useful or beautiful

the essential kit

Keep nothing, they say, that you do not know to be useful or find to be beautiful.

I’m in the stage of packing my office right now that it’s painfully clear I have a lot of shit that is neither. It’s obvious now, what with moving looming, that many items of sentimental value–Rogue & Gambit figurines collected by myself or by others for me, or mementos like the glass Pepsi bottle I kept from my first trip to the UK & Ireland in 1993–which, while I’m still fond of them, no longer feel worth the space or clutter or effort. With the gifts, this adds a layer of guilt; with the things that I bought, regret.

If we had an American-sized house, I would no doubt keep all of them happily, but for months all my figurines have been collected in a tiny precarious space on top of a bookshelf, not so much displayed as left there because there was nowhere else to put them. Many of them are too valuable to just throw out, but eBaying requires effort (and of course time not currently available, because I never move to *do* anything about this kind of stuff when we’re not moving) or they’re items that aren’t worth trying to re-sell but are in fine condition and it just seems a shame to dump them. They could be brought to charity shops, but again with time not currently available.

I also find the boxes of art supplies or fabric, which have gone pretty much untouched the 3 years we’ve been in this house, fairly depressing. There doesn’t seem to be much point in keeping them except as a representation of faint, bitter hope, or as something I used to do.

The office is also a terrible, terrible mess, so the fact that it’s nearly packed up doesn’t actually reflect in the way it looks right now.

Sigh. Back to it, I guess. One or two more boxes ought to take care of the rest of it, pretty much…

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