So guess what! I've moved. I've moved into a new apartment in a new city in a new state! I won't tell you explictly which city and state--and I certainly won't tell you which apartment!--but there is a clue in the title of this entry.

This is the city where I'm getting my MFA in the erotic science fictioniness. I'm a little old to be going back to school, and it's a little weird to be back in a university library after so many years--the last time I was really a student I had waist-length Kennedy-style hair and square Kennedy-style glasses and wore long, loose flannel shirts and occasionally (I will not lie!) even stirrup leggings. (I guess now it's probably kind of acceptable and hot to wear stirrup leggings again, so maybe it's a good time to have gone back to school.) I haven't done anything classroomy yet, though; I've only moved with great strain and anguish out of my last apartment, racing against the clock to cram mattresses and portable sewing machines and crystal punchbowls and scanners and individual sheets and towels into a ten-foot Budget rental truck, desperate to leave by eleven so that I could conceivably reach my destination by 2 PM. In reality we left at noon and even then the apartment was only half-painted (the landlord had wanted me to paint my acid-green and violet-blue walls white; I'd succeeded with the violet-blue bedroom, but there was only time for one coat in the living room, and it had to be left pale and patchy and hideous and much worse than if it hadn't been painted at all) and we ended up leaving all kinds of crazy things behind. Also we left all my beautiful flowers on the terrace--my brilliant cascading hanging supertunias, my climbing morning-glories and black-eyed susan, all the various pots, also the deck furniture, which won't be useful to me now but might be useful to a future tenant?

But it turns out I am a kick-ass truck driver. You know how when you're driving a car on the highway you hate all those big long trucks that get in the lane next to you, because they kind of exert this sucking force on your car, and you feel this desperate terror that you'll be sucked into the next lane and collide with the side of the truck? And you're always racing to get past the truck, but it's scary because if you go faster the inevitable truck-collision will surely be eight times more fatal. But when you're in a truck yourself, however small, you coast alongside those eighteen-wheelers with ease. YOU ARE ONE OF THEM. They cannot hurt you. They welcome you as a friend and comrade, and also they beep at you a lot for not going fast enough.

And my new apartment is in this 20-story building, so you can't just walk right into the hallway with your boxes like you normally would, you have to reserve the loading dock and use the freight elevator and it's awful. Also since I threw so much stuff away I had to furnish the new place entirely in Ikea furniture (amazing tremendous deal on an as-is eggplant-colored couch for $120!!!) which means that any second now I will turn into that Edward Norton character in Fight Club and start beating myself up in alleys. Wouldn't it be tremendous if girls did that? I suppose men would line up by the millions to see "Girlfight Club: This Time It's Personal." Or maybe not, because maybe they like to be the ones beating us up. But they could imagine themselves in the picture, like they do with lesbian porn.

Well, now I'm having trouble sorting through my stores of filmic conventions and popular-culture cliches: Girls fighting in alleys would be sexy; a girl beating herself up in an alley probably wouldn't happen; if it did, would boys like it? Would it seem tough& badass, like Lara Croft? Would it seem disturbingly erotic, like maybe a nun flagellating herself or something like that? Also, I know girls self-hurt all the time, but I think it's more like tiny cuts and burns, not slugging ourselves in the face all the time.

Why am I talking about this? Anyway, I have a lot of Ikea furniture. Now I have to run along to the registrar.