Sorting through stuff

Today’s task has been to sort through piles of STUFF that have been accumulating in my apartment: in the fruit dish, on the table near the front entrance, on my bedroom dresser, around my desk (dear god, around my desk!), on the filing cabinet, on the kitchen table. These little piles have been nagging at my consciousness – the unopened junk mail that must be opened and sorted for recycling or shredding; the TTC Metropasses that – for some stupid reason – apparently have to be saved (along with the actual receipts) in order for the cost to be deducted from my income taxes; the free greeting cards from various charities are nice enough for me to save for future use, but which I’ve yet to use because from the name on the back of the card it’s obvious that it’s free, and how tacky is that???

It’s frustrating how much time this process takes, mostly because there are so many mini-decisions to be made and sometimes the answer isn’t obvious (e.g., where do I put the latest set of free greeting cards if the drawer for greeting cards is full? Do I want to make a donation to the charity that sent me, unsolicited, more address labels? [After all, I was just looking fruitlessly for some address labels the other day.] Do I really want to save these books for the second-hand bookstore, or should I just put them out in the hallway for my neighbours to take if they like? How long after its expiration date should I actually throw out a medication?)

Then there’s the other debris, “life debris”, I guess you could call it - stuff left by my previous two roommates. One was supposedly coming back from Africa, but it’s been over a month and still no word, and I am gradually arriving at the conclusion that she may never come back (which isn’t a total tragedy as far as I’m concerned, as I’m really enjoying living alone these days). I know she’s going through a hard time, but in the meantime what do I do with her stuff? Her mail? The two boxes of bran flakes she left on top of the fridge are now in the garbage, because I think the cereal must be stale by now, and I’m certainly not going to eat it – it’s bran flakes, for crying out loud. The six or eight bottles of salad dressings and other condiments that were in the fridge are loooooong gone. The other stuff will just stay where it is for a while longer, I guess. I just hope she’s okay.

The other roommate situation ended badly, and while life has certainly been saner and less gut-churning since, I came to realize today that I actually did do care a great deal for this person. Getting “rid” of a person involves more regrets than, say, a stack of books, but my head is telling my heart that it was the healthiest possible decision for me, and that it still probably is. I found some more of her stuff in the last 10 days, and I think I will just send it off to her and leave it at that and learn to live with my disappointment.

And then there are the things that I can’t throw away, like letters from my friend Wendy, whom I met while we were teachers in South Korea. I’m not a terribly sentimental person, and generally read the Christmas cards people send me and then promptly recycle them just to try to manage the psychological burden of even more STUFF, but Wendy’s letters from New Zealand are different. Let me put it to you this way: when I read Bridget Jones books by Helen Fielding, I kept feeling they could have been written by Wendy. Wendy and Fielding have similar comic styles, with colourful hyperbole and manic pacing. For example, in her Christmas letter I just found from last year, she writes of her highly demanding work managing a pita factory, filling wraps for schools: “We have run like Indian gods with many arms to keep up with orders …” Every year she talks about selling the factory (of which she owns a significant part), and Christmas 2006 is no exception: “ I am further motivated by the fact that it will be my last Christmas with the bakery (if it isn’t please feel free to euthanize me) …” Well, it’s almost Christmas again, and the bakery is still not sold … but don’t worry, Wendy, you and your letters most certainly will never end up on my discard pile! :)

Now back to work …