Do you know how long this drive is? Hint: the answer is, “Longer than online maps suggest.”
So this is a quick photo post. We are staying at my godsister-in-law’s (just go with it) tonight. Tomorrow, we do the last walk through on our new house, sign 1.2 million documents to make it ours, and then watch all of our stuff come out of a truck and into the house. Ya know, the easy part.
I am so tired.
When the bucket of the dozer needs a series of supports, you’re talking about some serious machinery.
Do you know what it is like to stare at your bike for nine-plus hours, and not be able to ride it?
Yes, there was a lot of traffic like that. But, then, somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, around dinner time (because we’d driven through breakfast and lunch already, so why not?) all of the cars just disappeared. Everyone had gotten where they needed to be. That’s always a warm thought, especially when you’re not there yet. But the sun was getting low, which meant we were getting closer.
And it was good to see it in the mirror behind me.
Moving is a terrible thing. Packing is a tedious, physical chore. And if that’s not physical enough, there’s the move part. This is why people don’t do it frequently, if they can help it. But thank goodness, thank the universe and thank Providence for movers. At 8:30 this morning, precisely when they said, the movers arrived.
The owner of the company is the former student of one of our colleagues. And that professor has hired this company twice for moves, and is about to hire him a third time. A good endorsement.
Four guys come in. Two of them former D-1 football players. All of them strong and young and confident. All of them, “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “May I put my water in your refrigerator?” and “May I use your restroom?” These guys were great.
They were taking our things out of our hands because, as they said over and over, this was their job. And that’s true, but you’d feel like a total heel if you didn’t help.
One of the guys loaded his pickup with the last bit of junk and trash for the nearby dumpster run and followed me there to help us get it out of the way. These guys were great, and they worked hard.
And so have we! I told you about the packing. Things hurt on me, and part of that is a direct result of this. Moving is a terrible thing.
But the worst, perhaps, was the last little bit. Truck is full. Movers are thanked individually and collectively and sincerely. Ibuprofen was offered. Tips were delivered. And then they left with our stuff to … wherever. The plan is we’ll see it again on Thursday.
Now, we have to finish cleaning, and then load the cars. And then take a shower. And then, somehow, keep loading the last of the things into the cars. Where do these things keep coming from? Will there be room in the car for me? Can I take another shower now, because this is ridiculous?
And so we got on the road, a bit later than we wanted, but just fine in the scheme of things. And we pointed east.
We’re going to New Jersey, which is a good thing. More on that later. You might think, as I did at first, that moving to New Jersey would mean I wouldn’t see views like this …
Or important farm equipment like this …
That’s a stereotype, and stereotypes aren’t always accurate. We’re going to South Jersey. We’re going to be in a beautiful, bucolic, pastoral, verdant region. We will be surrounded by farmland, with the Delaware River a short distance away, the beach a bit farther away, and plenty of wonderful new places to explore and learn about. It’s quiet and small and really quite something.
But I’m getting well ahead of myself. Tonight we are in Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. It seemed a good idea, I dunno, a few weeks ago before we realized just how much work we’d put in ourselves over the last five days, to break this trip up. So it’s a hotel tonight, and on the road again in the morning. Driving in packed cars that, in any other context, you might think of as troubling, with limited visibility that is possibly flirting with the legal limits in some of the jurisdictions we’re driving through.
The thing I learned this evening — while loading up my car, full of a “You want it to go, I’ll get it in here” bravado that was mostly sincere — is that there’s something sad about some of those last few things that you put into the car when you’re moving your entire life.
Oh, some things you need. And I stupidly put my suitcase in the middle of the back seat, so everything is on top of it. Some things are important or are sentimental, and they go in their places. Some things are practical. We needed the vacuum and cleaning supplies for the last run through of the house for the buyers (a nice young family of four, first time home owners). And then there’s whatever else you keep running across in your last half dozen walk throughs of every room. And some of that stuff, dear reader, is just pitiful.
