Stuff

So I'm at home alone, sitting on the couch attempting to take the braids out of my hair. It's a long process and I attempt it in bits. An hour later, I go to start again and suddenly can't find the rat-tail comb I use to take the braids out. I'm looking all over the couch for it. No luck. I go back to the kitchen to see if I set it down while I made the last cappuccino (unlikely, since I don't take hair stuff into my kitchen, but I check). No luck. My apartment is only two bedrooms, so I walk around it looking for the comb, without success.

I'll find it at some point, of course, but it occurs to me that I just have too much stuff. I need to clear out about 75% of my belongings and give them to the Salvation Army. I was doing good for a while, making donations at least once a month, but then life starts to happen -- I'm in the gym 3 nights and one morning a week, in class one night a week, in church all day on Sunday -- yeah, I might go out for dinner on a Friday night, but today after class it took all my energy just to gather my clothes and drop them off at the laundry and the cleaners. In the half day I have to myself, I didn't choose to go through old stuff. I attempted to take the braids out of my hair so I can get it done before the party next week.

Here's an example of stuff. I want to wear a girlie tux to the party -- a skirt suit with tuxedo shirt, tie and cummerbund. My niece did it at her prom and I thought it looked lovely. Now that I'm a normal size, I can do it. I have a ladies' tuxedo shirt, and I got a pink bowtie and a kind of coral-pink cummerbund and tie. And I have a gold vest. I've decided I want to wear the gold vest, but the neither the pink tie nor the coral-colored ensemble looked festive enough. I got all this stuff in thrift shops, which was how I justified spending money on them. But I was too lazy to go thrift shopping after the class today, so I went to that men's store on 125. They of course had bow tie and rubberband sets, as they called them. So I looked at a gold one. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was a brighter shade than the gold vest I have, but I decided to buy it anyway. And because the guy could see the shopping lust in my eyes, he made me a deal on two sets, so I bought a set in red (which I will wear because it will look nice and festive with my gold vest). But I didn't need to buy two sets, and I really didn't need to buy them new -- I coulda got on the train and gone thrift shopping. If you go to the higher-end thrift shops, you'll find new stuff that gets donated, I guess after big parties or weddings or movie shoots -- I didn't need to buy two sets, because now that's just more stuff I have. It's not like I'm actually going to wear this cummerbund thing any more than once, possibly twice a year.

It's that way in every area of my life, and it needs to stop. I have waaaay more than I need of everything (with the possible exception of liquid cash) and need to begin to do as the bumper sticker says: "Live Simply so that others may Simply Live." I think that's going to be my goal. I like to travel, and that should be where my focus goes. No more of these hundred dollar rubber chicken dinners that I don't know what the money goes for anyway... No more nickel and diming and buying useless stuff like cummerbunds I'm never going to use.

I need to get rid of the clutter in every area of my life. No more Stuff -- I think the physical stuff is likely somehow related to emotional "stuff" -- it's like baggage. And I don't need more baggage. I don't need more stuff. It's time to get rid of the Stuff in my life.

Just as soon as I get these braids out....