A couple of weeks ago I was packing for my biggest move to date--from Brooklyn to Istanbul, where my boyfriend has relocated for work.

The well-intentioned lady at the post office advised “Turkey ain’t Queens, you know,” implying that Turkey is much farther from Brooklyn than Queens is, and that I should be married if I follow someone so far. My father, thankfully, was less interested in my marital status than he was in the number of times I’d packed up before.

“You’ve moved more times than anyone else that I know,” he said.

I counted the number of apartments I had lived in since I arrived in New York from college seven years ago and could only come up with five--which didn’t square with my recollection or reputation of always being in the hysterical throes of one moving crisis or another.

My dad and I tallied my various apartments and soon put our fingers on the disconnect: I had been remarkably bad at finding new homes before my official move-out date. Those dates often found me frantically calling loved-ones, first for feedback on possibly taking a dubious Craigslist share, and later for permission to crash for a bit while I sorted the whole living thing out.