But now, underway, in a hotel, with pizza topped with plans and dreams and contingencies, we are past the hardest, most hectic part of the move. We packed it all. It all got loaded. Everything is in motion. It is almost difficult to believe it all came together, considering where we were on Friday. The few hours of driving this evening was a welcome break. A full day’s worth of driving tomorrow … seems like a long day. After that, there’s just the new house, being reunited with our things, and getting settled.
Here’s the thing. This has been in the works for a while — and we’ll get into that later this week, I’m sure. Talks have been going on even longer. None of this is a surprise. And, happily, our new employer is paying for our packers.
Oh, they talked a good game on the phone. Walked them through the house verbally, they estimated the boxes. The guy that was going to be leading the actual work wanted to do a visual check via Facetime. That turned into a drop in visit on Wednesday or so. He looked at everything, thought the people on the phone in the office were about right. Said he’d be here with his crew on Friday to whip all of our things into boxes in a few hours.
So, you see, while none of this is a surprise, we’ve spent a few months just hanging out, thinking, Maybe we should be doing something?
Nahhh, we’ve got packers.
And they were scheduled to come at about 4 p.m. on Friday.
I bet you can tell where this is going.
On Friday at the end of the day I loaded my car with the last of my things from my on-campus office. Said goodbye to … well, no one, really, but I got a nice Slack message … and drove to the house. My lovely bride’s car was the only one in the drive.
These guys are fast!
I pulled in the garage, slid out the boxes from my office and stacked them in the fledgling pile of stuff we’ve actually put in the garage and walked inside, expecting a forest of boxes. Columns of cardboard, a feat of fort-making.
And there’s my lovely bride, packing a box.
Where, I asked, are the packers?
She gave me the smile that isn’t a smile, but is a smile, but really isn’t. The packers hadn’t turned up.
And so I joined her. She’d already made a frantic dash out to pick up a few boxes from stores and then hit the U-Haul and bought every packing supply they had in stock, and we got to work.
There was some back and forth with the no-show packers. They weren’t coming until so and so. And then they didn’t come. And then they didn’t come on Saturday. After which, we started demanding our money back. And some of it has been refunded. The next call, because we have time for this nonsense right now, is going to go like this: All of my money back, right now. Otherwise, you’re going to have two media professionals who have an embarrassing, embarrassing, array of media contacts and two months with nothing better to do than talk about you.
(Update: They fully refunded the charge.)
So we packed all night Friday. We packed all day Saturday, until about 8 p.m., when there was a small going away party held in our honor with The Yankee’s triathlon team. We packed all day Sunday. At one point yesterday I was packing some particular box and got sidetracked to help with another packing chore, but was then sidetracked by still two more packing tasks. It was ridiculous. We have packed all day today. (I spent most of that time doing some real work in the garage.) We’ll be packing still tomorrow.
At times, it looks like we’ve made a dent and the spirits are high. Progress! At times you can stand in the same spot and see not the momentum, but all of the things still to do, and you can see how this will never be over. Despair.
At every moment there is something to trip on. Sometimes there is something to trip on, and then you land in something else to stumble over.
Fortunately, we’ve been alternating the emotions between us, so someone is always on an upswing and lifting the other along.
These rotten packers.
The movers, a different company, show up tomorrow morning.
Music is doing us a lot of good right now. There’s been a curious sort of traffic pattern throughout the house. For a while, for some reason, The Yankee will work on something upstairs and I will work on something downstairs. And then she moves downstairs and I drift upstairs. I can’t say it is effortless, because everything is a huge effort right now, but it’s an easy flow. And there’s always some song or another as we pack. And usually two. So here’s some more Indigo Girls from their recent show at The Ryman.
Now, sure, you think, The Ryman. The Mother Church of Country Music, and here’s an Americana band, a folk band, a rock band. And all of that is true. But this song features, from left to right, a fiddle, a mandolin, an acoustic guitar, a resonator and a banjo.
Also there are two Loretta Lynn references in “Second Time Around.” This more country than anything Nashville churns out these days.
