De-Cluttering Woes
Mar. 11th, 2016 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkferengiAn older friend recently shared some of her de-cluttering woes. This was my reply.
Thank you for your frank sharing of your collecting and de-cluttering woes. Your efforts give me inspiration to renew my own. The older I get, the more I count opportunity cost: one day to read a book, another to get caught on what I got behind on while reading the book. If each book I read is going to cost two days of my life, then it had better be worthwhile. I'm stacked spouse-higher in places, with books that are perfectly interesting, but which I'm not likely to be able to get to. Hence the increased de-cluttering urgency. My house needs excavating every 5-10 years, whether I like it or not.
And I mostly don't [either do, or like the doing]. In spite of ze spouse's support [enthusiastic volunteering to rent fleet of U-Haul trucks ;)], it's hard to let go. We hoarders see things in layers of time. There's the past, emotional associations, the present satisfaction at hoarding a treasure, and the future possibilities of something being useful. Last month, I went through the mystery section & got rid of at least 10 feet that I hadn't read in several years & wasn't likely to get [back] to.
Full of smug, self-satisfaction, I turned to the science fiction section, and ... ground to a halt, like spinning wheels in clogging sand. I finally figured out why. Although I read more mysteries these days [especially cosies with punny titles & cats on the covers], my primary identification is as an sf fan. It's primordial, from reading Lester Del Rey & Rip Foster in 4th grade. Getting rid of sf isn't a light twinge, like mystery; it's deep gouging, worse even than peeling a sunburn too early.
It still needs doing, of course; I'm close to getting claustrophic in my own house, which is just silly. I don't want to just throw things at the thrift stores; rather like pets, I want to send my friends off to good homes. Right when I'm in this mode, the Georgia Tech library [where I sent several truckloads in the last purge, 10 years ago] is closed for renovations for the next 2-3 years. So, I do the swap-site thing [paperbackswap.com, et. al.], but that gets expensive, with all the shipping.
As Yul Brynner said in "The King And I," "Is a puzzlement." But we persevere.
Excelsior!
So, how are y'all getting on with your domestic de-cluttering endeavors?
Thank you for your frank sharing of your collecting and de-cluttering woes. Your efforts give me inspiration to renew my own. The older I get, the more I count opportunity cost: one day to read a book, another to get caught on what I got behind on while reading the book. If each book I read is going to cost two days of my life, then it had better be worthwhile. I'm stacked spouse-higher in places, with books that are perfectly interesting, but which I'm not likely to be able to get to. Hence the increased de-cluttering urgency. My house needs excavating every 5-10 years, whether I like it or not.
And I mostly don't [either do, or like the doing]. In spite of ze spouse's support [enthusiastic volunteering to rent fleet of U-Haul trucks ;)], it's hard to let go. We hoarders see things in layers of time. There's the past, emotional associations, the present satisfaction at hoarding a treasure, and the future possibilities of something being useful. Last month, I went through the mystery section & got rid of at least 10 feet that I hadn't read in several years & wasn't likely to get [back] to.
Full of smug, self-satisfaction, I turned to the science fiction section, and ... ground to a halt, like spinning wheels in clogging sand. I finally figured out why. Although I read more mysteries these days [especially cosies with punny titles & cats on the covers], my primary identification is as an sf fan. It's primordial, from reading Lester Del Rey & Rip Foster in 4th grade. Getting rid of sf isn't a light twinge, like mystery; it's deep gouging, worse even than peeling a sunburn too early.
It still needs doing, of course; I'm close to getting claustrophic in my own house, which is just silly. I don't want to just throw things at the thrift stores; rather like pets, I want to send my friends off to good homes. Right when I'm in this mode, the Georgia Tech library [where I sent several truckloads in the last purge, 10 years ago] is closed for renovations for the next 2-3 years. So, I do the swap-site thing [paperbackswap.com, et. al.], but that gets expensive, with all the shipping.
As Yul Brynner said in "The King And I," "Is a puzzlement." But we persevere.
Excelsior!
So, how are y'all getting on with your domestic de-cluttering endeavors?
