Holly Northrop Blog

Moving sucks. No real surprise there. No real surprise when the thunderstorm came blowing through Jersey City, dousing my filing cabinet and no real surprise that the movers had already blown their total time budget before we even got to the new place. So the yelling at the end of a very long nine-hour-move, between the movers and Martha was totally and in an curious way, expected.

Zoë almost had a seizure and I really mean that. No shit. Move day was super long and hard for that cat. It started out for her by spending over four hours locked in the bathroom with Lily while the movers carried all of our stuff out of the apartment. She meowed like a colicky baby. I sat in there with her for 15-minute intervals, spraying Feliway cat spray on my hands and then petting it into her fur, just shy from spraying her directly, which the label warns against doing. But, I could see why an owner just might go on ahead and spray the cat. Anyway, after the first hour of her pissing and moaning, I left her alone. (There is only so much I can take.) Part of me wanted her to blow just so the rest of the day she would be a zombie. Selfish, I know but best for all involved.

When it was time to go we shoved her in a Kennel Cab with Lily and hit the road. Staring at a three-hour drive from Jersey City, I was concerned that she would flip out in the cage and pee all over Lily. I could almost see the pull over to the side of the road anxiety but she seemed pretty doped up and able to deal.

The drive was uneventful, except for the phone call from Jazz letting me know that she had missed her flight to England. She was supposed to have flown out on Friday, not Saturday. She didn't figure all this out until she was at the airport and freaking out on some airline staff. The tension was high as she navigated and forced her way onto a flight to Philly with a connecting flight to Gatwick airport. We agreed to have her call me when she was at the gate (with boarding pass in hand) for the flight to England. It concerns me that she fucked up her itinerary like that. I mean what the hell, Jazz?

We got to the new house, locked the cats in the upstairs bathroom, and proceeded to help unload the truck just so we could get the hell away from the movers and be done before dark. Our shit is a wicked combination of volume and weight. Takes forever.

We let the cats out after the movers left and that is when Zoë went into overload. She seemed all right when she was walking around on the second floor but it was shortly after the big scary all by herself walk down the stairs to the first floor that she started panting. Cats don't pant. Oh god it was ugly and Martha and I were convinced she was going to blow. I kept spraying my hands and then petting her very slowly, trying to get her to calm the fuck down. Finally, she seemed better, sort of. The pacing and the panting stopped and she just wanted to lie in the hallway.

It then occurred to me that it had been several hours since I had spoken with Jazz and she should have called by then. I picked up my cell phone and called right into Jasmine freaking out. The Philly airport had been closed earlier due to storms and when I called her, she had been sitting on the runway for over an hour waiting to de-board the plane. The pilot had turned off the air conditioning and the passengers were not allowed to get up to even use the bathroom. Jazz was stuck in a middle seat on a full plane, sweating and crying. She had flown out of Pittsburgh, went to Philly, circled around Philly for twenty minutes, flew halfway back across the state of PA only to land in Harrisburg to refuel, and then took off again, flew back to Philly, landed in Philly and then everything came to a dead hot stop. Wow that is pretty fucked up. I did my best version of Calm Mom and managed to get her to at least sound better.

It was around that moment that I paused and thought it unusual that both Zoë and Jazz were almost on the same page.

After all that, Martha and I went out for sushi. What the hell, there is really only so much we can do for that cat or Jasmine and besides, we needed to eat.

I spoke with Jazz one more time while she was at her gate. Her flight to England had been delayed but not canceled so she was able to eat, charge her cell phone and get some cash before she flew off across the ocean and arrived in England at 4 am, (our time).

Jazz is in England, and we are in our new house. Wow.

Things I am going to miss about hi-rise living:

Jasmine's leaves for England on Saturday and her passport finally came just the other day. Months ago, while she was home for spring break, Jasmine without much bitching, got her shit together and shuffled on over to the post office to get her passport. All went without a hitch and I immediately became suspicious. Six-weeks later, her passport arrived here. Martha and I opened it and her first name was spelled wrong. Those fricken yahoos had left the 'e' off the end of Jasmine.

The next day the three of us had a conference call, (Martha in Jersey, me in Manhattan and Jazz in PA - we do this all the time and they should be recorded) to discuss the odds of her being stopped by our Homeland Security buckaroos or having trouble with the Brits on the return trip home. We made the group decision to send back the passport in the hopes that they would return it in time for her trip. A few weeks go by then one day Jasmine's passport is returned to her in PA with a stamp on the unopened envelop that reads "wrong address". Now, instead of the government agency that the passport was mistakenly sent to forwarding it to the proper department, they sent it unopened back to Jasmine. By this time, the clock was ticking and Jazz only had five weeks before she was to leave for England. Against Martha's protests, Jasmine sent it back to them at the correct address with a sweet little note inside explaining that she is a college student (blink, blink) and could she please have this corrected and returned before the 22nd of July.

I just assumed that once she stuck her passport back in the mail that she was fucked and would be spending the rest of the summer helping me unpack and settle into the new house. But magic does happen and hot damn if they didn't not only correct the spelling error but managed to return it to Jasmine one whole week before she escapes to England.

