The short answer- be persistent.
When we move in a week or two, Beta and I are taking a single car-load with us, and so to prepare we have been cutting down on even more of our possessions.
Clothing was the easiest- for a few months now I've been using to hanger trick and so it was immediately clear what I hadn't been wearing. I also finally gave up on some of my old t-shirts, many of which have stretched or warped and just fit strangely.
DVDs were a little harder- I had to call not just used video stores but used music stores as well. For some reason, Los Angeles seems to have a dearth of used-whatever stores- we had to drive twenty miles to the DVD-buying place I finally found, and got $40 cash for our troubles, which was cool.
Comics were also easy- we went to Pulp Fiction and traded 15 or 16 used comics (half trade paperbacks, half manga) for 3 new trade paperbacks, which was sweet, though a little counter-productive (but totally worth it! DMZ: Blood in the Game FTW!)
Books, though. Oh my.
It really started with a lot of thinking and reading and writing. Only after talking over the issue in my head for a couple of hours could I really bring myself to make book-decisions and begin to cull things off my shelves.
I found two thoughts to guide me:
- "If there was a fire and this was all destroyed, would I replace this specific book?"
- "Five years down the road, is this book something Awesome Happy Future Me would own?"
I found, for maybe the first time in my life, that for a majority of my books, the answers were both NO.
I think that for a long time books were my security- I knew that if I forgot something, I could always go back to the source and look it up. They let me hang pieces of my brain on the outside.
But I'm not at that place any more. As I mentioned in my previous post, when I was culling books there were whole shelves devoted to subjects that just don't hold my interest any more- I've moved on. Most of what remains are: fiction series that I have read and re-read and plan to read and re-read again- old friends that always show me something new; books on urbanism (but not the ones I found un-instructive or boring or not worth reading twice); a few comics (also old friends); and just five Dungeons and Dragons books (I sold thirty such ones last year). It's about a quarter of the high-water-mark, and less than half of what Rigel and I brought to the condo.
We took them one place, which took two of our three boxes. They had a pretty sketchy store credit policy- you could only used credit for up to half of your transaction. As they were offering us $52 in store credit, I'd have to... buy $104 worth of used books? That seemed pretty much counter to my intention to get rid of books. I haggled with the owner, and got him to just trade for two barely-opened Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, $40 to him but $70 retail! It was good.
The last box we took to another store the next day, and they bought five books for $6 cash, which was cool, but sort of a waste of time, as they took an hour to get around to us. Frustrated, we took the leavings (which were, weirdly, the nicest, least crappy-paperback-y of all the ones we were selling- urbanism textbooks, a few literary journals, some $14 paper-but-bigger-and-nicer-back sci fi, etc) to OPEN , just down the street from us, where they took everything and gave us store credit, which we plan on selling to someone on Craigslist for cash. OPEN was so plesant and such a well-lit, beautiful store, that I was almost happy just to give them the last few books- I knew it was a good home, or at least a pretty train station from which they would travel to good homes.
Weirdness pervaded the two days it took. What was most difficult was how long selling everything took- the whole process stretched out and gave me long periods of time to torture myself about how callous I was to push away so many words, and at such crappy prices.
It was also heart-breaking to enter so many used book stores- most of them seemed over-full and under-staffed. Apparently the recession is hitting the whole industry really hard- half of the places I called to ask were dead numbers of out-of-business stores, and another third weren't currently buying anything. All the open places were depressingly selective- they only seemed to want quick-selling paperbacks, while nicer-but-slower-selling tomes were shunned as short-term losses, even if they might be long-term gains.
But it's done, and despite the messiness of the operation, another weight has been lifted from my heart.
Showing posts with label elaborate story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elaborate story. Show all posts
A Good Day
When I got home for Thanksgiving my parents too seemed to have caught the cleaning bug. The house was a lot emptier, a lot more serene, than it had been. My early christmas gift to them, they informed me, was to be the elimination of at least one, hopefully three or four or all, of my boxes of stuff in the garage.
My mind flashed back to packing those very boxes, five years ago. Books, I remembered, lots of books.
A digression: My parents are, shall we say, not poor. They might be rich- they probably are rich- but they don't act rich, and I never grew up thinking we were rich. But they are comfortable, and they do have discretionary income, although I rarely see them spend it.
I have, however, seen them spend it on books. Many times in my childhood would we venture to the bookstore and leave with armfuls.
I was a voracious reader in high school and middle school. In college most of that appetite was channeled towards assigned reading. Looking up now, I have four half-read books on my shelf, and two more in my bag. The habit has definitely stuck.
I think my parents logic went something like this: reading is a very good habit, and something we want to encourage Connor to do. He should probably be reading good books. If he picks his own books, he will pick crap for a while, but eventually he will start picking good books. But giving him good books is not as good as him picking them out himself. To increase the aggregate total of good books read over time, we should let him a) pick his own books, and b) let him pick a lot of books.
Given this, the logical thing to do was to take me and my sister to a bookstore pretty often and let us go nuts. They could, so they did.
And now we find me pulling huge boxes of generally bad but occasionally good science fiction and fantasy out of my garage.
