Earlier this week I moved to Boston after living almost six years in Austin. Last time I lived in Boston metropolitan area was in 2011 when I had a fantastic summer working as an intern at the Berkman Center and a resident at the Acetarium, in Somerville. Before, from 2006 to 2009, I had lived in Cambridge while attending grad school (Comparative Media Studies) and working at MIT. Although it feels great to be back in a dense metropolitan area, it also feels exhausting to have done a move after so many years living in Austin. Moving requires a lot of time, energy, and planning. It also requires a budget. As I am now settling up, I would like to reflect on the lessons I learned with this recent move.
It is better to start packing early. I started to disassemble my home-studio almost one month before the final move. Because I have accumulated so much staff the process was pretty challenging. The more time you spend in a place, the more stuff you accumulate. Carving out a space, designing an environment requires sometimes accumulating stuff. I tended to accumulate many things taking advantage of the spacious room I had for setting up my working space. However, during the packing I had to get rid of many things. From books to vinyls to furniture, I had to figure out ways of down size all my equipment. I sold some stuff at half-prized books, donated a lot of things to Goodwill, passed curious artifacts to friends who stayed in Austin, and even sold a couple of electronics to strangers through Craigslist.
I decided to mail some things instead of carrying them with me. One of my favorite communication systems is the mail. And in the U.S. the mail works pretty good. It is fast, reliable, and efficient. Still in the 21st century, the mail persists in the U.S. Even in its snail form and despite all the other competitors, USPS delivers to anywhere in the country. It moves things from one place to another. Almost anything can be send through the USPS. Either in boxes or envelopes, of a variety of sizes can be shipped, and they will arrive to their destination. It is a great sign of the modernity and functionality of a public systems of communication.
For this occasion, however, I decided to use big boxes to send stuff up north. Although I have used boxes of different kinds before, I had never used the XXL size ReadyPost® Mailing Carton box (20″ x 20″ x 20″) before. Given the amount of things that I had, I thought it will be a good idea to use the biggest boxes available at the USPS office to mail my stuff. Everything is bigger in Texas. It is true, and the postal office had XXL boxes that I decided to buy. I packed them with a variety of things so they could be carried without major complications. I filled them with socks, towels, pillows, shoes, posters, kitchen tools, a yoga mat, and even a couple of books. Books seemed to have multiplied during the move. They kept appearing on shelves and tables despite the fact I have already been packing them for several days.
The XXL boxes ended weighting around 37 lb each and I paid $60-something for mailing them from Austin to Cambridge. It took them a week to cross the country towards the North East, and they arrived just in time for my arrival. However, to my surprise, when I saw the boxes at my new place, they looked quite different. They were torn apart, dirty, with the edges broken, and with some of the items about to fall from the box.
When I opened them I was afraid of having lost some items. However, perhaps the only thing that fell from the box were a couple of socks. And that piece of clothing is anyways always on the edge of being lost, of being missing. The lesson I learned is to avoid using big boxes in the USPS mail. I think such XXL was somehow treated by the USPS system without care. The XXL boxes seemed to have been kicked around (“tratado a las patadas”). Despite arriving to their destiny, their condition of arrival was certainly bad and could be even worst if the inside content had fallen outside the box through the holes.
However, despite the box-shipping situation, my arrival has been smooth and I have been able to settle up pretty fast. My new place is smaller but has a great light. My working space at home has been reduced now to a bedroom-like studio. I got a very nice old desk that fitted very well my room. I have already been writing and reading on my new set up and it has worked very well. I will still need to do some decorations of the walls with some posters and postcards, but so far it is looking pretty good.
