The reason why many people spend their entire lives in one town is not because they are afraid to leave, or because they desire a small-town atmosphere. It's because it is such a frickin' hassle to move.

There are several steps to moving, most of them ending in paper cuts and loud swearing. The first of which, of course, is packing. Jerry Seinfeld had a routine where he said that just before a move, your entire life involves looking for boxes. This is absolutely true, and it's because we all refuse to pay for something that we're going to throw away. Sure, we'll pay to ship our things, to move our things, to rent a van for our things. But you're not catching me spending fifty cents on a box to make sure I have something in which to ship, move, or drive my things.

Our moves then, become advertisements for our local grocery stores, Kinkos, and any company from which we order online. I know someone who, a week before he moved, ordered cheap, bulky things online so that he could keep the boxes. Staples, by the way, does not like to ship more than one box, so if you buy two medium things, they put both of the medium boxes inside a bigger box, so you get three boxes for the price of two. Or so my friend told me. Yeah, my friend. That's the ticket.

Once you have the boxes, or the taped up garbage bags pretending to be boxes, you must fill them. No matter how much stuff you think you have, there is always one shelf left over. Usually, it's the things you ordered from Staples. So you have to either use your laundry basket as a makeshift box, grab an armful of your crap and stumble with it to the car, or just leave a few things behind. How could you possibly leave anything behind? Easily, once you realize how seldom you actually use anything you own.

Here's a suggestion: if you're moving, pack as if you were going on a three-month trip. Then sell everything else. If you own stuff that you wouldn't use once in the next three months, there is no point to owning it. Right after you sell everything, you will probably need one of the things you sold, and you can't predict which one. So take the money you made from the books you've never read, the movies you've never watched, and the clothes you haven't worn since 1997, and buy a new one, whatever it is.

You're now all packed, hopefully using actual boxes, and you're ready to load your vehicle/mail all of your stuff across the country. If you're choosing between these things, load up a car and drive. For the cost of a plane ticket, you can rent a car. For the cost of shipping your computer, you can rent three.

If you have furniture, you will need a van instead of a car. Here's where it gets dicey, because lately, there's been a problem with vans (mainly white ones). At the risk of being horribly offensive, the whole white van thing can only help someone who is moving. How much easier has it gotten to find one available to rent? If I had any cash to invest, I'd channel it all into the white van market. If you think about it, this is really the lowest that market will ever dip. Someone has got to be the bull.

Now you have your crap in boxes, a wad of cash from everything you sold, and a van to pack it all in. Maybe it's white and maybe it's not. Maybe it's black and you could paint a diagonal red stripe down the side like the A-Team. But you're still missing the most important thing when it comes to moving: people to sucker into helping you.

Since you just spent the extra cash you had on an A-Team van, you no longer have the money to hire professional movers. Though professional movers charge your-first-born-per-hour, so you could have only hired them for a few minutes anyway. You then somehow convince a few of your friends to help by promising that you will help them move, provided they are planning to move on a weekend when you're out of town. Inevitably, one of them breaks something that you packed very poorly, and you get so mad that you threaten to never fleece them into helping you again. You recant, however, after you realize how large your dresser has gotten.

You finally get to your new place. But by the time you need to unload, and certainly by the time you need to unpack, your friends have left. So how the heck are you going to get all of your stuff into the places it actually goes? If you just moved to the Los Angeles underground, and you have this problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

They might know where to find more boxes.

I was sick recently, so I did what any sick guy in his early 20s would do. I watched action movies for three days straight.

I watched fourteen action movies, only pausing to sleep, eat, and un-eat. By the end of it, I was left with a High Fidelity-esque question: was I watching action movies because I was sick, or was I sick because I was watching action movies?

A good action flick is like high school. It requires little brain-power, there are plenty of bad guys to deal with, and despite the tough spots, it always ends well. I love a good action flick. Unfortunately, most screenwriters don't.

The majority of action flicks don't even have much action anymore, relying on one or two fight scenes with poorly choreographed moves that we've all seen before. Instead, of good action, "action"� movies have come to rely on artificial drama and a half-baked love story to fuel them. But that doesn't make a good action movie. Hell, that doesn't even make a good after school special.

To help aspiring screenwriters (and movie goers everywhere), I'm going to use my newfound knowledge and present to you, the reader, the ten commandments of a good action flick.

10) Never name the movie with "The"� followed by a word ending in "er."� The Eraser. The Negotiator. The Peacemaker. The really crappy movie-er.

9) Don't make the plot more complicated than the characters. When Samuel L. Jackson's supposedly idiot Ordell Robie figured out the plot in Jackie Brown, I was shocked. I was watching the damn thing, and I couldn't even follow it.

