What can I say about Sunday that hasn’t been said here, here, and here? It was one of those days that you expect will start out one way, and ends up another. In this case, I had expected to have a miserable time, because I, personally, hate moving with a passion: there’s got to be a better way to spend an afternoon than lugging boxes and furniture around. Usually I help out if asked because the people moving are friends of mine, and they’ve promised either to feed me or to give me beer for my troubles. Those of you who know me already know that promising me good beer (not something like Michelob or Budweiser — contrary to what the advertisers would have you believe, most American produced beers are simply not beer; in fact, I’m certain that if you sent a pint of Miller Genuine Draft to a laboratory for analysis, the results would come back saying something like, "Your horse has diabetes." Guinness counts as beer; I like beer you can eat with a fork) is a good way to get me to do something. But in this case, the people moving were people I didn’t know, there was no mention of food, and nearly every single one of the people I was going to be with that day takes a perverse pride in declaring, "I just don’t drink beer". This is usually said with a haughty sniff, a tone reserved for the cultural elite who usually consider themselves above, say, Shakespeare or Thomas Pynchon, and who claim to have never heard of Star Trek.

So, why did I agree? Probably because Lisa IM’ed me and said, "Hey, Richard, can you help my friends move? Your girlfriend already said that she would."

Yep. Lisa blackmailed me into it. Pure and simple.

Okay, no, not really. But as I was lugging the umpteenth box of heavy hardback books (with lead covers, I presume) up the tortuously narrow — quite attractive — staircase, I found myself wishing that Lisa had blackmailed me into this. That way I could have said, "Hey! You made me do this!" And, I admit, my temper did get stretched a bit thin a couple of times.

But, you know, it really wasn’t that bad. My friends have mastered the fine art of amusing themselves under the most trying circumstances, and I like to think that I’m pretty good at it myself. Mishaps became adventures, and the day we spent in the rain moving perfect strangers ("Nobody’s perfect," my mother reminded me later that night) from Oakland to Berkeley is now the stuff of legends.

At one point, for example, Lisa’s new "housemate" (Lisa is very firm about this point), Michael, managed to vanish, just as we were about to try moving the couch upstairs. A search of the new apartment — small as it is, the apartment is riddled with dozens of hidden nooks and crannies, and it reminded me of something out of a Clive Barker novel — revealed that Michael was literally in the closet. He’d gone in to look at something, the door had shut behind him, and there was no handle inside. Apparently he’d been stuck for something like ten or fifteen minutes before he was finally rescued. After the inevitable joke about being "in the closet" had died down, Michael finally showed his face to us again, looking somehow wiser for his experience.

And I got to experience a moment of self-righteousness, which I always treasure. When a dolly full of books that I was leading down the ramp of the moving truck fell over onto the asphalt, and everyone else was still dry and safe in the truck laughing at me, I was able to say, "I’d just like to point out that while you’re all laughing at me, I’m the only one who’s actually moving anything at the moment." I live for opportunities to feel morally superior to other people, so I felt very pretentious and proud of myself as the laughter of the others simply increased in volume and derision. But at least I knew that I was in the right. Moral superiority is a lonely call, sometimes.

At the end of the day, some of us discovered that we had musical talent, or at least claimed to; between the wind instruments, the percussion, and the name of an ex-Beatles wife, we found that we could form the Yoko Ono Double-Oboe Bongo, Bones, and Whistle Band. Our first album, Can’t Get Enough Coffee (featuring "The Prig Song", which Lisa can’t get enough of), will be out sometime in the next fifty years. Our band sang loudly and proudly as we left Oakland for Mountain View, to indulge in some of the best sushi in Northern California, and then on the way down to San Jose to drop off Lisa and her new housemate.

Things became more sedate after that, as the new girlfriend and I decided to swing by and visit my parents (who live near Lisa) and my sister (who lives near my parents), discovered that various emotions can ooze out of one’s various orifices like various substances (pride, for example, oozes out like mint jelly), and had a quiet drive back from San Jose to Davis, thus completing our circuit of Northern California.

We had originally planned to go to San Francisco this past Sunday, to play and hang out. At one point during the move, while I was finding myself sprawled on the stairwell with a couch in my lap, I asked myself whether I would ever let Lisa plan another day in the Bay Area for us again. And looking up at all of my friends and feeling overcome with giddiness, I realized that I certainly would. Anytime.