Immeasurably More

I've just spent half an hour sitting cross-legged on my bed surveying the chaos that is my apartment. You can actually fit quite a lot of stuff into 500 sq. ft. And it's mine: the books I've enjoyed reading, the movies I can recite huge portions of, the clothes that make me look good (I think) , the dishes my high school bff gave me in memory of our trip to Paris. This gold tea pot with the orange dragon belonged to my grandfather, and you can pry it from my cold dead fingers. Seriously. I mean that. I'm trying to be reasonable, to balance the cost of shipping or storing the things I own now with the cost of replacing them with new things later. How much do I really need ? Less is more, as they say, and most of this is just going to weigh me down. But rationality is having a hard time sinking from my head to my heart tonight, so, I'm giving up for now. Maybe it will be easier tomorrow. ~~~LeAn

I have several freecyclers stopping by today to pick up various things that I have found around my apartment and no longer have any use for, like VHS tapes and 35 mm film. It is a wonderful feeling to know that they will go to someone who can use them and an even more wonderful feeling to know that, however small their size or slight their weight, I will not have to see, pack, carry or ship them ever again. Similarly, I've been giving out a few things around the office, so far mostly Kinder Surprise toys accumulated from my previous travels. There is general agreement among my co-workers that the Kinder Surprise engineers are geniuses of their trade. If you don't believe me, you design a super-hero-chasing-a-super-villain-over-NYC toy that will disassemble and fit into a plastic egg about 1 1/2 inches long. Two other things that will be leaving my apartment today are a library book - Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island , which I enjoyed, but don't think is his b