book a week geek

In efforts to be a better version of myself, I am getting rid of all of my life clutter.  I am doing this for three reasons:

1. feng shui (dorky, I know–but it really does feel good to be rid of all this junk in my life)
2. less stuff to move when I move away (crossing fingers)
3. people actually give me money for things like season 3 of the show 24!

Also it feels nice to give people things that you suspect they might like that you never use anymore.  I gave my roommate a bunch of old goofy cds & tapes (a cassette of Dookie!  this made his day!) and he is so excited to have some silly things I thought no one would ever want.  This is probably good for my feng shui, too.  Next I will be clapping in corners and weird things like that.

I have weeded out the following things from my life:

1. lots of things on VHS.  Aspects of this were heartbreaking.  I was really attached to some of my movies (like Independence Day.  Go figure.)
2. most of my CDs.  I kept things that I am deeply attached to and things that are extra-special because of the artwork (like this Menomena album I seriously can’t part with for the life of me.)
3. socks.  These I just threw out.  I don’t think anybody wants my awful old socks.  Some of these socks have been around since high school.  I distinctly remember ordering one pair with sparkly snowflakes from the Delia’s catalog in 7th grade.  Those are in the garbage now.  Where they belong.
4. t-shirts.  For some reason I felt compelled in high school & college to collect t-shirts with “ironic” slogans.  Most of these were ill-fitting.  They now live at the Monroeville Goodwill, in case you feel like you need a boxy t-shirt with some stupid sports slogan on it.
5. things that don’t fit me.  I have had it with myself: no more keeping stuff around in my closet “in case it fits someday”.  I do this constantly.  But no more.  All of this went to Goodwill.  Some of this stuff had never been worn.  Let this be a punishment to me: don’t buy stuff that doesn’t fit just because it has a cute pattern or something.
6. books!  This was SO hard to do.   I got rid of old textbooks (I swore I would never do this, but my chances of needing to refer to, like, the quadratic formula are so, so unlikely), books from when I was little and things I just didn’t think I would ever read again.  I didn’t do a good enough job of this.  I still have too many books.  I will be re-doing this.

And there is so much more yet to come.  Next up: shoes.  Boots.  Dresses.   Skirts.  Kitchen stuff.  Maybe even my beloved Bianchi road-bike <3.  I am a packrat.  I know this.  This is hard on me.  But I am trying, and I feel better for it.

When I am not cleaning out my life’s belongings, you can find me on my yellow couch with two dogfriends & the Amber Spyglass, pretending I don’t have insane amounts of homework to do.  Life, you are kind of okay.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under lists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.