So now the last minute focus is on how much money she is going to need. Given this child's total lack of economic understanding and the current exchange rate, I am frightened. Thank god for Grandma Northrop's money because without that, there would be no studying abroad.

"The dollar is worthless. It's double. You gotta think like this Jazz, if a cheeseburger is $8.00 here then it will be $16.00 there. You are going to spend a shitload of money." Martha sighed.

"I know, I know. Starting next week, I have to make a packing list. I already know I need conditioner." Jazz replied in all seriousness.

2ND FLOOR SM. FRONT ROOM
Packing up everything you own all by yourself sucks. I chose to combat the solitude by doing the one thing that I know how. I smoked pot and drank coffee all weekend long and I did my best work as a gum chewing stoner, packing up negatives as well as playing with tape. Even though we live small, we live thick. Our crap is concentrated and when I say our I really mean me. I have books and music; countless binders of photography negatives; plastic drawers filled with working prints; Polaroids and framed photography from past exhibits; zip disks and binders upon binders of backups of either photography or computer work. The biggest collection of stuff that Martha has is her clothes, something that I just don't care all that much about. If is could get away with it I would wear the same baggy shit every damn day.

Martha spent the weekend in North Carolina handling her parents affairs and their decision to sell the house and most of their stuff and move into a nursing home - right now. Thankfully, it all cannot happen within a seven-day period so Martha came home for the move this weekend, and to get me more boxes. She will be going back and forth a great deal over the next six-weeks until they are safely moved into the nursing place or she cracks. The timing and logistics of all of this is a little wacky but like Jasmine' said; "That's how we roll mom. As much ridiculous shit as possible happens all at once. Whether we do it or the universe does it."

She's cute. She called me several times over the weekend just to check on me. Probably because I told her I was freaking out but whatever. Love is love.

But having all this stuff makes it difficult to feel like there is any forward motion in packing. For hours, I would stand in one place, packing box after box and stacking them on one side of a room but never even making a dent in the source. It made me think of what it would have been like to pack up my grandma's coal pile, if for whatever screwed up reason that had to happen. I bet it would have taken all day.

GIVE BACKS
So there I was home alone, stoned and boxing up my life, and what do I start thinking about? My mother. Left alone and well after the stereo was packed I had no choice but to go there.

I am starting to have the same level of anxiety about moving upstate that is usually reserved for things like my dentist or hi-speed interstate driving. The interesting thing about being the child of a mentally ill parent is that you spend most your adult life looking for little 'signs' of a possible inheritance of the illness. Kind of like WWMD: What Would Mom Do? perspective and then adjust accordingly.

All odd behavior is questioned as to its normalness, if that makes sense, and making sense is important. The minute that you feel as though you are not being understood, well that might be the crack in the door that lets the dark little crazies out of the backroom of the brain.

Have I ever thought about throwing myself off my 32nd store balcony and swan diving it on down, well, no but only because I don't have a 32nd store balcony. Have I ever thought about jumping out of my 18th floor window, and trying to belly flop onto the roof of the fucking hi-rise across the street...

...well actually I thought about it a lot as I kept pausing to look out my window while packing up my office.

"Fuck this." I though. I'll just mark all the boxes Goodwill and jump out the window.

This is obviously a slight panicked response to moving. For little slivers of time, my solution to moving is to just not. Fuck it, I'll get off here. I would rather jump out a window then move upstate.

What the fuck is that?

Some things are no doubt learned. My mother's long ago dead phobias are now mine and when I trace them back, it goes right to the point where I spent an absurd amount of hours watching her flip out about shit.

Nothing like having an existential meltdown while boxing up my life.

Miss Jasmine's twenty-second birthday is this Thursday. Hard to believe in oh so many ways isn't it? Not sure what her plans are. I know she has friends driving over from Philly to spend the weekend with her so my guess is there will be just general debauchery instead of the extravagance she requested. She is however, excepting donations of no less than $1000.00 per gift giver. Drop her a line and say "Hey".

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HIVE
The new house is coming along and is presently waiting for us to move into it two-weeks from now. I am a little panicky. We have discover wasps living in the gutter right over the side door into the sunroom. This is a major in/out part of the house from the driveway. I'm a little freaked out by it all but Martha has promised me that she will have someone come take care of it before we move in. By the looks of all the massive cans of wasp and hornet bug spray that the Home Depot up there has on display, my guess is that we aren't the only ones being terrorized the second we walk out of our house. I'm already not a big fan of the great outdoors in the summertime and this is just a little much. Flooding, I think is what they call it. Further cracking my mind and making me unable to shut up about it, causing Martha to daydream about putting me down, is what it is doing.

