Stuffed Turtle

Day 266: Stuffed Turtle

Let the countdown begin! 100 more days... 100 more objects...

Later note: double-checking counts and realized I had gotten off. I only had 99 days to go at this point!

Whistle

Day 250: Whistle

I read an interesting article in the New York Times about people who visit every Disney park. There are fourteen, in places as far flung as Tokyo, Paris, and Orlando.

The article was surprisingly relevant to the stuff project. It quoted a professor at Oxford, author of "Understanding Fandom, who said that people love to collect, and that "obsessive niche travel" (as he called it) is a form of collecting.

Question: is getting rid of one thing every day for a year a form of collecting experiences? Now there's a paradox. Almost on a par with Spock speaking to his younger self in the most recent Star Trek movie.

I'll take it even deeper. Some people collect the experience of collecting experiences. Like A.J. Jacobs, who wrote The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible AND The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World AND My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Quest to Improve Himself AND Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Quest for Bodily Perfection. A.J. (the recipient of the only fan letter I've ever written - and he answered!) actually transformed himself and his life for each of these experimental years, at great cost to himself and his family. In The Year of Living Biblically, he never shaved his beard for God's sake! (Get it? For God's sake?)

A.J. Jacobs was the inspiration for this blog. His agent even said she might be interested in helping me find a publisher for a memoir about this year. I'm not sure how that will pan out. So far nothing I've done is cutting anywhere near as deep as not using zippers and stoning adulterers. Even so, I've fantasized about what my next resolution will be after I finish this project. My current idea: a year of whole foods. So maybe collecting experiences is addicting, like the professor said.

A clinical psychologist in the article speculated that obsessive niche travel fulfills the need to feel superior. Do I feel superior? I hope not. That would be against my own religion, such as it is. We Unitarians-Universalists believe first in the worth of every human being, and second in justice, equity and compassion. Feelings of superiority are to be guarded against.

One obsessive niche traveler (i.e., somebody who was aiming to visit all the Disney parks) talked about completion anxiety: once you've invested a certain amount of time and effort in an endeavor, you don't want to cheapen it by giving up. Well, on day 249, with nothing but a whistle to give away, I can certainly relate to that.

Completion anxiety. Yeah.

More Tax Records and Bank Statements

Day 212: More Tax Records and Bank Statements

These tax records and bank statements were in a big binder labeled "Pierce Sale and Shadford Purchase." That meant to me that the binder was full of documents about selling our flat in San Francisco and buying our first place in Ann Arbor, over sixteen years ago. I was surprised to find the binder. It was part of barrel scraping, reaching to the back of low shelves that haven't entered my consciousness in years. It seemed like a jackpot. There can be no need for documents about a house we haven't lived in for decades.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened it up and found a whole bunch more tax statements, including a handwritten individual 1040 of Rich's from 1995, the year we met, the last year we prepared individual tax statements. The last year that he prepared a tax statement at all.

There were seven years worth of tax statements in the big binder, including all the back-up documents. My father assured me that it is okay to throw away the back-up documentation and retain only the tax returns themselves, except for the previous three years.

He must be right.

He's a tax attorney.

Still, it was scary, putting all those back-up documents in the shredder pile. Bank statements, charitable gift receipts, medical receipts, interest statements and everything else. All in a box, ready for shredding.

Now that I'm 50, and getting age spots and cellulite and wrinkles and just generally getting that thin-skin look, I'm thinking a lot about growing older. In the words of my old neighbor, Barb Blue, the days crawl, the years fly. A cliche perhaps, but the years do fly. Suddenly, I'm more than middle-aged. I completely understand now what I never did before: when Papa (my father-in-law Bill) would tell me, as he often did, that he felt surprised when he looked in the mirror. That he felt just the same on the inside as he did when he was 30 years old.

Looking at that 1040 in Rich's hand, that individual tax statement from the year before we were married, and then that stack of eighteen tax returns, gave me that same feeling of surprised. I'm getting old! I've completed so many tax returns, I'm losing track of them! I've filed our taxes so many times now, it's easy!

Well, these things were easy to get rid of, too. One more day down, 154 to go. I think I saw another binder or two on that same shelf.

Oak End Table

Day 165: Oak End Table

Day 165. I won't say it's exactly significant. But it does mean I have exactly 200 days to go. 

200 days. 

200 days of identifying stuff that has no utility and brings no joy. (Do I have 200 such items left?) 200 days of trying to come up with content that, if not interesting, is at least not embarrassing. 200 days of writing a few paragraphs, sometimes late at night when I'd rather be sleeping. Or in the middle of the day while I'm walking on a dock in Saugatuck, writing with my thumbs (as I am now). Or sitting at my desk instead of taking a lunch break. 200 days of taking photos, and composing Craig's List ads (only about 50% successful so far), or running to the post office or the Salvation Army. 200 days of composing little quips for Facebook and hoping someone will comment. 

And why? Because at this point, it's starting to feel like into Thin Air. Like, why would a guy with kids and money and a home keep on climbing that mountain, when it was ugly and strewn with litter and dead bodies and he could hardly breath? When he might have died and then where would his kids be? Was it just because he wanted to say he'd done it? Was it because, having invested so much in beginning the endeavor - the training, the gear, arranging it all, writing about it for publication no less - would it have been just too humiliating to call it quits? Who would he be, if having invested all that, he simply packed it in and went home?

I'm not self-satisfied enough to imagine that this endeavor is by any means on a par with climbing Mount Everest. And I do remember what I hoped to gain from it - a daily writer's prompt, a forum for thinking through letting my daughter go off to college with grace, an opportunity to clean house responsibly and thoughtfully, and perhaps, at the end, content for a thought-provoking memoir about stuff, society and letting go. And I even realize that deep learning involves effort. Even hardship. 

But today, sitting here on the dock with the sun shining and the wind at my back, with no photos of extraneous stuff in my photo archive, plumbing my memory for a thing or two that we don't need, I'm starting to feel the same way about the stuff project as I felt about Jon Krakauer's trip up Mount Everest. 

Like, seriously?

So. This end table. Water damage on the top. Not rickety. It made the cut when we moved to Ann Arbor from San Francisco. But it's in the basement now, getting more water damage and doing nobody any good. I don't have a photo, because I'm 150 miles away. And the Salvation Army errand will have to wait 'til Tuesday. 

165 down. 200 to go.