This past weekend, Liv and I have been cleaning out our apartment of anonymous stuff that we’ve accumulated over the years. Our place is a lot cleaner and neater already. We moved in together in April, and at that time we each got rid of a lot of stuff to make the move easier. It’s alarming that we didn’t do this good a job the first time around.
photo from Merrick Brown, via flickr
I’ve put more clothing in bags to give away - they’ll probably mostly go to Housing Works, where Liv just started working last week. I now have one closet’s worth of clothing. When I left my last apartment I had a footlocker and a trashbag of clothes for the thrift stores.
I’ve gone through all the notebooks I kept from college - I was determined to trash a lot of my notes. Most of the good stuff was from computer courses. I was convinced I could get rid of it because…
- my notations would be (are?) obsolete
- if my notations are not obsolete, they are surely available to me on the internet somewhere
I got rid of most of them. I did this by tearing the notes out of my notebook. Along with the notes, what I ended up with was a stack of mostly unused notebooks. I’m holding onto some of my old notes for now (which makes it less surprising that I’ve gone through this process before).
Getting rid of books I don’t care terribly much for. Getting rid of all the odd cables that I don’t need because I already have backups for the backups in case I lose them. Put out the plastic container/drawers that I’ve had for years. They took up much more space than the objects I kept inside of them. I have a bin of stuff that’s usable and that I’ll try to give away.
It’s so much work to go over all these objects. And in the end, I’m left with… less objects. Which is what I want, but it leaves me feeling a bit empty (har har). I cannot describe the feeling, but I tried to express it to Daoud. He said he’s cleaned out his stuff three times in the past year, and “I guess you do it so you don’t have to think about it.” I have piles of stuff, and each pile is a todo list I don’t want to do. So I have less piles now.
And I’m past that stuff now, and I feel good about it all. But now I can’t believe I have the luxury to get rid of stuff when so many people don’t have enough.