I love that lyric about compromise.
Here’s what I find about compromise
Don’t do it if it hurts inside
Cause either way you’re screwed
And eventually you’ll find
That you may as well feel good
You may as well have some pride
This is one of those songs where I find myself thinking about the narrator versus the performer, because Amy Ray has an earlier line about how she doesn’t want to sing again, it has a catchy little meter, but is probably the farthest line possible from the performer. Throughout her career she has talked over and over and over about how she has to do these things, sing and play, like it’s in her and she has to get it out, because from the first time she ever played cover songs with Emily Saliers, when they were kids, that this was what she wanted to do, make these noises with her friend. And here we are 40 years later and there’s no way that woman won’t sing her soul out because it feels right. So it must, then, be the narrator. And anyway, that line about compromise is a good concept and maybe one that should be applied a little bit more.
Point is, there’s a lot of time for your mind to wander while you’re trying to find the right angle to get all of these things to go in boxes. And why do I have this many things anyway?
The good news is that late last evening I got to the place where I am ready to shove it all into boxes, or study the insurance policy about fire. It was easy to get into that last bit of gallows humor when the tornado warnings fired up yesterday. This could solve a few problems at once!
Tomorrow, the movers.
If you ain’t go nothin’ good to say
Don’t say nothin’ at all
A note of gratitude for the people who have meant the most, as my time at IU comes to a close.
When I arrived at Indiana University seven years ago The Media School, at that time just a year old itself, was moving into its new building. Simultaneously, the dynamics of all of the student media outlets on campus were changing.
What was once a collection of independent groups — the newspaper had thrived in the basement of the old Ernie Pyle Hall, a building named after the journalism program’s most famous alumnus, the radio station operated out of a house, the TV station produced content from a dorm basement — were all being more formally pulled into The Media School’s new portfolio.
I was given the opportunity to advise and oversee IUSTV. No one else wanted the project, which was often mistakenly viewed as a pesky afterthought, a nuisance. Some people, though, just don’t know what they are looking at. Those first two years, we had to teach equipment and writing, but I also had to institutionalize things like deadlines, planning and various house rules.
Those things were the difference between struggling on a makeshift basement set and growing into two state-of-the-art television studios. Fortunately, I was surrounded that first year by a solid handful of upperclassmen that knew a few things. Together, we re-shaped the organization. Over time, the students that have come through have built on that, and the current roster continues to create good and important work.
My favorite part of academia is watching people grow. The time between a person’s freshman or sophomore year and their senior year is substantial. Their growth, in terms of their maturity and confidence, can be remarkable.
In those seven years, IUSTV produced 935 scripted episodes of TV and video productions. They have has also produced 328 podcasts. We’ve run 15 original shows – each with their own show bible, show runners, schedule breakers and everything else. I’ve watched, or helped, them create 12 of those – seven of which are still ongoing. This year alone, they continually produced 10 different programs and a handful of podcast series. The year before was no less busy.
Viewership from 2022-2023 compared to 2015-2016 before my arrival, is up an improbable 1,901 percent. One thousand, nine hundred and one percent. The social media metrics all show substantial increases. Some six-dozen students and shows have won statewide and regional and national awards. They’ve earned every bit of their success. And when they leave, IUSTV alumni work in the professional media all over the country and abroad.
With gratitude and pride I think of them all, seven years worth of them, in the collective. Their teamwork, and how they so generously support one another, creates lessons we all learn over and over. What makes the work they do great is that they do it together.
Today, we are now graduating students who tell us they enrolled at IU specifically to be a part of what IUSTV is building.
What IUSTV is building. That is what I’ll look back on proudly. That notion is what I’ll take away. Even as I am sad to know I’ll miss out on some truly talented, hardworking people there right now, even as I am excited about what is coming next, that continued growth at IUSTV is the part of IU I will truly miss.
Something amazing happened in my office today. It’s one of those grown up things that should never feel like a fun thing to the adolescent version of your inner monologue, but is immensely satisfying to the adult part of your conscious thinking.
