Waste a lot, want a lot

During the six months leading up to my move, I thought a lot about consumption. Not the illness people used to die from in the olden days when they were busy trying to ward off scarlet fever and whooping cough, but rather, the good old-fashioned human instinct to acquire, use and throw away.

It all began with my aforementioned dreaded basement. It had originated innocently enough as a place to store all of the boxes that had been following me around since I’d left home at 18. However, it ended four years later as a deep, dark jungle of junk (a “junkgle”) made up of stuff that had been gradually left there to rot by me and my steady stream of roommates.

This might not sound so bad, but see, the situation was significantly worsened by the Mouse Infestations of ’05, ’06 and ’07; fearing a standoff, I gradually grew more and more scared to go down there. As a result, I admit that my basement suffered from increasing neglect and fell victim to nature’s desire to re-claim it as its own (see Mold-stock ’07 and Rat-gate ’08), eventually resulting in what I’m sure would be a far more effective torture chamber that whatever the CIA could come up with.

When the time came to get out of Dodge, clearly the basement posed the biggest challenge. During one particularly horrendous day down there cleaning, I couldn’t shake the thought that this entire situation was so completely unnecessary. How on earth had I acquired so much crap? I clearly didn’t need it—I’d hardly touched any of it since I’d moved it. Not only that, but from top to bottom, my house was chock full of completely unnecessary belongings.

I had always wanted to be one of those people who only bought things for her house that really meant something to her, but instead I realized I was that person who made impulse point-of-purchase buys and couldn’t leave Target without spending half her paycheck. I mean how many baskets does one person need?? (if you’re me, apparently the answer is about 44, though I’m happy to say that I currently own zero.)

For the next six months, I worked diligently to remove all the excessive detritus from my existence. It wasn’t easy. I made several trips to the garbage dump (remember: NOT HEALTHCLIFF THE CAT-LIKE AT ALL); I paid a company called 1-800-Got-Junk to come in and look at me judgmentally while removing an embarrassing amount of “Lack” and “Billy” from my basement (I am convinced that when life on earth ceases to exist, all that will remain is Twinkies and Ikea furniture); and I even held an in-house garage sale affectionately known as The OckleShop (you WISH you had this last name) where I guilted my friends into buying one of my 10,000 copies of Trivial Pursuit with half the cards missing.

Despite my additional forays with Goodwill and Craigslist, I was still left in the end with more than I needed. At the 11th hour, I was forced to do a “Baltimore Sweep” (also known as leaving your crap on the street corner and then counting the seconds until people magically appear as if from nowhere to fight over it, regardless of what it is).

Despite being a giant pain in my ass, the whole thing was extremely therapeutic, and I highly recommend everyone do a full contents purge at least once in their lives. It’s amazing how little stuff you actually need once you try. If you pull it off, you might even be able to offset the Catholic guilt that starts you thinking about how much some kid in Africa might really have liked a Trivial Pursuit board game with half the cards missing to replace the dirty pots and pans he's been playing with, and leads to you feeling like A Bad Person.

The good news is that since I’ve been in the UK, I have noticed a marked difference in the way people live, and I think it's helping with in my quest to live lighter. Perhaps by virtue of us living in an extremely dense city with very little personal space or because Europeans just don’t have that American manifest-destiny culture, but there’s a refreshingly pervasive sense of measured purchasing and waste awareness here that I’m finding to be quite inspiring.

(((Aside

This is true except for in one oddly specific department: Letters used in hideous words. For some reason, the Brits add a completely unnecessary superfluous letter in the following words: paedophile (that’s pedophile), foetus (fetus), and leukaemia (leukemia). Odd. Even more odd is that I inserted this here, but I’ve been trying to work this observation into a blog for a week. Sorry for the awkward segue.

/Aside)))

In the interest of taking this opportunity in my life to evaluate some of my less desirable living habits, now seems like a good time to put my “insatiable consumption” (as The Pope referred to in yesterday’s Australia speech) in check. Generally, I’m not in the habit of quoting the Pope, but maybe that will earn me some points back from the whole mass-mouse-murdering debacle.

Happy weekend!