Movin' on up to the east side

by Robison Wells

It’s not unusual for me to dream about my mission. Usually, these dreams consist of me (with kids and a wife and a job) getting a phone call from the Church Office Building: they’ve made some kind of accounting error, and it turns out I went home three months early! So now I have to go back and finish up. It sounds like the plot for the next Halestorm movie. (Starring Kirby Heyborne as my conscience. He carries a banjo.)

In real life, however, I’m getting a similar call: after many years, it’s time to go back to school. This August I’ll be starting BYU’s MBA program, learning about how the good flat world has a great long tail (or whatever). In conjunction with this, I’ll be moving out of scenic West Jordan (motto: “We may not have paved roads, but at least we don’t have any Democrats!”) and down to Wymount, BYU’s married housing. The location change isn’t that big of a deal, really. I hate living in West Jordan—I understand that the people are nice and all, but seriously: it could sink into the ocean for all I care. (In my ideal version of the Salt Lake Valley, everything south of 45th and west of Redwood would vaporize. All the rest is just an endless waste of subdivisions and supermarkets.) (This will be a major tenet of my campaign platform when I run for governor.)

But my point is not that I hate the suburbs, with their Wal-Marts and their stylistically depraved architecture. No, my point is that, despite my hate, I’d rather stay right here than have to move. Man, moving sucks.

Here’s one major problem: my apartment right now is a spacious 1400 square feet delight, and my BYU apartment is just a shade over 700. For those of you who aren’t math majors, that means that the floor my new apartment has approximately the same dimensions as a Ritz cracker. I assume we’re going to have to sleep standing up.

Because of this size restriction, I want to get rid of stuff. My wife claims to be in agreement, but every time she comes home from her mother’s house, she brings more and more overflowing boxes and bags. (When we moved my mother-in-law from her house to an apartment, all of us relatives contemplated taking a few of the MANY truckloads of stuff to goodwill, and see if she ever noticed.) (We didn’t do that, of course, but if we ever have to move her again, I’ll just burn down her current place and buy her all new furniture—to be delivered by the store.)

Anyway, we’re moving, and I keep trying to think of what we can toss. In our seven years of marriage, we’ve lived in seven apartments (because we don’t pay the rent) and we’ve had our share of annoying moves. We once had to carry a piano up three flights of stairs (and, of course, we later had to carry it down). We once had to literally fold our mattress and box spring in half to get them through a tight curve in a narrow stairwell. If you’re asking “how can you do that without severely damaging the structural integrity of the box spring?” the answer is “You can’t, genius. You thought taking a saw to your box spring was a good idea? You’ll be buying another one of these soon.”

And our new apartment is missing two important items: a dishwasher (except for my wife—har!) and an air conditioner. Now, you already know my feelings about heat. Spending the better part of the summer in an apartment/sauna is not my idea of fun—and I’ve already told you that going outside is not an option. Curse you, Heat Miser! Curse you!

Still, in spite of it all, it’ll be nice to get down there. When the purifying rains of brimstone and damnation fall upon West Jordan, I’ll be safely holed up on church property. I’m pretty sure BYU students get, like, free passes to survive the apocalypse.