Books and Clothes

As part of my continuing efforts to rid myself of old patterns and further streamline my life, I've been going through everything I own and losing as much as possible.

To that end, I've been putting a little time into it each day, and a lot of time when able.

Last week, I leaned into my books. I have a lot. Most of them, I read once and set aside. I can't throw away a book, so instead they collect in stacks in my closet and next to my bed. Ugh. I sat down and separated them into two stacks: Core Titles, and Books that Can Go Away.

You call a stack of books something like "Core Titles," and you expect it to be small, an elite squadron of the best of the best. But I define a Core Title as any book that I could imagine myself wanting to re-read, and being bummed that it isn't just sitting on a shelf, patiently waiting for that happy moment.

True, the over-riding rule of my stuff purge has been "anything I haven't used, touched, read, listened to or worn in the past year... goes." Books are the exception. For instance, I don't read THE MASTER AND MARGARITA every year, but I definitely get back into that one every couple of years. It stays. My stack of Core Titles is higher than expected.

I've been taking the Books that Can Go Away to the library in lots of twenty or so at a time. I don't want to overwhelm them. They get a little persnickety if you dump a ton of books in their laps. Instead of thinking, "Boy howdy, free books!", they see it as work. Such is the life of a librarian.

I did a quick cull of my clothes last week. That wasn't hard. But it wasn't until last night that I really got into it, doing a load of laundry, emptying the closet and throwing the entire sad affair into a big pile on my bed to be sorted and judged.

Some interesting facts quickly came to light:

a) I have a ton of fucking socks. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was idly thinking of getting more black socks. I was re-washing the same six or seven pairs every week. But that seemed weird... I have this giant pile of socks sitting around, right? Why do I keep going back to the same pairs? What's going on with that?

In truly spreading them all out and taking a good, hard look at this sock situation, I recognized an emerging pattern... Whenever I did laundry and put it away and found a single sock without a brother, I'd set it off to the side. I don't know why... perhaps, in the back of my mind, I thought the other one would show up from under the bed or from behind a dresser or something. This went on for SEVEN YEARS, finally bringing me to the moment I was standing next to my bed, shaking my head at a pile composed of dozens of single socks.

See what I mean? We do stuff... not exactly NOT thinking about it, but BARELY thinking about it, just enough to go through a series of motions without any actual thought. Though this is so minor I'm almost embarrassed by the fact that I'm blogging about adventures in my sock drawer, but God is in the details. In some small way, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm in the process of ridding from my life.

Fucking SOCKS, dude. I don't even know what to do with the goddamn things. Do I give a big pile of single socks to Goodwill, and inflict my mismatched sock curse on a charitable organization? Or do I toss 'em?

b) I found a stack of pants I'd brought out with me from Chicago. They're all khakis and such, business casual-type pants. I thought, "Ah ha, more pants." A good thing. Again, you never know what your true resources are until you look. But then I tried them on... and they were all too big. When I came out to LA, I was wearing a 34. These days, I'm either a 30 or 32, depending on the specific pair. I don't really feel any different, but I guess I'm in better shape these days.

Well, there's some good news, huh?