In honor of Jameson’s departure, I am holding a Winter Spring Cleaning. He was right (damn). I have SO much stuff. Not like I didn’t know that before, but now those boxes sitting in my living room are just starting to irritate me. Because they’re there, and because I have no idea where to put what’s in them. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want to because I would know that there would be purposeful pockets of space everywhere in my apartment that I forced stuff into. Personal things should fit intuitively into a living space; there is a given place for everything, and I just don’t have enough surface in my figurative, intuitive counters and drawers and shelves and closets and corners.

For a while there, I did rationale that throwing away stuff in China was too tragic since they don’t have Salvation Armies here. But, much to my dismay, garbage bins are veritable stop-and-go’s, because people have full-time jobs picking through that stuff here. They even make money on it. There is no Recycling-Bin God in China because any plastic bottles you toss get picked out right away. Any clothes or cardboard you trash becomes an old person’s treasure. Seriously. It does. Great sub-economy.

So, since my Salvation Army plea didn’t pan out, I’m getting rid of it, along with a shitload of my stuff – as much as I can, as quickly as I can. If I didn’t miss them while they were in boxes, I might as well just get rid of the whole shebang.

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