Cleaning is easy when you have no mercy

The last month has been devoted to frantically cleaning my apartment (though not well enough, apparently, since my security deposit was returned with two deductions), moving back to my folks' place, and then attacking over twenty-two years' worth of junk with no mercy whatsoever.

Everyone in my family is a packrat, but I've gotten sick of living in a pit, so I went through and tossed a solid 75% of the crap that was all over my room (literally: there was a path through the junk from the door to the bed and a free space to set your foot if you needed to reach over the desk to open the curtains) so that not only can I see the awful brownish-yellow shag carpeting, but I also vacuumed for the first time in...a while. It's amazing what you find when you go through twenty years' worth of stuff.

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For example, I found several books I'd long ago written off as missing, and found a full set of bedsheets I didn't even know I had (which turned out to be too small for the bed, but still). I reclaimed the full half of my closet that had been full of other peoples' clothes for the entire duration of my life and found three identical, barely-worn men's coats that I'll donate to charity this fall. There was also a faux-silk Katharine Hepburn-style blouse that I washed and painstakingly ironed, only to discover it's too big (alas!), along with an honest-to-goodness muumuu and a romper (from its original period of popularity). The downside to clearing out my bedroom is that now our living room is completely packed to the gills with castoffs. I honestly don't know how my tiny room held all of the stuff that's out there now, because the living room (twice the size of my bedroom) is barely big enough for it all.

In an effort to make this admittedly huge undertaking (as in, I don't think anyone's cleaned since my grandparents moved into the brand-new house in the 1960s) beneficial for the rest of the family, I've started clearing out areas of our basement, too. The extra bits and pieces from my two years living in college dorms had all been sitting downstairs for two years while I lived in a furnished apartment, along with a lot of lecture notes and useless gifts from ex-boyfriends. After attacking the notebooks and binders and looseleaf textbooks the bookstore wouldn't buy back, I ended up with several half-blank notebooks and a couple sketchpads. I won't have to buy new notebooks from now until the end of time. There were 5-inch floppy disks, two old computer keyboards, a set of 23 craft books from the late 1960s, a nightshirt from France (tags still attached), a stuffed bear I'd forgotten about, a speech I wrote for AP Composition during my junior year of high school that's still funny now, and more huge spiders and centipedes than I care to think about.

Basically, I'm going to have the biggest garage sale ever.

So this blog might be all about what I find while cleaning for a while. But hey, it's my blog, right? I can write what I want! Particularly since I'm blogging in oblivion! On into the void, dear blog!