Not everyone thinks as an adult, of course. Not everyone has an adolescent version of their inner monologue. We can all agree that 33,977 emails is a lot of emails. That’s so many emails the email program had to delete them in batches.
I wonder how long it took to accumulate those emails. A bit longer than it took to dispatch them and, even though they were all already in the trash folder, watching that number disappear felt pretty great. It was a good Thursday exercise. But why this Thursday?
Lyris Hung is here for your fiddle needs. She’s using a looper, or some such technology, to do a multitrack song all by herself. (She is the fourth artist I’ve seen do this live, and I’m sure that she could do whatever she wants with this, though this is a beautiful atmospheric piece. The second person I saw use this was also a violin player, Kishi Bashi in 2015, and his set was so incredible I was convinced he’d discovered the future of music. Maybe I’m not far off.)
Also, Hung transitions effortless into the opening strains of “The Wood Song,” and that’s never a bad thing, another classic track from the chronically misunderappreciated “Swamp Ophelia.” Critics are on a deadline and they listen to a song a few times, maybe, amidst whatever else they have going on. They bang out some copy and move on. Thing is, this song is going to be 30 years old next year. Still a huge a hit with the Indigo Girls’ fans.
Also, once again, The Ryman … an amazing place to watch a show. Each time I upload one of those videos I find myself wanting to go back.
Let’s spin a few more CDs so that we can find ourselves (temporarily) caught up in the Re-Listening project. You know the drill by now, dear regular reader. I am playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. Today we’re doing a double shot, because it is the same band on two consecutive discs. I must have had a few extra bucks in my hand at whatever point this was in 1999, because I probably did a little binge buying. This first one was a 1993 CD that I picked up to replace the old cassette version of Pearl Jam’s “Vs.”
This was their second studio album. Wikipedia tells me they scaled back the marketing, and yet still sold 950,000 copies in its first five days on sale, a record which apparently stood for five years. No idea who took that odd bit of trivia off their shoulders.
This album stood atop the Billboard 200 chart for five weeks and was certified seven-times platinum. So naturally, I needed the copy in a new format. Though they produced no videos (again, this was 1993), Pearl Jam had four singles chart from Vs. Three of them lodged themselves into the top three of the US Mainstream Rock chart, including this one.
(If you watch that with the closed captioning on YouTube tells you it begins with “pensive indie rock music.” That’s not where I give up, but perhaps it should have been.)
For some reason seven songs from this album have their own Wiki page, including “Rearviewmirror” which is a wholly underrated track. And it is great in the car, at any age, just so long as the wheels are turning reasonably fast.
Best song on the record, even if it’s a 20-minute pretentious put-up.
Which brings us to the “Yield” record, somehow. “Vs.” was second, “Yield” was fifth, and I got the ones in between later on, for whatever reason. That doesn’t make any sense, in retrospect, given how much I enjoyed Pearl Jam. But maybe I was starting to shuffle in another direction by this point. “Yield” came out in early 1998, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200. I picked it up somewhere in 1999. “Faithful” is OK, but things were changing to my ear.
Much was written and said about how the band changed their process when they produced this album, and how that helped form a more straightforward, accessible record. No longer the guys in flannel from Seattle, they were America’s rock band, by this point. I remember thinking this, though it is not accurate or at all fair to say, but they were as close a thing to The Doors as the ’90s would produce, and Roskilde was still a year or so away. So they’d mainstreamed the sound, which diluted the power a bit. All of the slower, quieter songs sounded like this for a time.
And the intensity that is Eddie Vedder’s hallmark felt a little askew on this record. Except for “MFC.”
I doubt I listened to this one enough way back when to give it a real chance, but I don’t think my impressions have really changed much. Platinum in five countries, and an undeniable hit, but this was the last of Pearl Jam’s studio records that I bought. (Not counting picking up a few earlier discs.) And so we’ll let Yield’s hidden track, “Hummus,” play us out.
