Last night our community threw us a going-away party. It was about as nice as a party can be at which I am the guest of honor, given my reluctance to be the center of attention. (I'm a typical "introvert" in this way -- instead of my batteries getting charged, they get drained. I wish 'twasn't so, but 'tis.) When I told my son that our neighbors were throwing a party for us, he asked in all seriousness, "How old are we going to be?" Because all parties are birthday parties when you're four!
Just before we left on our look-see visit, they had a going-away luncheon for me at work. It ended up being a combined going-away luncheon for me and two of my colleagues, one of whom had been recently promoted and the other of whom is returning to Istanbul with his wife and their two children. (Word on the street was that if they hadn't combined the three going-away luncheons, one of the three luncheons would have been poorly attended.) Everyone wanted to sit at my table to ask me about my new job and try out their fledgling German and express their envy at our imminent ability to travel abroad, and frankly after so much attention the introverted part of my brain was begging me to dive under the table so the neurons would stop firing.
My boss said a few words about how fabulous an employee I am and made a feeble joke about my tendency to procrastinate that no one laughed at, and then he mentioned I'd been with the company since 1986, to which I interjected, "when I was 8 years old," which was greeted with gales of laughter. (Much too much laughter, really. Am I THAT old? Crap.)
Anyway, the good-bye party and the luncheon are over. The inexorable slide towards a new life has begun. We're in the "it's definitely too late to change your mind now!" phase of our big move. Tomorrow the moving vans will arrive to take all of our furniture to be loaded onto a ship in a harbor, somewhere. Wish us luck -- we'll definitely need it.
How 20th-century it feels to be putting furniture on a ship. Shouldn't we be able to transport our furniture by now? How hard can it be to disassemble and reassemble objects at the molecular level? C'mon, scientists, packets of information traveling over optical wire networks have ceased to amaze. Let's figure out a way to send my sofa to Germany at light-speed!
