I spent my weekend moving into a new apartment.
Shifting out is not a new experience for me. Given the precarity of renting in a major Australian city, changing my address is basically an annual ritual. I suppose that makes it a bit like Christmas, if the celebration involved wrapping possessions you already own and delivering them to yourself.
The other reason it’s a bit like Christmas is that I only seem to move out when it’s fucking hot. Deep into Friday night, while the mercury was still hovering well above 30 degrees, my housemates and I paused at the top of a stairwell. We’d been lugging someone’s bedframe into the new place on what was probably the twentieth van-to-apartment trek of the afternoon. It was so warm I felt like I was sweating from my eyes. One of my housemates said he’d never seen me look so devastated.
It is in this spirit that I present to you a new Instagram video of Courtney Cox moving some furniture. Of course, when I say “moving”, I mean her partner Johnny McDaid was tasked with shifting a heavy-looking table while Cox herself decided to recreate a famous scene from her time on Friends.
Cox yells “pivot!” as McDaid and another fella schlep the desk through a pristine abode. “Pivot!” she cries, as three people try to stop the desk’s sharp corners from smashing into a photo of Cher (?). “Pivot!” she implores, at the precise moment the thing is being pivoted through a doorway. “That’s good pivoting”, she says, after ignoring a set of screws underneath the desk which suggest it could have been entirely disassembled prior to moving.
Perhaps I am still a touch fragile from the past 72 hours, but this video has forced me to speak my truth: I think Friends is a terrible show. I believe there is no reason to watch it in 2019 outside of severe nostalgia poisoning. In the real world, there is no laugh track as someone yells “pivot!”, there are only the shattered faces of people who’ve been pivoting all goddamn afternoon.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to prepare myself to deep-clean the old apartment to ensure the return of my bond. It never ends. If you pivot enough, you end up in the exact same place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2u0sN9stbA
