The Room - Part 2

The Room - Part 2

Today, after my cat came home from what seems to have been a 3-night adventure in the underside of an old vehicle (probably the very old white van permanently parked outside my apartment) I bathed her and laid down with her to take my weekend nap. (See previous entry called Dizzy.)

After that and after several very successful attempts at sidetracking myself I dove into the boxes that have been haunting The Room since I moved here. (I avoided the incredibly urgent need to go shopping for a St. Francis statue to keep in the house as a sort of thank-you for bringing my cat back home safely.) There are books I haven't seen in a year, art supplies, pieces of art from here and there in my life and notebook binders galore.

But, how can I possibly work on this sort of thing in the quiet? I need music, and not the radio; I have to, I MUST buy songs for my iPod. I received a gift card for iTunes and I have been planning on making an Austinatious playlist ever since. Now I have 12 songs (some of which I already owned) in this playlist, and a nice start to an alternative music playlist as well. (So, I wanted Creep by Radiohead. I love that song so I bought it and played it. I learned that I will have to remember to pay attention to the label "Explicit" when looking at songs. [Again, see in Dizzy where I address issues I have with warning labels.] I played Creep and, WOW! On the radio he sings "You're so very special..."; on the recording he uses a very different adverb. It's almost distracting enough to keep me from enjoying the rest of the song. It certainly gives the whole song a different - more angry and jaded feel over-all.)

But, back to The Room now. I have stacks of books, 2 boxes of art supplies (some of which might not be of any use at this point) and other stacks of things: things to throw away by the door next to the pile of things to donate to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. I'm not sure what amazes me more, the amount of things that can accumulate in my life or the amount of dust that can accumulate since I gave up dusting in here 6 months ago because I couldn't reach anything.

Next step, closets. There are things that I plan to donate or give away. Clean out those spaces and I'll have room to store the art supplies that I plan to keep.

At some point I'll have to go through the books and really get rid of a lot of them. Truly. It's almost embarrassing. The word 'almost' in that last sentence was truly superfluous.

I have to remember only to put into the closets things that I actually plan on using. Not to say I'll use them every day, but if I do use them it's worth keeping them. Otherwise, they gotta go. In a memoir Carol Burnet wrote about her grandmother and the stacks and stacks of magazines that she kept because there were recipes in them that she planned on cutting out. For years those magazines sat around. I'm already 3/4 of the way there simply because I technically own 7 cats (only three of which live with me). I have to keep the image of a hoarding, old cat-woman in my mind to keep me on track.

Now I can see the floor. I can dust the CD's. I call that progress. Not good progress, but progress nonetheless. Now that it's almost midnight I think I'll go to bed.

Good night.

eArnie