WHEN PARENTS ATTACK
Martha has to go to North Carolina this weekend to deal with her Mom and Dad. Things are... well, not going along in a such a great way. Her mother is running the crazy train and dad is having a little bit of trouble now that he is home. The timing is interesting in that I will have to pack everything. No shit, we move on the 22nd so it has to be this weekend that all packing takes place. It will be a weekend of air-conditioning and overuse of the dishwasher. Oh well, give me enough boxes, tape and bubble wrap and I'll have it all ready to go. After all, I am a professional packer.

I LOVE THE TRAIN
I had a five-hour commute on Friday night that in all honesty struck me as more funny than exhausting. The real buzz-kill was New Jersey transit where I ended up sitting next to a yuppie fuck who farted every few minutes. This went on for over an hour on a train that went no faster then five-miles-an-hour due to train congestion. I could have run along side the tracks at a faster clip then the 5:21 train to Suffern. But the whole train thing started out badly.

I had managed to get to Hoboken via The Path in record time and even considered myself lucky at the quick Path snag. That 9th street station is a heat pit of hell and I didn't have to wait too long for a Hoboken train. In Hoboken, I walked into the train station at 5:10 to buy my ticket to Route 17 and I actually thought to myself how cool it was to be able to catch the earlier train. Just as I started to walk towards the ticket window, things started to twist around. I went to the window just as the announcer started screaming train times over the intercom system. I told the lady that I needed a ticket to Route 17 and I thought she said to me, "You're going to suffer." I just looked at her while she took my seven dollars and handed me a ticket that had no information on it except the words Hoboken and Cancel.

"How do I know what train or what track to go to?" I asked.

She pointed to the TV screen mounted on the wall to my left and said, "You are going to be on the train to suffer." I could barely hear her because of the intercom and the bulletproof glass that she was sitting behind had only one tiny little hole drilled in it for two-way communication.

Confused, I walked over to the TV and noticed a listing for the train to Suffern on track 12. If, in all of my six-years of essentially living in the fine state of New Jersey, had I actually paid any attention to anything around me, (other than Manhattan) I would have already known that there was a town named Suffern.

Feeling super stupid I boarded the train at track 12 and proceeded to sit there for over twenty minutes before the conductor announced the train was out of order and we all needed to mad dash it to track 16. So that is what we did, a whole train full of pissed off Friday night commuters ran to track 16, pushing and shoving each other all over the place and within minutes we were on our way. Things were rather speedy until Secaucus, and then it went to shit. Fart man got on and the train slowed way down. It took me two-hours to get to Martha in northern New Jersey and we still had another hour and a half to go. But honestly, once I got in the car with her, I was fine. I mean she and I are always racing to get home to each other. Once we were in the same place nothing else really mattered, until it got dark and we got off the wrong exit up in the Catskills and bugs the size of small mammals hit the windshield with alarming sounds, but whatever, we'll figure it out.

Three days of painting and cleaning have left me bruised and beaten. That almost sounds like poetry.

Martha continued with her terrorization of the doors in our new house. This time she zeroed in on the front door. While she did not try and flip it or touch its hinges in any way, she did try to paint it. Our hidden yuppies have sprung to life and she and I have conversations around things like exterior paint, black shutters and window awnings. At this point that is all we want to take outside for the neighbors to observe is a painted front door. We are trying to keep the crazy in the house until we have lived there a little while and maybe make a few friends. At least, it seemed like a good idea to paint the front door. We bought a gallon of high gloss firehouse red, exterior paint and she went to town. The door was originally a teal green so primer was necessary. Things were fine until she came back at the door for the third coat but the second coat wasn't dry. So now we have a lumpy, textured door that needs to be sanded down and re-painted. Also, we had run out of paint tape so she just decided to "wing it" around the glass parts at the top. Yep, we look like one of those houses. The shutter and awning show later on this summer should be fantastic.

We carried the original bathroom door out to the garage while humming the death march song.

This trip upstate we only went to Home Depot twice but we still managed to spend a shitload of money. We finally ordered the living room carpet but now it is unlikely that it can be installed before we move in. Fuck, we waited too long. Should be interesting. I guess we'll just shove everything into the bedroom, kitchen and Martha's office. On the carpet-ordering trip to Home Depot, I saw someone I work with. How very odd. Apparently, as I am finding out, other Voice and former Voice folks live upstate. My old Editor in Chief lives literally ten minutes away from me. Plus, we are just a stones throw from the Catskills so celebrity sightings are all around. Christ, I think I saw JD Salinger over in the lumber section.

Even though we are sort of living at the new house, I haven't really been cooking and the whole dinner thing has been difficult. Anything other than salads, yogurt, almonds and pretzels needs to be purchased off-sight. We went out for a sushi dinner that is within a two-minute walk from the house. It was super yummy and they will know me before too long. We also stopped at a local country bistro just down the road from Home Depot. We had to pick up a few things and needed real food, so okay, right? Well things close early round those parts and we pulled in 15 minutes before closing. Once seated the waitress informed us that there was no baked potatoes, mashed potatoes or liver. Then the cooked barked in "there aren't no home fries neither, or french-fries". They seemed all freaked out about the whole lack of potatoes but I just smiled at the waitress and apologized for being there.

All in all here is what we did in three days.