NO MATTER WHAT THE PRINCIPAL SAYS, THERE IS NO CHAMPAGNE IN THE FACULTY DINING ROOM

“Hey Dad, am I reading the thermometer wrong, or is it really zero degrees outside?”
“No, that thermometer doesn’t really work.”
“Oh, good.”
“Yeah, it’s actually about six degrees right now.”

That was how last Sunday—the day on which I was supposed to move most of my worldly possessions from New Hampshire to Massachusetts—began for me.

If you are at all acquainted with my vast reservoir of neuroses, you know that I consider moving to be an experience only slightly more pleasant than, say, a weekend jaunt to a New Jersey-based IKEA store, or having to participate in any scenario involving either frontier medicine or a homemade catheter. But such was my plight that I had to undertake yet another drastic change of venue—my plight being that I was recently hired as a Spanish teacher by a prominent Boston-area high school.

The move itself was marred only by the typical moving debacles: winding stairwells, difficulty parking, U-Haul customer service. But ultimately I triumphed (thanks to the help of my various parents), and can now state proudly that I am a resident of what my dad calls “The Big City,” what the locals call “The People’s Republic of Cambridge,” and what the state of Utah refers to as “Satan’s Hedonistic Playground and Leper Storage.”

The strategic location of my new residence allows me to take the subway to work every day, which is so much better than driving from Concord to Boston (as I did all last week) that I would unhesitatingly compare it to what I imagine are the best feelings in the world—things like consequence-free heroin use, or eating a sausage calzone. (The former, of course, doesn’t exist. But the latter is real and tasty.)

To celebrate my new, euphoria-inducing commute, I went to the faculty dining room yesterday morning in the hopes of procuring a bottle of champagne. Sadly—and, it seems, as a general rule—there is no champagne in the faculty dining room. So instead I opened a bottle of water. And in lieu of running around spraying everyone with champagne foam, I ate a Nutri-Grain bar.