Back from where ever never was…

The five day weekend oddly meant less time on LJ, not more. I return now to face with shock all the enties I’ve missed on my friends list.

Rather than the virtual, I spent the time firmly in the physical. badfaggot and I added shelving, swept, moved and packed and unpacked boxes. I alternated between watching episodes of HGTV’s  Mission Organization and living one out. The effort is paying off: I am down to about twenty-four cardboard boxes now after starting out with two hundred or so. Most things are in the room that they are going to end up in. Piles of mail have been sorted. Twelve boxes of books stand on my landing, ready for dispersal.

The result? I feel a little woozy, actually, since once I get started on a project it may well take over : sorting through a box of “Tools” led to me squinting at a pile of pop rivets, trying to determine their respective sizes, lengths and whether they were made of steel or aluminum. After doing that for days on end, I tend to be rather shall we say, inward, running through various organizing schemes in my head when I should be paying attention to what people are saying to me. I am obsessed with translucent plastic bins, since they allow me to see in a general way what they contain, wipe down and stack easily and afford me the opportunity to blow more money at the Container Store

The result of all this work however is that the space now abounds with possibility: there is room to have people over, and when they are there I know where the tools are to entertain them. More art is making it’s way on to the walls, and I feel happier about the things I own. Long slogs through far too many files lie ahead, but the whole has take an enormous leap forward in terms of livability.

Much of this is due to badfaggot‘s good humor and thoroughness, so many thanks to him.

0 Comments +

  1. Happy to do it, as ever.

    Nice new icon. With all my fellow grad students procreating like mad in Ann Arbor (more baby pics turned up in my email today), I sometimes threatened to make a T-shirt which read “EAT YOUR BABIES”.

  2. I need to get busy on doing the same thing. I sort of did a half-assed job on cleaning my room and I need to finish the job. The hypothesis is that if you clean up your surroundings physically, your life will start straightening itself out as well.

    Hell, that’s optimistic, ain’t it?

    I have managed to unearth cool items that I thought I’d lost forever. Nothing as cool as that photo, though.

  3. Not to be all Martha Stewart on ya or anything, but doesn’t organizing everything feel awesome?

    I almost never get in the organizey-eliminatey mood, but when I do – yeeow!!! I can’t even tell you, for example, how amazing it was to pare my entire 34 years on this planet down to what would fit in/on my car when I moved to Seattle. I was forced to find out what really mattered and what didn’t really matter in the long-term. And in the end, everything fit so nicely into around 20 milk crates. Incredible to have one’s whole life stowed neatly in 20 milk crates.

    Believe me, that is not the case now. I’ve made up for the aforementioned paring down of my life by buying more useless, meaningless (but pretty) crap than ever before! Heaven help me when I have to move again! I’ll need a separate van just for the orange and green knick-knacks…

  4. I’ve certainly found that by seeing everything (which happens when I open boxes and actually look inside) I have a better understanding of what I need to get done and what resourses I have to do it with. It’s embarrassing to run across so many duplicates of things, for example: t-squares, or copies of Maus. Lots of them are things that I would have had access to If I had just made myself unpack.

  5. I have been doing more and more of this the past year, and it feels good. The nicest thing is to to realize that I don’t actually miss any of the stuff I’ve unburdened from myself.

    With my move to Brooklyn less than a month away, I’m ready for an all-out purge-fest. I think it will be immensely cathartic.

  6. I say there shall be no more babies.
    Of those who are babies, all but one shall live.
    The rest shall keep as they are.

    The other thing I kept threatening to do was take a picture of my spooge and put it up on the departmental baby bulletin board. I mean, I express half of potentially hundreds of thousands of babies almost every day. 🙂

  7. Very hearty congrats on living out of the box!

    It’s a great feeling to realize that you own your belongings, they don’t own you. I have the same plastic container fetish you do– every time I see an interesting design (on sale) I buy two, three, or five of them to group on a shelf. They come in handy for those inevitable new treasures (junk) I drag into the house.

    Alas, my box collection is in storage, far from where I can dig thru the detrius for the treasures I miss. I do have motivation to dig, tho. The Redwood run is less than two weeks away, and I HAVE to find my tent and sleeping bag!

  8. Organizing? Yes, because it means I can find anything I own with a minimum of fuss and bother.

    Eliminating? HELL no. I’m a classic data packrat — the idea of getting rid of magazines/books/music/movies/etc. gives me hives just thinking about it.

    I really need to spend a weekend fired up on massive amounts of caffeine cleaning out my apartment — and then moving stuff over from my storage unit with the eventual goal of closing it. Yes, that will involve getting rid of stuff; I have an unfortunate tendency to make “piles of stuff” and I can’t just discard a pile because there’s both stuff that needs to go and stuff that needs to stay in any given pile….

  9. I am so happy not to be paying storage space rent any more! One other thought – I had a flash of understanding the other day when I confronted a batch of magazines that I had saved “because there was something I wanted” in them. I thumbed through each one and coouldn’t for the life of me find what it was that was supposedly so important at the time. I don’t think this is Alzheimer’s. SO now I can feel much freer about getting rid of data.

  10. I’ve certainly found that by seeing everything (which happens when I open boxes and actually look inside) I have a better understanding of what I need to get done and what resourses I have to do it with. It’s embarrassing to run across so many duplicates of things, for example: t-squares, or copies of Maus. Lots of them are things that I would have had access to If I had just made myself unpack.

  11. I am so happy not to be paying storage space rent any more! One other thought – I had a flash of understanding the other day when I confronted a batch of magazines that I had saved “because there was something I wanted” in them. I thumbed through each one and coouldn’t for the life of me find what it was that was supposedly so important at the time. I don’t think this is Alzheimer’s. SO now I can feel much freer about getting rid of data.

  12. Books? Dispersing Books? Book Slut, here!

    And since when did have an inner Virgo? You should have invited – she’d have despatched the offending detritus far more quickly, far more efficiently!

Leave a Reply to deafdykeCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.