavily.



On Sunday, Brandon's family came to help us. After evacuating our apartment, we set to work cleaning. Our muscles screamed as noxious fumes savaged our lungs. It won't surprise you to hear that that night also ended with heavy drinking.

On Monday we again plunged our lungs into the fumes. We closed our now-empty apartment and said farewell to our neighbors. Then we began unpacking.

Our former apartment was incredibly cheap, incredibly located and incredibly ghetto. Residents were mostly working class and our favorite neighbors were friendly drunks. During the two years we lived there, the complex kept changing hands, and each management demonstrated a complete apathy toward our myriad repair problems. The most recent company decided to flush everyone out with rent hikes and recast the complex to be student friendly. This guy's moving to Woodland.


Each of my roommates left their mark on the truck. Brandon hit a protector at the gas station and Howard took a chunk out of our complex's "pool house". It was a fitting farewell to make the complex look that much more like a war-torn former Soviet republic.


We will be joined this year by Greg Webb, a friend of Brandon's from DCD who's going to share his room. With Greg's contribution, the average rent is as cheap as our previous locale. Our new place is a duplex with the exact floor plan of almost every duplex in Davis and our landlord is a cute little Indian woman. We now benefit from such luxuries as central air, unbroken windows, and a dishwasher.

We are still without internet or phone service and my room's still mostly in boxes, but the TV is set up and we cooked our first meal in the kitchen tonight. This year we're living in style.