T Minus 21

So, three weeks from today another moving van will pull up outside my door and a lovely group of individuals will proceed to pack all my earthly goods into identical cardboard boxes that I can only hope will be recycled. Honestly, when you have as much stuff as I do, and you move every six months, and the movers show up with what appear to be brand new boxes each time, and you have some modicum of environmental awareness, it’s hard not to wonder where all that cardboard winds up.

I knew all along that six months would go by in the blink of an eye. Everyone kept telling me that; I even told myself that. But now that I’m getting ready to go apartment hunting in Connecticut, I see how right everyone was. I don’t have all that angst-ridden longing I had as I planned my departure from California. I can’t think of a single thing I would have liked to have done in Atlanta that I haven’t done. (Full disclosure: before moving here I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do in Atlanta.) Now that I’ve seen the new World of Coke, Babyland General (the place where Cabbage Patch Kids are from), and the Braves play at Turner Field, I can’t for the life of my imagine what else there is.

As I start this process all over again, the one very valuable lesson that comes to mind is that I need to make sure to see the actual apartment I’m renting, not just the model. Perhaps this would have prevented the confusion about where the first floor is and is not. That said, I’ll do my best to find suitable accommodations for all of you already planning your trips to the northeast.

The Suspense Was Killing Me

Actually it wasn’t the suspense, it was the monster headache that I woke up with this morning. But the suspense wasn’t helping matters. My colleagues and I originally thought we’d receive our January assignments in the first week of November. Then we thought we’d know by last Wednesday or Thursday. Earlier today we all received an invitation to a conference call to discuss how the selections were made. On the call, we were told that we’d each receive an e-mail within an hour. How do you spell P-I-N-S-A-N-D-N-E-E-D-L-E-S?

The good news is that I was assigned to my number one preference. I promised myself that I would rank the options based on the projects and the assignment leaders and not worry about location. Now that I’m breathing that great big sigh of relief, I can admit that this was the only assignment that jumped out and made me say, “Now that could be cool.” So, where did that put me? The City that Works. No, not Chicago. That also happens to be the official nickname of Stamford, Connecticut.

At Least There’s No SAT Requirement

Strange to think that next week this time I’ll be working on plans to move. Yup, that’s right: if all goes according to plan, next Tuesday or Wednesday I’ll receive my January assignment. Of course that means that sometime this weekend I need to narrow down the list of options to a prioritized list of five assignments. The whole experience brings me back to my senior year of high school, and makes me realize that I haven’t changed all that much.

If you knew me then, you would have seen that I was the underachiever in all the honors classes. So, while my classmates were sweating early admission to Yale, I was eyeing colleges with the shortest application and the least number of essays. No Kaplan courses for me, no last minute scramble to find extra extra-curricular activities. I was much more of a Que Sera Sera kind of girl.

It’s been a few years, and I thought I’d done quite a bit of growing up. Then I realized how much effort my colleagues are putting into deciding their next rotations. There are interviews and feedback sessions and endless games of “what do you know about this rotation/assignment leader/location?” And then there’s me. We received the preliminary list of options on October 23, and the final list on November 6. Since our preferences are due by end of business Monday, I fully intend to sit down Saturday, or Monday at the latest, and read through them. I’ll think about it a little and narrow it down to my top five.

These days I like to think of it as a Zen thing.