Excited about the prospect of our new couch, Husband and I attacked the living room with gusto over the weekend.
And the hall closet. (Details forthcoming.)
The amount of unused belongings hanging around our apartment is a symptom of growing up in a house and having to adapt to the constraints of an apartment later in life. We grew up with basements, crawlspaces, and spare rooms. Now we don't even have a spare closet.
Added to the problem is the fact that I'm a bibliophile and Husband doesn't much like to throw anything out. (I'm not a huge fan either, to be honest. Ticket stubs from ferries taken on our honeymoon? Still have them. I use them as bookmarks!)
I once dreamed of having bookcases instead of walls. I almost got there in this apartment. We have about 22 feet of bookcases in our current apartment. This does not include the cookbook annex in the kitchen. Recently our crowded bookcases began to suffocate me. I am attempting to live as green a lifestyle as I can, and being surrounded by dead trees did not help my karma.
Problem: I studied literature in school (undergraduate and graduate), so 95% of the books I have read (and thus 85% of the books I own) are underlined, annotated, flagged, and generally beat up. I’m not gentle on books. I worked in mass-market publishing for a couple years and know exactly how little books cost to make. I don’t feel bad about breaking the spine on a mass-market title, nor do I have any issue with doing the same on a Penguin Classic. No one hand-crafting these books. I leave the dust jacket of a hardcover at home, because damaging that is just silly. You can damage the cover all you want and then cover it with the pristine jacket.
I digress.
In order to sell books, they need to be in pretty good condition. The condition that mine are definitely not in.
I have resigned myself to donating a huge percentage of my books with full knowledge that I spent thousands on this library and I’ll never see that money again. If someone else reads these books, I’m happy.
I have also resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to the dark side. The e-reader side. I love the concept of a physical book and have resisted this change for as long as decent e-readers have been around. But…when you’re done with an electronic book, it simply disappears. It was never physical to begin with, so there’s no waste. No trees had to die.
And maybe I can put a few decorative objects on my half-dozen bookshelves. Or replace them with lighter, airier ones. Like these:
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| CB2 (obviously) |
I could never have gotten these while still addicted to books, for fear the books would fall off all the time. And I'd have to invest in bookends. And I don't think I'm bookend-y.
I boxed up a couple dozen books over the weekend. Mercilessly. The fiction and literature section of my library is alphabetized. People, I boxed up Jane Austen without batting an eye. I could not do the same for Paul Auster, likely out of guilt for not having seen him speak on Friday. I am able to keep on living because I know Jane Austen ebooks are free. Paul Auster, on the other hand, might hunt me down and kill me if I bought him in ebook form.
While I did this, Husband took to the reference shelf and threw out LSAT and GRE books. Why did we keep them? He then stared at my Disney VHS tapes and remembered that we'd boxed a crap ton of them in an earlier overhaul.
I admit this to you: In high school and early college, I was an aficionado of The Goo Goo Dolls. What? I’m from Western New York. I can’t help it. And their albums before “Dizzy Up the Girl” were amazing. I taped every single television appearance they made. I have like, a dozen tapes of various television appearances, videos, and concerts. My love for them fell out of fashion around the time video tapes fell out of fashion.
I also taped Legends of the Fall from HBO and put hearts all over the tape. I'm not proud.
Video tapes, my friends, are freaking hard to dispose of. NYC Waste Management doesn’t want them. I’m not donating crap I taped off the television. NYC wants me to use this service to dispose of them. Um? $9.95 to send my VHS tapes somewhere? …I guess I’ll have to suck it up and do it.
The various electronic appliances (old phones, a zip drive, chargers for things we no longer own) can be dropped off at Best Buy, who will happily recycle them. Best Buy doesn’t want my VHS tapes. They are missing out.
Husband looking through my old tapes of course lead to him finding the video taken in my high school public speaking class. And watching it. And making fun of my (former!) Rochester accent.
We later watched a tape of a variety show he emceed in high school. He is exactly the same, but with better pants.
Cleaning our life detritus is dangerous, folks. You can discover embarrassing pasts…or just how difficult it is to dispose of outdated technology. I bet I could recycle an old Kindle more easily than I can get rid of these VHS tapes.
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