Date Night has been postponed in favor of Sit-At-Home-And-Relax-While-Listening-To-Music-After-Moving-Pots-Of-Dirt-And-Cleaning-The-Old-House-All-Day Night. I’m catching up on computery things with a Black and Tan close at hand and I believe Kim’s making a chocolate cake. I think a hot bath and a date with a Neti pot (oh, man, the basement work this past week has been dusty; I think a few readers may know the term “faire boogers”) may be on the menu for later tonight.
Something quite apropos to the recent move is a set of articles on 43 Folders (the guy who came up wit the Hipster PDA and who is just a general organizational freak) about the “War On Clutter.” There’s a good recap at the tail end of this article on book clutter (i.e. reducing the number of books you own.) Much of this stuff I have figured out on my own, and quite a bit of junk was shed in the months leading up to the move. A few highlights of the series of articles include:
* There is memorabilia clutter and “I might need this someday” clutter, with ways of dealing with both
* “The things you own are a distraction to getting started on the right path. The key to getting — and staying — organized is to look beyond the stuff and imagine the life you could be living. Put most simply: It’s about how you see your life before all else.”
* “To some extent, I think de-cluttering involves recognizing that regret is part of life, and being OK with that. Yes, I’ve given away books that I now often wish I still owned. But I’ve also screwed up relationships, made iffy career choices, etc. — you suck it up and move on.”
* Never “organize” what you can discard
* You’re going to need a bigger garbage can
And of course…
“‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.” -Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Yum. Chocolate cake.
