Total upheaval in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

If the military and I were tango partners, and relocations were one of those complicated, whip-lash-inducing interchanges, we'd still be bashing faces and kneeing each other in the groin. I use dance as a metaphor here, and the tango in particular, because it implies hope that I can one day master upheaval and clasp it to my heaving bosom in a passionate, complicated, synchronized embrace.

Right now, not so much.

Pants and I learned a few days ago that within the next two weeks, we are California-bound. It wasn't our first choice, but the more I think about it, I'm ashamed it wasn't. I'm looking forward to boasting about my adopted state's forward-thinking auto emissions requirements, and the fact that I was once terrified of our governor hunting me down with his exposed red robot eye. I'm also looking forward to getting carsick on Highway 1, taunting lemurs in San Diego, and goggling at trees wider at their base than the house I grew up in. There will still be plenty of Mexican immigrants to make me feel at home, but I'll also be within a couple hours' drive of world class drag shows and a nationally recognized dildo shop (inappropriate Christmas gifts!).

I have already warned a friend who lives near San Francisco that I've spent far too long away from my liberal hippie roots. Especially at our current post, things to do and places to go have been limited to dive bars and the local Chili's. I'm looking forward to ordering food I can't pronounce, seeing (intentional) performance art, and meeting people who pay for bizarre restorative treatments.*

*Very soon, Pants will have to sit in the equivalent of a giant salad spinner, whirling around a giant room until he passes out. The whole process, for some obscure and sadistic reason, will be videotaped. There's a reason for this, but it doesn't sound very convincing. Instead, I thought back to a co-worker of mine from a few years ago who paid $40 for blurry Polaroids of her aura, routinely hyperventilated while blindfolded with a group of "trance dancers," and spoke openly of the spiritual power of public nudity.

"How much do you think V____ would pay to ride the salad spinner if you told her it was purifying her chakras?" I asked. "More than $100?"

"Put it this way: probably not as much as the taxpayers pay for me to ride it, and all it does for me is make me puke and pass out," Pants replied.

For now I'm trying to focus on these good things, and not the part where I'm leaving another job I really liked and am about to engage in the crap-shoot hunt for a landlord in another state who doesn't harbor a grudge against military renters or indoor pets. Or the part where I get to frantically search for a job before the time bomb of my unemployment-based depression flattens me.