Sep 27, 2011

Inventory of Made-Up Statistics

{Our shipment is coming today! I got a call an hour ago saying the truck would be here in 2 minutes. Good to know that delivery time ineptitude is a worldwide phenomenon. So while I wait, here is a post I started back in April at the beginning of this whole adventure, when we were just starting the process of moving. Enjoy, and be glad if you are not currently moving.}


True confession: over the years, I've flirted a bit with minimalism and the simplicity movement. It's all exciting and fun at first, picking up some books from the library, or subscribing to some blogs. The future is bright, and clean, and sparsely decorated. But after a while it just gets to be a lot of work, and pretty soon some simplicity expert is suggesting the need to do a home inventory. It's like having a defining-the-relationship talk with everything you own. That's a pretty big commitment you know? And that's usually the point where I decide that maybe clutter isn't so bad after all. Then I go on a rebound shopping trip to Target.

Well, the first item of business on the Amsterdam list was to get a moving bid. And to do that, we had to know what were taking and what we weren't. Which meant making a home inventory. Super (minimal) fun!

Yet somehow, I had this silly notion that the whole inventory process would translate into some great blog post; that I would become an excel spreadsheet geek and, naturally, a proliferate fountain of entirely unimportant statistics, such as "12% of our pencils are not #2," or "1 out of 5 pairs of our socks are unmatched." But most likely, "100% of our stuff is total crap."

Now that the pain and trauma is over (and when I say that it's over, I mean that we gave up in the middle of the garage), the spreadsheet is complete, and as it turns out, our stuff is very boring.

And there is a whole lot of it.

Specifically, a lot of cables. I had no idea, but apparently we are purveyors of cables. Cables of all varieties. We have no less than 5 boxes of cables under our bed, a few more in our garage, cables in random drawers and closets, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some lost in between the couch cushions and down some heating vents. It seems you can't throw a dead cat in our house without hitting some stash of cables. You also can't throw a dead cat in our house because that would be gross.

Among the things we found that we didn't know we had: a tape I made while working at Mt. Rushmore, before I met Mark. I sound weirdly Californian, and said things like "rad." Oh to be 19 again.

But really, to be 17 again, because according to my old journals, which I found under my bed being strangled by a million cables, I really enjoyed being 17. And that's an actual quote from my journal. My 17 year-old self seemingly had non-stop fun and thought that everything that ever happened was "helairous." Also hilarious, the deep thoughts I had as a pre-teen, such as "I feel older, but young." Wow. However, I did not enjoy being 12, when every entry detailed which of my friends hated each other and one entry included this little gem: "it's sooooooooo hard to hang around with people I hang around with. They hate practically everybody that I like or don't know well enough to hate yet." Thank you, 12 year-old me. Because of you those journals will be meeting their doom in the near future, which is ironic since my first journal repeatedly warned anyone caught reading it to prepare to meet theirs. Reading all the painfully embarrassing things I'd forgotten about myself, but had the foresight to preserve for my posterity, was almost as fun as recording for our posterity all of our embarrassing worldly possessions. Almost.

And that's as uninteresting as it got. According to my spreadsheet, 2 out of 3 minimalists agree.


2 comments:

Angela said...

Argh, cables. I hate those things! I'm constantly trying to get rid of them or picking them up and stashing them somewhere because I have no idea what they belong to and Mike isn't around to ask. I guess it is just part of being married to someone in the tech industry.

Anyways, I'm so glad to hear that you are finally getting your shipment. It will be like Christmas (especially for the kids).

SRHadley said...

I enjoyed being 17 as well. Thanks.