day four hundred and eighty-seven - 11%
576,337 total reported covid deaths to date in the US. 400,000 reported covid cases today in India. The global we are nowhere done with this pandemic, but in the US, life goes on, unless it didn’t, and today I’m going to write about what I’ve been doing instead of writing. Spoiler: beyond just generally despairing, it has to do with clothes.
It’s been just over a month since I got my stuff back after it spent 11 months in storage, and I have to say, it is WILD how much time I spend dealing with my belongings. From unpacking them to organizing them to deciding which of them to get rid of to researching where to get rid of them to listing them for sale to coordinating pickups or trips to the post office, it’s all been adding up, and that doesn’t include time spent just maintaining them (washing, folding, dusting, etc). I feel like I had so much more time when I was Airbnbing, and that feeling led me to write a few weeks ago that I was committing to getting rid of 100 things. I’m at 11...by one count.
I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the things I’ve sold and at what price to remind myself, again, that material goods aren’t good investments. The very first thing I sold was a Ring doorbell cam and chime, which is technically two things but I’m counting as one, and which I priced at $60 despite paying $190 (which I only just looked up and now am sad about). Then I sold two curtain rods that I’m again counting as one thing and made back a whopping $15 of the $56 they cost. I probably put in more than $15 worth of effort into photographing and listing them, but selling directly feels like the only way to guarantee they live on in a circular economy.
It would have been way easier to just donate the curtain rods, or the giant flamingo floatie I only made $12 on because Poshmark, or the Crate + Barrel metal placemats that netted me $20, but I’ve gotten it into my brain that I am responsible for whatever items come into my possession, which means I’m responsible for where they go when they leave my possession. Remember that post about malamutes? Or the one from before that where I also recapped what I recouped in resale? I hate that I’m back doing the same thing, but do feel that I’ve learned some things in the intervening 400-some days!
Take my ink jet printer, for example (and get ready, cause it’s a meta example). I plugged in my printer for the first time in a year to print the shipping label for the flamingo floatie (meta!) and got hit with an error message that it didn’t detect any cartridges, despite the cartridges that I meticulously had sealed up in a ziplock for the movers definitely being there. I did a ton of googling, cleared the error with a YouTube tutorial, but only got the printer to print blank pages (helpful!) and felt absurdly resistant to spending $50 on cartridges for a maybe busted printer. When I couldn’t find a place that would service an 8ish year old printer, I said no to a $50 cartridge test, declared it broken, bought a more earthy friendly laser jet, and then set about deciding what to do with a broken printer, because I knew I could absolutely not just throw it in the trash.
This entailed more googling, and learning both that San Francisco has an e-waste program and that Goodwill has partnered with Dell on their own e-waste solution, which is what I decided on because I clung to the probably false hope that some parts in my no longer trusty printer could be reused or melted down or somesuch. My alternate plan was to post a broken printer on Marketplace, which would’ve likely been better for the environment but worse for my mental health - I’ve learned in the last month that I hate having things I don’t need or want in my apartment. Which is a real bitch with the 20ish things I have listed for sale and stored in a built-in bookshelf where they taunt me with their existence.
The printer is not one of the 11 things because I make arbitrary decisions, like that things donated don’t count toward the get rid of goal because it’s too easy to throw things in a bag and drop them at Goodwill and also that things replaced are not truly gotten rid of - there is no “replace” in the Reduce! Re-Use! Recycle! mantra and also, peep that word order!
Reducing consumption is way better for the planet than getting rid of stuff you already consumped (probably only I will think that sentence is funny and not a typo, but I’m keeping it). I am proud to say that in this year 2 of no clothes, I’m still pretty much not buying clothes (just the blazer in February and those shearling sandals in March, for those who keep score). I’m also not really buying other “things,” despite moving into a new place with new “needs” (please ignore: my plant habit, but please see: me buying a tension rod on Marketplace). I’m summing this post up (badly) in this manner just as a reminder that I wouldn’t have to be getting rid of this stuff if I hadn’t bought it in the first place and that is the whole lesson of this whole project - don’t buy stuff! K byeeeee.