8) If you're going to rely on drama, build. There shouldn't be any action for the first twenty minutes. The corollary to this commandment is when you put a regular dude in a hero situation, he needs to build up to killing everyone he sees. In Die Hard, John McLane was hesitant to kill at first, and this made him a real character. If you sold tires for a living and someone tried to rob your store, you'd probably let them, no matter how convinced you were that they were international terrorists planning to hide stolen nukes in your radials.

7) A love story can be thrown into a good action movie. Terminator II, Total Recall, and Die Hard are all examples of this. But it has to be an actual story. If a guy and a girl meet and happen to save the world together, that does not make them perfect for each other. Especially when they're horrible actors. (See Broken Arrow). Actually, you're better off not seeing Broken Arrow.

6) Every good movie needs a really cool villain. This can almost never be someone famous. In Star Wars, did anyone know who played Emperor Palpatine? Does anyone now?

5) Sequels work best if the story does not rely on an earlier movie. Look at Indiana Jones, perhaps the best example of a successful series of action movies. You don't have to see them in order, and you don't have to see them all to enjoy any of the others. If you watch all three, sure, you'll get a few more of the jokes. But you shouldn't need to look up what happened to the characters before to understand their motivation. Their motivation is to kill bad guys. Simple.

4) Be consistent. Even Die Hard (and you know how much I love Die Hard) had its flaws in the sequels. McLane was not terrified of technology in the first movie, yet it's a big joke that everyone keeps bringing up in number two. Oh, I get it, he's old fashioned! That makes his sudden willingness to use a fax machine high-larious.

3) If you're going to foreshadow, don't make it obvious. Van Damme's Bloodsport did a great job of surprise foreshadowing. Van Damme's Sudden Death was some of the worst foreshadowing I've ever seen. And here's a note to the audience: if you're in a movie theatre and you do discover foreshadowing, keep it to yourself. I'm not worried about you ruining the movie for everyone else. You'll just be the idiot who says "Oh!"� fifteen minutes after the rest of us figured it out.

2) The only person alive who can say "I'm too old for this,"� is Sean Connery, since he really is too old for this. Anyone who has died can also say it, since they are definitely too old for this.

1) Your movie is not the non-stop thrill ride of the year. Stop calling it that.

If obeyed, these commandments will produce movies that will please anyone looking for a little bad-guy butt-whoopin. And though the corner I have backed myself into with this column prevents me from giving an eleventh commandment, I do have one more piece of advice. Running away from explosions has been overdone. Next time, try running into the explosion.

Especially if you're the screenwriter.

There are very few things in this world that go together worse than backpacks and suits.

I was on my way to work today when I saw a young man coming towards me. I say young man because I am now a seasoned 23, while he couldn't have been older than 22 and a half. And something was wrong with his shoulders - one of them was jutting sort of sideways, and the other was a full inch higher than the rest of him. As I got closer, I realized that his shoulders were not the problem - rather it was the giant black straps attached to them.

Backpack straps are not normal straps. Attachés, laptop cases, purses, these are things with normal straps. But backpack straps are thick and deep with a sewed pleat down the middle. Backpack straps go well with t-shirts and jeans and baseball caps. They do not go well with suits. And you may laugh that I said purse straps are normal, but he'd have looked more dignified if he were carrying one than lugging around a backpack

This was not just any backpack - this was a full backpack. We all went to high school with one kid who had a full backpack, and you're picturing him now and laughing at how silly he looked. Or you're picturing yourself and wondering why I'm making fun of you. But I'm picturing him, walking around with notes from tests he already took, textbooks to classes he decided not to take, and a whole watermelon. The watermelon part was never confirmed, but something had to have taken up all that room.

I wondered where this man could be coming from that required both a suit and a full backpack. What did he have with him that he could not have carried in a shopping bag or a rolling suitcase or a dump truck? So as we passed each other, I opened my mouth to ask him. But I quickly closed it, knowing how much more fun it is to speculate.

The obvious possibility was that he was coming from somewhere that required a backpack while going somewhere that required a suit. Therefore, he brought the suit with him, changed before he left, and put the extra clothes in the bag to take home with him. But he should have removed the watermelon first. There would have been more room.

Maybe he had more backpacks inside. They'd be like those Russian dolls, where each one was smaller than the one it came out of, until they got so tiny that the only person who could wear one would be a teenage girl from 1996.

He could have found the backpack on the side of the road, sitting there with a sign that said "free backpack with a lot of crap inside."� And while I'm sure he thought about how silly he'd look in a backpack and a suit, that's the price you have to pay for a free backpack.