It took less than thirty minutes to sort through three boxes of them. Everything went except for a) five books that were not actually mine and b) a signed copy of the un-utterably terrible Dune: House Harkonnen, kept because of the inscription:
"To Connor, who knows so much about the Dune Universe"
to which I always want to append: "From Brian Herbert, who knows so little about the Dune Universe"
The other two hundred books we took, along with two Ikea bags of books my parents also intended to not own, to a used book store, and sold them.
The store (BookBuyers, which is an awesome place that everyone in the bay area should visit) remaindered a half-box, and took the rest for two thirds store credit, one third cash. We are going to sell the store credit on Craigslist, or maybe the KGB board (all those googlers must love books!)
It was a good day.
My mind flashed back to packing those very boxes, five years ago. Books, I remembered, lots of books.
A digression: My parents are, shall we say, not poor. They might be rich- they probably are rich- but they don't act rich, and I never grew up thinking we were rich. But they are comfortable, and they do have discretionary income, although I rarely see them spend it.
I have, however, seen them spend it on books. Many times in my childhood would we venture to the bookstore and leave with armfuls.
I was a voracious reader in high school and middle school. In college most of that appetite was channeled towards assigned reading. Looking up now, I have four half-read books on my shelf, and two more in my bag. The habit has definitely stuck.
I think my parents logic went something like this: reading is a very good habit, and something we want to encourage Connor to do. He should probably be reading good books. If he picks his own books, he will pick crap for a while, but eventually he will start picking good books. But giving him good books is not as good as him picking them out himself. To increase the aggregate total of good books read over time, we should let him a) pick his own books, and b) let him pick a lot of books.
Given this, the logical thing to do was to take me and my sister to a bookstore pretty often and let us go nuts. They could, so they did.
And now we find me pulling huge boxes of generally bad but occasionally good science fiction and fantasy out of my garage.
It took less than thirty minutes to sort through three boxes of them. Everything went except for a) five books that were not actually mine and b) a signed copy of the un-utterably terrible Dune: House Harkonnen, kept because of the inscription:
"To Connor, who knows so much about the Dune Universe"
to which I always want to append: "From Brian Herbert, who knows so little about the Dune Universe"
The other two hundred books we took, along with two Ikea bags of books my parents also intended to not own, to a used book store, and sold them.
The store (BookBuyers, which is an awesome place that everyone in the bay area should visit) remaindered a half-box, and took the rest for two thirds store credit, one third cash. We are going to sell the store credit on Craigslist, or maybe the KGB board (all those googlers must love books!)
It was a good day.
Different Mixers
Four years ago when I lived in Massachusetts for a summer, I moved into a spacious but unfurnished apartment. As a present, my mother bought me a set of something like seventy cooking items from Ikea. They came in a big box, densely packed, and heavy as all hell.
I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.
That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.
At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.
I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.
I think one of the measuring cups has survived.
I think.
I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.
My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.
The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.
I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.
Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.
In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.
The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.
The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.
And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.
As for everything else?
There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.
I knew, when I took everything out of the box and arranged it all around the kitchen, that they would never, ever go back into the box again. Just by unpacking it, I had disturbed so much of the box's internal structure that I could not stack things inside
of it as neatly as they had been.
That point when I had opened the box but before I had removed anything was the neatest and most complete that set would ever be.
At present, I can tell you for certain where perhaps twenty of those seventy items are. Most of those twenty are infrequently used, hyper-specific tools, and I'm not sure why I even own them. I have a garlic crusher. I don't crush garlic. I have a lemon squeezer. I don't squeeze lemons.
I have, however, wondered why those two tools are fundamentally different in structure, when they do almost the same mechanical action onto similar products.
I think one of the measuring cups has survived.
I think.
I do own, however, about thirty unrelated cookware items that I know for a fact I never purchased.
My theory, at this point, is that that cookware set and I have gone through six or seven moves in the past four years, and have been housed with six or seven roommates, each with their own set of stuff.
The kitchens, in all cases, have been integrated ones- everyone's pots living with everyone else's, a communal knife drawer, etc. Moving out is always something rushed, and hiding behind those drawers and cabinets, cookware is usually forgotten until last. One doesn't always see the proper pan lid hiding in the sink, and one could miss the plate that is in a roommate's room.
I am as guilty as my roommates- over time I just sort of took stuff that I thought was mine, and, three or four or seven pieces at a time, I began substituting their cookware for mine, and now I have fractions of many distinct sets of cookware, and they certainly don't add up to a whole. I have three pots and four potlids, but the lids are for pots I do not own.
Additionally, a lot of that stuff is cheap and breakable. I think of the fifteen plates I once bought, three remain, and one of them is chipped. I do, though, possess an unrelated set of twenty floral plates that I would never in a million years purchase, but yet somehow possess.
In any case, when we move I will be abandoning all of it, save three items, all of them by chance, from Crate and Barrel, and all Christmas presents, though they were different Christmases.
The first is a circular spatula full of holes, that my sister got me for cooking pirogues.
The second is a cast iron skillet my mother got me, for cooking all sorts of stuff.
And the third is rigel's vegetable steamer that her mother got her for, well, self-evident vegi-steaming.
