Graduation Day

Not mine, obviously. It's actually my future sister-in-law's graduation day, so Jeremy and his family are up in Minnesota to watch Jessica walk and get her diploma. Thinking about it brought back memories for me, mainly, how relieved I was to know that I would never again have to write a 12-15 page paper unless I wanted to. Wait ... actually that's not quite true. Armenia's 2006 human rights report was over 30 pages long. Drat.

Anyway, I'm having a different kind of graduation over here in Yerevan. This post is brought to you by the habit of procrastination. I'm sitting in my apartment surrounded by the detritus of my life, trying to organize it into four neat categories: ship to Kabul, ship to storage, ship to the U.S., and take with me on the plane. That's right ... it's pack-out time! The movers come on Thursday, but I have to get all my stuff in order in the meantime.

I actually somewhat enjoy the drudgery of the pack-out. This is my sixth pack-out since I graduated college in 2000, and I rather enjoy the load-lightening that accompanies each move. There are few pleasures in life greater than the satisfaction I feel in donating bags of clothes, giving crap away, or just tossing it into the dumpster. Though, as I look at the pile of stuff on the spare-room bed, all of which is going to storage, I realize once again that I just have too much stuff. Problem is, I want all of it. One of my soul's eternal dilemmas is the tug-of-war between my desire to be able to fit all that I own into my car, and my desire to own yarn to knit, books to read, DVDs to watch, CDs to listen to, pictures to look at, and a guitar and piano and sheet music to play on them. I think the latter is clearly winning.