Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Priorities, Cleaning, and Minor Purchases

Dorm rooms aren't big.

You own probably about twenty or thirty cubic feet of stuff when you move into a 10x15x8 dorm room.

Logic and math says that you and all of your stuff and the desk and the dresser and the bed and the (insert large dorm object here) cannot all exist in that space together without a few bruised toes. Butyou'll try anyway.

Do you need to bring your entire collection of miniature teddy bears? Of course! And the complete dinnerware set? How could I leave it behind? And that hand-tooled leather bag you've never used? Duh!

See where I'm going?

So we start to cut back, and leave the dual-action flossing and brushing tootbrush (still in its box) and the Martha Stewart stationery set (only $39.99 plus the cost of shipping, handling, and the effort it will take to pitch it into a dumpster in a month!), and all the other crap we hang on to because it makes us feel all warm and fuzzy.

I have been hanging onto a lot of stuff. This is not the ideal "stuff" that is perfect and makes you happy every time you look at it. No no. This is the stuff that when you open the drawer to get what you really want, you see it and think "Dear god, I can't even look at this right now!" and you slam the drawer shut and hope to never open it again. Why? It might eat your soul.

So we leave the drawer shut because it's too scary. Or maybe because we just can't justify something that we spent our hard-earned money on in the first place. I'm a college student - money is a big deal.

But I have limits. Limits are reached when I have finally come to a healthier, mostly headache-free point in my life... only to realize I live in a high-class dumpster. Nothing is dirty or moldy, there's just a lot of stuff! So much of it represents what I would actually like to own, so I have five or six representations of a single more expensive object I want.

Logic says that in order to gain space and sanity, I should just go ahead and buy the one thing I want and give away the six other objects. In the immortal words of one of my idols: "Pick it up, walk to the window, and throw it aaaaalllll out!"

Ahhh. Breathing room.

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