A Clean Slate

Yesterday was my 31st birthday and a new moon! Bring on the newness!

I have two goals this year:

1. To relax more. (Dumpling, I can hear you laughing. Knock it off.)
2. To own less stuff.

I got very inspired by this article I read in the NY Times today.

I started to feel upset about how much stuff (junk, crap, clutter, etc) was in my life after we moved to a new apartment in April of last year. I put all our things in boxes and literally felt the weight of what I owned. I had flashbacks to reading Walden in the tenth grade. Dumpling was busy getting the restaurant started at that time, and the burden of unpacking and setting up our new place was on me.

Then a few months after that we were married, and my very large, very well-intentioned Midwestern family gave us a lot of gifts. I had struggled with the gift registry because there were probably five or six things I could actually think of that we needed (a new set of sheets, a new frying pan) but my (generous, loving) relatives wanted to see a typically big registry so they could get us "something nice."

It's really hard to explain to house-dwellers what it's like living in a Brooklyn apartment.

It's also very tricky to try to avoid the traditional wedding gift situation without offending people who have traditional beliefs about weddings.

That's one thing I love about Asian weddings--you give the happy couple an envelope with cash in it and you're done.

Anyway, the wedding hubub is all behind us now (we had our one-year anniversary on Monday!) but that's the point when I started to realize how uncomfortable all my stuff was making me.

I don't know if we'll be able to take the idea as far as the couple in the article did. And I don't think their choices are necessarily ideal for everyone. I suspect each of us has his or her own "comfort level" for possessions. Just like we each tend to have our own "set point" for body weight.

I'm still feeling kind of chunky with my junky, so I think there's more to lose.

I've been cleaning out stuff, selling on eBay, giving to the Salvation Army, and selling/donating clothes at clothing recyclers like Buffalo Exchange all spring and summer. What I've learned is, you can't rush it. Just do a little at a time. Get rid of one bag or box of crap per week. Again, it's like weight loss: if you lose it too fast you'll just get it back again (like when I compulsively bought Gremlins on DVD and three books at a stoop sale--and I have literally hundreds of DVDs and books already). Small adjustments over time are key.

It's funny how one week you won't be ready to part with that handbag you haven't used in two years, and then all of a sudden one day you can't stand to look at it anymore, and you give it away and you feel so relieved, and it's like: why did it take me so long to see that I didn't even like it anymore?

Such is life. Here's to being older and wiser!