And thanks for all the fish

I felt this odd sense of detachment on the morning of my wedding day.  As we woke up and moved decorations from the hotel to the venue and then went off to get hair and makeup done I kept feeling like it just wasn't real.  Or that it was real, and it just wasn't my wedding.  Until about 3pm, when we arrived back at the wedding site and started getting dressed, I just couldn't process that it was actually happening.  For real.  For me.

I felt the same way on my last day of work last Friday. It was slightly less emotional and there was no photographer following me around, but I spent the entire day feeling like it just wasn't real.  I'm more than ready for a change.  I'm excited about the new job.  But still, it was sad leaving behind the people and the place I've spent 40 hours a week with for the past five years. 

What was even sadder, as someone who considers herself staunchly anti-clutter, was the amount of stuff I dredged from the back of filing cabinets and the dark corners under my desk.  It took me two trips with the car and one final pack-mule ride on my bike to drag home the contents of my tiny office, including:

• Receipts and return shipping labels for everything I've purchased on the internet over the past five years
• A forgotten foldable shopping bag I didn't know I had
• A copy of Glamour magazine from July 2006
• A set of return address labels with my maiden name on them
• A sheet of 2-cent stamps
• Two blank thank-you cards
• A very short phone cord
• The notebook that we used to keep track of our shared expenses before we got married.  Before we got engaged.  Before I learned that Excel is a lot easier than a paper, pen and a TI-83 with an aging battery
• A CD titled "wedding photos 2005," the contents of which I can only guess at (that was a big wedding year)
• A yellowed computer mouse
• Two MP3 data CDs, from before I had an MP3 player
• A plain manila folder containing my marriage certificate, birth certificate and passport
• A floppy disk containing a bunch of stuff from my master's program
• A pair of used Asics that I never got around to sending to Nike's shoe recycling program
• An entire shopping bag filled with shoes from under my desk
• A never-worn baseball cap
• One of those license plate frame things
• An old calendar
• An medium-sized American flag on a stick
• A Halloween jack-o-lantern pail
• A broken hanging folder file
• A dirty Tupperware container
• A nasty pair of flip flops (used for showering at the gym, which I did all of three times)
• A dirty t-shirt (used for summer days when it was too hot to ride to work in a nice shirt)
• Nearly a dozen cardboard boxes of varying sizes and shapes, all filled with tissue paper
• A fork, knife and spoon
• Eight packets of sugar-free hot chocolate mix
• $10.37 in coins and loose dollar bills
• A Coach keychain, still in its gift box
• A table runner, still in its gift wrapping
• Four coffee mugs, a pint glass and a bud vase
• A ziploc bag filled with used sandwich bags (We re-use them. It's gross, I know)
• A sheet of pills that I think are for allergies
• A long-lost coffee shop loyalty card with $16.34 left on it
• Two bottles of Tylenol (one in an Alleve botle, one in an Excedrin PM bottle)
• Approximately 700 napkins and four plastic utensils

And that, my friends, is not even taking into account the three boxes of stuff that I threw away all the things that I bequeathed to my coworkers.  Trust me, I'm suitably mortified at my own hoarding.  And I paid for it when Joel started rooting through the box designated for Goodwill and picking out things he wanted to keep.  

Farewell, little basement office.  I'll miss some things about you.  The cinderblock walls will not be one of them.

********************************************

For those of you who have inquired how the new job is going and if it's responsible for my absesnce from Internetville this week, fear not!  It's going absolutely splendidly because I haven't actually started  yet.  I took this week off as a between jobs vacation.  So far I've spent ten hours weeding our new garden plot, gotten a hair cut and written scripts for several Justified episodes in my head.  It's been glorious.

Comments

[heidikins]

Oh goodness, I can totally relate with the accumulated list of items...I'm afraid to clean out most of my closets and "hiding places" for fear of The Pile Of Shyte that will surface.

Also--HOORAY for the week break and HOORAY for the new job!

xox

[Janssen]

Sounds terrific! Enjoy your week off!

[RA]

Oh, my word, your marriage certificate, birth certificate AND passport?! That makes me paranoid FOR you! But, hey, you made like $25 from cleaning out your office, including coffee points! Not bad at all.

A week off between job is a perfect time to get a hair cut. Did you buy your new job prize necklace yet?

[nancypearlwannabe]

Oh god, would I love a week long vacation right now. Wait... I have one in two weeks. Whoop!

I'm excited for you to start a new job; hopefully one with a boss who knows how to use email.

[Life of a Doctor's Wife]

You can really never have too many napkins. Ask my glove compartment.

And it's natural to want to disguise your Tylenol stash. Much like you'd want to disguise your Chex Mix in a regular old potato chips bag. That way nobody snags any from you.

All silliness aside, so glad you are enjoying your week off!! Sounds delightful.

[beth]

RIP week-in-between-jobs-break. But so exciting to start something new!

[Anna]

I felt the same way when I just cleaned out my own desk at work recently. I had no idea why I was even keeping certain things. (Ex, a picture of a news guy that looks like our maintenance guy. A friend had left it on my desk once. Why did I hang on to that???)

[Annie Stevens]

Thank you for quoting Hitchhiker's! IMMD!