celebrate discardia on a regular basis

Oddly, I haven’t decluttered much this winter, but I’m starting to feel the familiar urge. I went shopping this weekend, so as I was putting away the new clothes, I decided to look through my old clothes to see if there was anything that I could give away. Among the things that’re leaving the house are a few pants that I didn’t even remember owning. I filled up one mid-sized bag, but I know there’s more stuff in there that needs to leave… In particular, I have two skirts that I’ve never worn. One I made myself but never hemmed. The other desperately needs a slip, and I’ve actually gone out to buy one for it several times and come home empty-handed each time. It’s silly to feel sorry for clothes, but…

As I was walking downstairs today, I grabbed a pair of rollerblading braces that someone had left on the free spot. No one had claimed them for a few days, and since I had other trash of my own to take out, I grabbed them and set them out top of the trash cans outside my building. Almost as soon as I’d put them there, a stranger [a burly man carrying a bouquet of flowers held up high—his jacket said he was in the lather’s union] scooped them up with a quick “Thank you!”... He was happy to have them since he’d lost his a few weeks before.

I’m so glad my neighbors do the free spot thing! I’ve liberated a bunch of stuff and recieved a bunch of kitchen gadgets in return…

I went a friend’s birthday party last night, where we sat next to a couple we’d only vaguely met… Somehow my boyfriend’s collections came up [he collects all sorts of vintage space/scifi stuff… half of his apartment is given over to display space] and then the guy asked me what I collect. Of course, the answer is that I viligantly patrol my house and spending to make sure nothing I don’t need or adore takes up residence in my space… His next question was “what do you guys fight about”, and my boyfriend and I drew a blank. We don’t fight. He has his space, I have mine. I like his collections, he likes my “empty” house. Although his house gets cluttered, the majority of the stuff in it is on display and the real clutter is boy-mess. My house is vaguely decluttered and clean but it’s also really comfortable. It’s not like I live in a big white box with no furniture.

We have different clutter levels and different cleaning regimens, but his house and mine have one thing in common—we’ve chosen the objects we live with very deliberately. It’s not like I’m dating someone who collects candy wrappers and used tissue. [Although it does occasionally look like I’m dating someone who collects cardboard boxes.] When I used to watch shows like “Clean Sweep”, any time someone wanted to save a group of objects, they were suddenly either “important for work” or something the person was “collecting”. There’s a big difference between buying tchotchkes at the mall and frantically combing through eBay in the hopes that you’ll find a blue version of an extremely rare toy that’s older than my dad.

Discardia is coming up, but I think this time around, I really don’t have much in my domestic life that I want to fix. I do want to keep working on the goals I’ve set out here, but I don’t have a new project that I want to take on. I do want to do a sweep through the house, but it’s more important that I keep working on my downtime projects and do all of the end of the year tie-ing up that I can.

Time to fess up: I didn’t do the dishes this week. Maybe not all week, but since, you know, Wednesday? I cooked, or at least did what counts as cooking around here. I made at least two meals that required pots and the cutting board and a bowl, and I left them all stacked in dirty water for a few days. Mea culpa.

The story isn’t that I didn’t do the dishes, it’s what happened when I did. I set the microwave to cook veggies for seven minutes and started in on the pile. It was gone when the oven dinged, and I even got to wipe down the counter later on in my dinner prep. I often wonder if I don’t cook more because I don’t like dishes - they’re a drag, and I often just leave them, even though I know better - but if I can get through a sinkful in seven minutes, why don’t I do it more often?

Tonight I met up with a few NYC-based 43thingers [Hi FlyingFader and Michael!] for hot chocolate. I walked part-way home with Michael [he lives two blocks north of my house, oddly enough] and we talked about my “simplify” goal… When he first moved to NYC, he came here with two suitcases and a laptop, which is pretty amazing. I don’t know that I could quite do that—I need a cat carrier, and I have an enormous computer that takes up two boxes when I need to carry it into work. Still, I’d love to be able to just flee all of the extra stuff I have. Drop the old bills into the shredder and toss everything I don’t love but have around anyway into the fire.

I confessed to Michael that stuff [particularly yarn] makes me feel guilty. Not just in an over-consumption way, but because I have this useful object that I bought that I haven’t used. I feel sad when I have things that lie fallow. There are women in the suburbs that buy enough yarn to fill up two-car garages, but here I am with my one-two-three-four-five boxes of yarn that I am mostly-actively-using and I feel guilty. I don’t see potential, I see potential unused.

By contrast, my boyfriend actively collects stuff. I love the stuff he collects, but I can’t imagine doing it. He’s explained to me [at length. lengthly length, even.] how obsessive and passionate he is about collecting, and while I understand and enjoy his collections, they would drive me crazy if I had to live in the middle of them. Stuff is claustrophobic to me. I have a silent list of the material things I want in life [Washcloths. A bigger monitor. Kitty litter.], but it usually takes me months to commit. Buying a DVD means that I have to watch it—it’s buying a to-do list. Someone out there said that when people buy him books, he should start charging them rent, since he never let go of them… I feel that when I buy things.

Even though I have stuff, I’m an anti-collector and I don’t know why. I tell people that I have no space, but there’s something else going on there, and I don’t know what…

There’s a good article in the NYTimes about one man’s quick quest to shed a half-ton of carbon with minimal effort…

The Energy Diet

I got this one from a fellow postcrosser:

http://wearewhatwedo.org/

On the front page there’s a list of actions that will make the world just slightly better in no time at all… Do one!

Sunday’s discardian blog entry was really good:

Why Do You Have So Much Junk?

She links to this article on SFGate.com, but you can get the jist from her entry. The article is a little soapboxy and polemicised [and just to warn you, it’s from San Fransisco, so every metaphor has W as a punchline], but it has made me think about all of the excess that we have here in the US. I’m guilty of it too—I try to keep everything to a minimum, but it never quite works out that way when I desperately want something. I think that’s just human nature, to want as much as we can have. I was surprised when I started using 43things how often people would have cleaning and decluttering as goals, but lose 5 pounds or stick to my diet or pay off my debts are part of the same problem, really, and it’s a hard thing to fight… For millenia, wanting as much as we could possibly have was completely necessary, but what do we do now that we’re drowning in “more than enough”?

Also, I just wanna appologise for being so far behind in my cheers—the internet was out over here all weekend and the cheer goblin’s been eating away at my cheers! I’m hoping it’ll all get back to normal soon, but until then, I owe you guys some and I look forward to seeing what you’ve all been up to…

The discardian blog is back! I’ve missed it…