I hung out with a guy from Ecuador today, and we talked about what immigrants always talk about: how much we miss the food we can't get here. (His wife is originally from Venezuela -- they both grew up in Spain before ending up in England -- and our extensive talk about food made me miss the Venezuelan who made arepas, but I think that place didn't survive lockdowns. Apparently there's no Ecuadoran food here; the closest thing he could console himself with is a Colombian place in Liverpool.)
When someone from queer club who has chronic pain and fatigue asked for help with the heavy lifting of moving house, of course I volunteered. This was the man-with-a-van that he hired.
It's funny, when Matt told me to text Dennis I expected that Dennis would be an old gammony bigot, but instead I got Denis, an adorable wife guy, a decade younger than me, helping people move house as a side hustle.
Denis called me Matt at first, which didn't bother me -- Matt's the person he's mostly been dealing with! -- but he could not have been more apologetic. And then apparently he called me Kevin for a while, which did make me laugh (I didn't even know this until he apologized for it!). I did try to assure Denis that all these white guy names are the same but he was adamant.
I don't know Matt well, except that he's a single-in-the-sense-of-not-cohabiting person who's 30 or 40 years old. I expected a room full of stuff. This guy had an amount of books I'd expect from boomers who haven't had to move to a new house in fifty years. And the heaviest bookcases, I think Matt said they were made of old scaffolding or something? And because the bookcases had to go in the van first, they had to come out last, and thus be taken upstairs when I was already wiped out.
We collected stuff from his storage unit and brought it to his house first, then went to his previous house to get stuff from there and there was so much we didn't think we could fit it all in the van and that we'd have to come back to make a second trip. We really really didn't want to do that, though, and managed to avoid it by packing the van so full that Denis's hand truck had to come with us in the front -- I sat in the middle, and it got shotgun. But we were so pleased with ourselves for not having to go back, and it's a damn good thing. I could barely walk the 20ish minutes home by the time we finished -- and when I got there, it took me most of an hour to eat and shower even though I very much wanted to do both of those things!
As we were dragging the bookcases up the stairs, Denis could not stop talking about how strong I was, he was shocked when I told him (not quite in so many words) that I have a bullshit email job, he absolutely thought I was a fellow manual laborer. "How did you get so good at this?" he said. I didn't know how to tell him it's a combination of my dad instilling his (manual laborer) work ethic, and transgym making me hench.
I was not looking forward to having to go help V's relative get stuff from his mum's house to the tip again tomorrow, but it sounds like we almost certainly won't be needed! He got extra done this week and extra help today, which is wonderful for him and well-timed for me. Apparently the last bit, a friend of his with a van, might fall through tomorrow so we're on standby but that slight possibility feels a lot better than the absolute certainty!
Now I'm off to take some more ibuprofen and sleep forever.
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cosmolinguist
