Possessions are causing me suspicion

There is one thing I’ve been putting off in life for quite some time now, and a few recent events have finally spurred me to get cracking. The task? A major review and overhaul of my possessions, specifically all of the stuff I’ve acquired over the last, oh, ten years. The recent events are two in number: first, it’s coming up on the two-year anniversary of when we moved into our current apartment, which means that any moving box that still has stuff in it is fair game for disposal. Second, my favorite office supply store near where I work is going out of business. I know that doesn’t seem terribly relevant, but it fits into the puzzle because the office supply store is where they sell things that help you get organized, like file folders and so on. And also, the store itself was incredibly well organized, in a way that bordered on obsessive. Since I value my own organizational talents, the store and I were a good personality match. And now that they’re going out of business, I figure I’m going to need to pick up the slack.

Back to the moving boxes for a moment. Thanks to all the housing woes of the recent past, many of which have been chronicled here, there’s been a lot of moving in the last several years. It’s true that moving frequently often discourages the piling up of unwanted stuff, because you have a strong motivation to keep your possessions lean and you don’t have time to fill your current space with crap. On the other hand, though, recently I’d been moving often enough that I never wanted to spend the time to really look through boxes of papers and random possessions, especially if they were already packed carefully and easy to just move. So a lot of crap has been following me from house to house, simply because of inertia.

I’ve also been partially stymied by the impulse to try and get rid of things in a constructive way, by selling or giving them away on Craigslist. I had a little success at that before the last move—people will take all kinds of odd things if you offer them for free or cheap on Craigslist. But in the ultimate reckoning, I realized a couple of weeks ago that I had a lot of stuff to get rid of, and listing it all individually on Craigslist was too daunting. In fact, it was keeping me from getting off the ground at all. Then I read an online discussion about cleaning out stuff, and was reminded of Goodwill. Stuff that isn’t trash but that I don’t need or want is exactly the kind of stuff that Goodwill takes. Aha!

For about a week, once I started to commit to the idea of going through things, I was in the planning stage. There are only a couple of storage areas in the house where I originally stashed the stuff we don’t use: the dining room closet and the extra room upstairs. There’s also the three redundant corkscrews in the kitchen, but that was quite easily addressed. Now I’m in the phase where I’m actually gathering the unused stuff, trashing the trash and boxing the Goodwill candidates. I also cleared out a clothes drawer that had shit in it I didn’t even remember; things I hadn’t worn since college, or never. Uh, college is getting to be a long time ago. That led to a lot of gleeful chucking of things into the trash, and now that drawer is only half filled. It’s like my pajamas get to live in a mansion with cathedral ceilings now.

I also visited my doomed office supply store today, and bought some things to help organize some of the crap I do intend to save. Childhood papers and writings from the distant past are scattered across several boxes and locations right now. My plan is to collect them into a single plastic file box, which I can then easily store and move. My messy life will be neatly filed—ah, the irony.

Of course, an important part of the entire process is to report it here, if only to provide motivation to see this through. Embarrassment is a healthy source of stamina. After all, I mentioned here that we sold the old Civic when, last September? Well, the bag containing all the stuff from the glove compartment and the trunk is still sitting in the dining room. Uh, maybe it’s time to get rid of that.