Day 9 (of 30)

DAY 9: Friday. A hugely significant day for me, the male half of the Dynamic Duo, as I put out to pasture the postage-stamp-sized television/VCR combo I've had since I began college and which D and I dubbed "Merlin" (the remote control was named "Archimedes") one sleepless Freshman night; a beanbag chair also dating back to my USC days; and a lava lamp donated to me by Milly, who rescued it from the curb in her neighborhood, only so that it might eventually wind up on the curb in mine.

The giving up of these three items has been like my transition out from bachelorhood and into... well, something else. (I'm not quite married, am I? But definitely living with someone, now.) Milly has always been super-sensitive about letting me enjoy my bachelorhood (even donating bachelor paraphenalia, like lava lamps, to the cause!), and encouraged me to decorate and organize my "bachelor pad" in K-town so that I could enjoy it. And as excited as I am to be moving in with her, I won't deny that part of me is mourning the end of my bachelor pad days. For the past couple of years, I never actually really sat on the beanbag chair, and it was starting to rip at the seams and become deflated anyway, serving as little other than a place to sit other junk I didn't know what to do with. Still, I'm sorry to give it away. The television is easier for me to part with: the VCR part doesn't work, it's screen has been oft-mocked (though not by me) for its diminutive size, and I didn't really watch television anyway. Milly has a much better TV that she's bringing to the deal, but... Hers isn't a major player in Arthurian legend, is it? Sure, you may argue that I could simply name her TV "Merlin," but that's too easy: the original "Merlin" earned its monicker from a delirious night of no sleep in Trojan Hall dormitory -- neither my roommate, D, nor I had any reason to be up all night long (and in fact, I'm quite impressed D managed it!), but by the time dawn spread her rosy fingertips out across the southern Californian sky, we had named beds, desk lamps, televisions, even over head lights after the more notable characters in Arthurian legend. What I mean to say is, there's history there. I imagine the Route 66 signs in my kitchen will have to go as well; ditto the hula girl postcards in my bathroom. What will become of the EXIT sign currently above my door, nabbed from the now-extinct Madstone Theatres in Albuquerque?

There is brightness within this darkness: not only do I now have more room to navigate around my apartment with the beanbag chair gone, but it's also starting to look a helluva lot more like I'm actually moving! I took down frames from my walls, and while there are still some things hanging up, the walls are starting to look a lot more nekkid, and I feel as though I'm gathering momentum...