completely obsessed.
June 19, 2002 11:20 AM

Everyone might as well know I'm insane.

Seriously.

We've been moving since Saturday. It's Wednesday. I can think of nothing but moving. Things to be bought. Things to be packed. Things to be unpacked.

Still, I've made some prized accomplishments. Filled the linen closet with my shoes. Installed (ahem, talked the boy into installing) a showerhead that looks like the business end of the world's largest tin watering can and feels like bathing in a rainstorm. Purchased stylish accoutrements for a living room which is currently without most of its furnishings - but not without style.

The reason I've accomplished and purchased these things is simple. I am obsessed. And not in a good way. What happens is this. I've never moved out of a place I wasn't in some way or other desperately eager to leave before. Which means each next place has always had a glossy sheen of not-the-old-place.

It's the sort of sheen that could make you forget a too-small bathroom, a demented plastic dildo of a showerhead, a broken washer-dryer that would only hold five pieces of clothing if it were working, keys that stick in doors, refrigerators that smell dead.

I'm lacking that sheen. I liked the old apartment, despite its increasing smallness and other old-old building flaws. I liked the deep colors we painted the walls, liked the mantle in the livingroom, the worn wood floors, the character of the place and the things we were so near.

I liked the way it smelled like us.

The new place keeps asserting its own smell.

It has all these tiny quirks, little things that aren't quite ideal. The livingroom has the most 1972 parquet floor ever. The bathrooms I've mentioned. Its shocking whiteness. The twenty sparkling Range Rovers at the neighborhood grocery store. The closet doors.

Being alone in the place is dangerous. I convince myself that it was a bad decision, that I want to go back. Which, of course, I can't.

To avoid this all, I shop. I shop to solve the problems I perceive with the new place.

This is unbelievably girly. But then, so am I. I mean, I converted the linen closet to a haven of black mary janes (only about a third of my shoes are mary janes, but fully ninety percent are black). That was pretty girly.

I can think of little else besides my work, the move. And things I've bought [or need to buy].

The truth is out. I'm obsessive.