Sucking at Life

Yesterday, I did a load of dishes. And it's important that we're really clear about what happened here, so let me elaborate.

Ed and I collectively have quite a few dishes, and a large number of them were dirty. I was picking up these dirty dishes, one by one, and placing them on the dishwasher racks. Once I was done, I would I put a little square of soap into the dishwasher, close it, move a small lever to lock the door, and slightly rotate a dial. A couple of hours later, there would be clean dishes.

This is not at all difficult or taxing, and yet we are a couple of days behind on dishes. As usual. Whence the following conversation as I was loading:

Me: We suck at life.

Ed: Oh, I know.

Me: How could anyone have this easy of a life...

Ed: And suck at it this much?

Me: Yeah.

Ed: I don't know, but we do.

[pause]

Ed: We can't solve any real problems, that's why we solve made-up problems.

Me: Right! So that's why we're in math?

Ed: Yep.

Me: So we can be like, "Oh, what if we had this type of thing, and we called it a blah de blah, then what else could we say about it?" and just give ourselves easier problems to work on?

Ed: Yep.

Me: My god, I think you're right.

The Fantasy of an Uncluttered Life

Tomorrow, assuming we can make it in the snow, Ed and I are headed to our rental cabin for four days of relaxation. I plan to do a lot of math homework, read for hours on end, hang out in a hot tub (for which the snow is a bonus, assuming, again, that we can get to the cabin), eat homemade food, and just generally chill.

Aside from the hot tub and the general beauty of the surroundings,the aspects of this vacation that I'm most looking forward to are theoretically possible at home. No Internet. No TV. (The cabin has one, but I don't plan to use it.) No distractions. A lot of reading. But I wouldn't do that at home.

Sometimes I feel like it's the sheer amount of stuff in my home that keeps me distracted and unproductive. I don't really have that much stuff - we are not hoarders or anything - but I wish I had even less. I have a persistent fantasy of living in a place that is sparse, simple, utilitarian, and not only uncluttered, but incapable of becoming cluttered, by virtue of not containing things that could clutter it.

Some of this is pure fantasy, but I do want to get rid of a number of things before I leave for grad school next year. I have a lot of things I need (or choose to) hang on to, but there are other things I really can get rid of. Some highlights:

• A few years ago, I got rid of most of my books, and I'm ready to do that again. (I haven't gotten many new books in the interim, I'm just ready for the next stage.) Most of my books I will never read again, so why should I hold onto them? I plan to take these to the library nearby, where they happily accept donations for their various fundraisers.
• I am finally giving away my saxophone, which I got several years ago, and really enjoyed taking lessons in before I ran out of time and energy for it. This kind of entails giving up the fantasy of playing sax regularly, which feels sad, but it's not as though I couldn't buy a saxophone and take up playing again in the future if I wanted to. I found a local middle school that is, in the words of the band director, "always looking for quality instruments," and I will drop it off there.
• I have way more pairs of shoes than I need. Most will just go in one of those ubiquitous clothes + shoes donation dumpsters, but I have a couple of new pairs that I got a few years ago but that didn't work out for me. I have scheduled those to go up on eBay.
• Once I finish the process (begun years ago) of putting my music CDs into binders, my music collection will be reduced to three or four binders, which will take up a lot less space than the gazillion CDs in their original cases did. Most of my music is on the computer anyway.
• Various old computer equipment can go to Goodwill or a pawn shop or something.
• I am going to get rid of my tent and sleeping bag. I never, ever go camping.
• Almost all of my DVDs and videos can go. I won't watch most of them again and it's not hard to rent a movie when you want one.
  

In addition, here are some things I do not plan on moving with me to a new place:

• My dining room chairs, which do not match my table either aesthetically or in terms of height, and are just annoying.
• A couple of my bookcases, which will be empty after the book purge.
• My entertainment center, video game consoles, DVD player, receiver, speakers, or TV. I could change my mind on this, but for now I think I'm just not going to bother having a TV or any of that in the new place. (If Ed moves with me, we'll probably take this stuff, but I hope not to really have TV service. If I live alone, I think I just won't have any of it.)
• Most of my framed posters - I don't seem to care about them enough to hang them up, and they're kind of a pain to move. I can always get something else for the walls.
  

My dining room table and desk are both useful pieces of furniture that can be disassembled into a much more convenient size, so they will stay (unless Mosch decides he wants the desk back). I may get another sparse type of desk - I would like to have one that doesn't have my computer on it at all, since computers are very distracting to me. I'd like a desk like this or this from Ikea.

Here are some other things I plan to keep:

• My bed (it's great, very comfy, and everyone needs a bed)
• My clothes (at least the ones that fit)
• Towels and sheets
• Kitchen equipment
• Photo albums
• Yearbooks
• Seymour (my first stuffed animal)
  
• My filing cabinet and its contents
• My little nested teak end tables
• Cat equipment (litter box, carriers, etc.)

That's the plan.

Spring Cleaning

In an utterly out-of-character move, I took advantage of having five days off and have gone through everything in my entire bedroom (including the closet). I got rid of a lot of things including

• just enough books that I could shelve all of the remaining books
• all of my clothes that don't fit or are stained
• giant amounts of papers that I don't need or want
• a kite I never fly
• five of my seven pairs of snow gloves/mittens
• a scarf I would never wear
• shoes I don't like
• sheets that are not the same size as my bed
• one of the six pillows I own
• a tiny cooler and a giant thermos
• about six backpacks and other similar types of bags
• my Miami J collars from when I had my surgery
• connectors and cables for tech equipment I no longer own
  

I also finished going through all the papers I have from childhood. When I bought my beautiful file cabinet a couple of years ago, Mosch and I went through almost all of my papers and filed them away or discarded them. But I left one medium-sized box of papers from childhood because I just ran out of steam, and figured I could get around to them later.

I like to keep almost everything like that. I love to look at elementary school reports cards, the paper on solar energy that I wrote in 3rd grade, my high school journals, and all kinds of stuff like that. And now they are all filed properly in my filing cabinet.

The nice thing about a serious filing cabinet is that, once you have one, and until it is full, there is no cost to adding more things to it. It takes up the same amount of space whether it is half-empty or mostly full. So it was really wonderful to get all of the papers in there.

We also, while filing all papers, emptied out my "to be filed" file folder and either filed or discarded everything in it.

I had a lot of help from Mosch and some from Ed, but I worked really hard, and I'm super pleased that I've thinned out my possessions somewhat, and organized and cleaned the rest. The room and closet got an excellent vacuuming too, so everything is just super nice.

I still feel like I own too many things, but at least in my bedroom, I don't own anything I don't actively want to own. When we did the closet, we took every single thing out first, just to make sure that (a) it was just as easy to throw things out as to keep them, and (b) the stuff would get reorganized. Obviously I couldn't do that with the whole bedroom, but still - almost everything was gone through.

As much as I love getting rid of things I no longer need, and seeing the useful things go to thrift stores where other people who actually want them can get them, I'm usually way too lazy to clean and organize. But since this was my last week at my old job, and I had to work hard all week to get caught up, I was in the habit of working, and since I spent the last day at my job cleaning out my old office, I was even in the habit of organizing and cleaning.

I'm very pleased with myself tonight :-)