Clutter

Yesterday, 4/20, was my birthday. I opened a couple of great gifts from C. at midnight: the first two books in A Song of Ice and Fire, a series that I want to re-read in its entirety while waiting for the fifth book to be published (come on already, GRRM!), and some pot.

I took the day off work and meant to spend it in dolce far niente. At one point I needed to find a stamp to send a friend a card, but I had no idea where C. had put them during his latest … well, you can’t call them cleaning sprees; they’re more like shoving-stuff-around-before-people-come-over sprees. Not that I blame him – I do the same thing. Clutter in and of itself is OK with me, as long as the stuff is useful and I know where everything is. That was not the case with the stamps, however. I went through the piles I thought they would most likely be in, but no dice.

Frustrated, I was seized with the impulse to do some real cleaning. I attacked the piles and after 2 hours of work ended up throwing out a couple of big kitchen bags’ worth of junk, putting other less junky stuff in the Goodwill stash and some in the Secret Santa regift stash, and re-organizing other items to more appropriate places in the apartment. I also got rid of two bags of styrofoam packing peanuts, otherwise known in this household as devil spawn, and flattened and recycled some empty cardboard boxes. And I still felt like I hadn’t even made a dent.

I spent the rest of the day reacting rather disproportionately to the actual problem – mostly angry and sad that we have accumulated so much useless crap (a subject for another post), and beating up on myself for various things, like not being a better housekeeper, letting this make me sad on my birthday, being so self-critical (no, really), etc.

Several people phoned and I had some lovely catching-up conversations, and then I had a gig in the evening and C. took me out for a great dinner between the warmup and the concert. And I have to say I felt a lot better after that dinner and after singing Handel for 3 hours. But the funky weird depression stuff, even though some can be chalked up to monthly hormonal swings, scares me a little. And it’s just another in a relatively long list of things I complain about and never seem to actually get around to dealing with. Kind of like the useless crap.

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Tags: Marriage, Birthday, Clutter, Depression, Hormones