He may have been smuggling a jockey. This is perhaps the most interesting theory, since I had no idea that Boston had such a thriving jockey smuggling business. When I typed "Boston jockey smuggling"� into Yahoo, there were over 200 matches. This is something I will have to investigate further. In the meantime, I will refer to everyone who annoys me as "jockey smuggler."�

It's possible that he was returning from a wedding where they gave out full backpacks as party favors. Or maybe he was on his way to a wedding. You know how it's bad luck for the bride and the groom to see each other beforehand? Well, she's got to get there somehow.

Perhaps he was going on an interview as a backpack tester. He'd of course have to carry the backpack with him and fill it with bricks and watermelons in order to test its durability, all while in a suit because it was a job interview. And since Boston is renowned for its armada of backpack testers, this made perfect sense.

Or maybe, just maybe, the guy was simply a giant dork. A dork so big that he wore a fanny pack to the community swimming pool because hey - where else are you going to keep your nose plugs? A dork so big that his underwear was labeled from when he went to summer camp - this past summer. A dork so big that he posts calendars of his life online, and most of the nights include the Sci-Fi channel. A dork so big that he couldn't even fit into his own oversized backpack.

But I bet one night he got so bored that he tried. Jockey smuggler.

Most people's e-mail addresses are wrong. Sure, people still get all their e-mail. But if your address is "youwantme@imahottie.com," odds are that we don't and you're not.

When you are born, you are given a name and you have very little choice in the matter. Some might even say you have none at all. Most parents pick names even before they know what their kid looks like. But there's a reason to this - if we let children pick their own names, we'd have to wait until they were old enough to talk, and immaturity would lead every one of them to pick something ridiculous.

If kids chose their own names, we'd have people named SpongeBob Squarepants Johnson and NSYNC Smith. Because of the lack of foresight that comes with being four, we protect our children from their own errors in judgment by handing them a name and saying "live with it."

It's a bit of a trade off though; if kids could choose their own names, no one would ever be named Tanner. "But mom - I don't want to get beat up for the next ten years." Ever notice that kids with names like that are track stars? How do you think they learned to run so fast?

With the exception of those given to you at work and school (and even those have exceptions), we do get to choose our own e-mail addresses and Instant Messenger names, and we'd be better off if we didn't. How many of us make a horribly poor choice? Well, how many of us have addresses ending with the year "1998?"

But choosing the current year (which is only the current year for a maximum of 12 months) is not the only mistake people make. Some people put their birthday on the end of their address, which would be great if everyone memorized each other's birthdays. Your e-mail address or IM name should be easy to remember, or it fails to serve its purpose. If your phone number is shorter than the numbers at the end of your name, I will never send you e-mail. Especially if random letters in your name are capitalized.

Then, of course, there are vanity names. People take addresses devoted to their favorite teams, actors, singers, and writers (anyone?), but often choose these too quickly. No one wants to change his or her IM name every two months, so using any reference to pop culture is shortsighted. I bet someone out there slapped himself in the forehead before saying, "Chumbawumba_fan? What was I thinking?"

The opposite end of the spectrum is when your e-mail address or screen name is an attack on something you hate. Politicians, athletes, the kid down the hall - hey, it happens. And it's probably pretty funny for a while - until you apply for a job. "Um, yeah, you can e-mail me at BravesSuckCox@aol.com. Can't wait to hear from you, Mr. Turner."

The manager of the Atlanta Braves is actually named Cox, and they've got a pitcher named Millwood and two outfielders named Jones. While I was at spring training this year, they had a bullpen catcher named Alan Butts. If I didn't take the picture myself, I wouldn't have believed it.

Many people try to describe themselves in their address, but end up choosing words that they don't quite understand. There are a lot of girls out there that want to come off as sexy, so they have names like "vixen," and "temptress," and other such synonyms for "slut" and "tease." It's getting to the point where I expect an IM from someone named "Ihookupwith17guyseveryweekend." Or "Ihookupwith17guyseveryweekend2002."

But the worst e-mail or IM gaffe is when someone chooses something that doesn't resemble him or herself at all. Sure, you're smart or good looking or great in bed. And we needed Hotmail to remind us. Hey - Basketballstud24. You may play basketball and your jersey number might be 24, but unless that's an abbreviation for student, you've probably been kidding yourself for years.

When you choose an e-mail address or a new screen name, please take something that represents who you really are, and who you will be for at least the next three years. Use as few numbers as possible. Choose something easy to spell. Don't use capital letters unless they're at the beginning of words. Make it simple on the rest of us. And for god sakes, don't name your kids "Tanner."

I'm sure I've stepped on a lot of toes with this column. If so, I apologize, and I encourage you to send me your feedback. I can be reached at DeBBie_GiBsOn_faN@hottie.com. Sorry - that's DeBBie_GiBsOn_faN98.