I am by nature an acquisitive greedy squirrel monkey magpie of a person, and I’ve gone through multiple phases of acquisitioning and de-acquisitioning. For several life-change-related reasons, I’m currently battling the urge to Get Things. And I am not always winning. Case in point:
Why, you ask, would I buy a load of show-tune sheet music? Well, there’s a piano in the family again, and I used to be quite good at piano things (also singing), and the prospect of being able to revive that was sufficiently exciting that I … bought sheet music. This is not all of it, by any means. I’d previously bought sheet music for writing-related reasons, e.g. a collection of tango music by Carlos Gardel (while developing my book THE GHOST OF CARLOS GARDEL) and the ‘42nd Street’ revival songbook (because that’s coming into play in the next Andy & Victor novel). But this serves to illustrate the dilemma.
Why is it even a thing? Well, because we’re going to be moving across the country in the not too distant future. What with purchasing packing materials, packing & loading the means of conveyance, getting the stuff where it’s going, unloading & unpacking it all, and disposing of waste, each carton of stuff will cost roughly $100 in time and actual cash. It behooves us to have less stuff. Thus, in the interest of balancing out recent music and book acquisitions, I have recently divested a much greater volume of stuff in the form of kitchen items I haven’t used for 5+ years and thus clearly do not need. Whew.
Something I’ve learned from the recurrent decluttering phases: divesting things I haven’t used for a long time gives me a distinct sense of freedom, of unburdening, of release. It’s as if those things I haven’t used were sitting silently in their drawers or cupboards, judging me. Now somebody else can use those things, and I don’t have to feel that I’ve let myself down somehow by not using them.
Less defensible than the sheet music are some books I’ve bought recently. After reducing my physical library (in a series of operations over nearly ten years) from over 2000 to fewer than 400 books, I’ve instituted a strict One In = One Out policy.
Except I bought 7 books at The Ripped Bodice yesterday, and while I can find 7 books to cull, it will take some time. Full disclosure, five of the seven new books I already own as ebooks; I bought the paperbacks purely to support the store and the authors. And they do look nice on the shelf!
Fortunately I do not owe my publisher anything at the moment, and at least three of the books I have in mind to divest are not text-heavy books, so with a bit of application I should have them queued for disposal by the end of July.
Then it’s on to the next project, which had better include writing something, eh?