As for everything else?
There are plenty of Ikeas in California, and plenty of roommates here who want to cook with my strange cookware.
How to Rid Yourself of Books
I will start with a declarative. More than any other possession, books are hard for me to let go of.
I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.
The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.
One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.
I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.
And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.
Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).
He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.
In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.
Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.
Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.
I want him to have these books.
True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.
True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.
But everyone wins now.
Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.
I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.
And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.
Just not by me.
I hold the printed word in such high regard that I can sometimes lend books (but only to the trustworthy), rarely give books away (but only to the special), sometimes sell them (but I am always frustrated that they are not worth as much to others as they are to me), and never, never throw them out.
The one time I ever threw books away outright was when they had been stored over the summer in my friend's basement, and that basement had flooded. Not, you know, a big puddle flood. A foot deep of nasty groundwater seeping in from the hardest summer rainfall in a hundred years.
One or two big boxes of books and clothing were at the bottom of the pile of stuff, and after five minutes of examining them and choking on the clouds of mold emanating from them, I realized that exactly 0% was salvageable, and that both boxes should be summarily blackbagged and tossed.
I mean, of course, big industrial garbage bags for to hold trash. Not that each book should be disappeared fascist regime/ secret police style, bag-on-head. Wow- some sort of V For Vendetta / Fahrenheit 451 crossover is playing out in my head now.
And so we arrive at the problem- I am probably moving in the next few months. My apartment has approximately 30 linear feet of books in it. That's 250 pounds of books. I cannot move 250 pounds of books. Moving them across town was a bitch. Moving them across the country will either be painful or expensive or both.
Enter my friend Alan. Alan grew up about six hours northeast of Pittsburgh, in Middle-of-Nowhere-No-Really-We-Mean-It, PA. He has had two stays in Pittsburgh of around two years and then around one year, and although he loves the hell out of the city and its residents, he hasn't been able to stay permanently, due to ongoing financial crises of various sorts. He visited for the long weekend, and crashed on my couch (and it is a damn comfy couch too).
He even helped name this blog. The suggestion of TS Eliot's 4 Quartets beat out my idea of The Waste Land as a source of floral but effective language.
In any case, it occured to me sometime tonight that Alan is someone I trust. I trust him to not only not throw books away, but to appreciate the hell out of them the way he appreciates me, and the way he appreciates Pittsburgh. He is a man to which I would love to give books.
Given as well that he is a poor man, and can purchase perhaps a book or two a year, giving him as many books as he could take seemed like the best of all solutions.
Boxed in his car's trunk are about 60 books- a sixth of what I own. I have given them freely, without any sort of monetary solicitation, however paltry, from either party.
I want him to have these books.
True, they cost me money to buy when I did buy them, but that is money I don't remember spending. That is money that could have gone to movies or popcorn or something frivolous, but instead they went to paper, and the enjoyment of paper. I've gotten my pound of flesh from the books he's getting- they are all one's I've already read. And if I really need them again, its not like things go out of print anymore. No book I own is old enough that copies are rare, or even semi-rare. Half of them are mass-market paperbacks anyway.
True, keeping them is a comfort. Knowing that all that information, all those quotes and paragraphs and words are just at arms reach is a good feeling, a sort of warm blanket of information and phrase. But it can be smothering, and although a good feeling, it is just a feeling, and perhaps not as good as other feelings that not having so many damn books might allow. You cannot keep everything.
But everyone wins now.
Alan feels good- he has books, and he loves books. And they were filtered through me and my tastes, so they probably won't be crap.
I feel good. I'm three shelves lighter than I was this morning. It sounds sort of callous, but its one more thing I can check off on my List of Things to Do.
And the books feel good to, as they aren't being tossed, or disappeared, or thrown into a big Nazi fire, or turned into terrible, terrible sewer mold. They are being loved.
Just not by me.
Household Plant is Sad and Gone
Some time ago, I had some crazy architecture student roommates. Those times are now over, and have been for quite some time.
One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.
To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.
I think I watered it once.
I think.
Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.
If it isn't dead already.
In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.
I do not clean in halves.
One of their stranger ideas was inherited from a crazy forty-something Russian one of them had stayed with in a sixth floor walkup in Brooklyn during an architecture conference. (Never thought I would say that sentence, but there goes) Rather than a shower curtain, he instead had a long, low pot (almost a trough) full of ferns and small plants. The splashings from the shower would fall into that and water the plants.
To mimic this, we bought a potted plant. Not a fern, a plant. One of those five foot tall fern-on-a-stick plants that doesn't need sunlight, or love. After a month of pulling fronds out of the drain and mopping up the spilled shower water brown with dirt, I bought a shower curtain and moved the plant to the living room.
I think I watered it once.
I think.
Today, I looked at it, and saw that all but three fronds had turned brown. I took it out to the dumpster. Tonight, I will watch the garbage man laugh and then crush it into planty death.
If it isn't dead already.
In any case, this is instructive as to how things go in my apartment- there is a weird thing, then it becomes a clutter problem, then it is ignored, and then I flip out and deal with it in the most final, regime-changing way I can.
I do not clean in halves.
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