Saturday, April 26, 2008

Cut the Crap- Weekend Blitz

When I was a kid, I was kind of a freak. Let me give you a good example. Every year, I would look forward to the end of the school year. What's so freakish about that, you might wonder? Every kid looks forward to summer vacation.

Yes this is true. But the truth is, it wasn't summer vacation that I was anticipating so hotly. I was excited because summer vacation meant that I had time to spend a week cleaning and re-organizing my room!

No, I swear, I am not making this up. Nor was this something I was forced to do, or even ASKED to do. In fact, if my mom is reading this blog post, she can attest to the veracity of this. Ever since the summer after fourth grade, I would spend a week completely re-organizing everything. Toys I never played with either were given to my sister or got thrown away. The artwork I thought was impressive got saved, the stuff I wasn't proud of I tossed. As for my school papers, those got organized in files. Yes, I developed a filing system for school work as a fourth grader. Did I miss my calling as a librarian? The school work I didn't care about got thrown out, but everything I thought could be important as reference, or everything I was proud of (I have a file that says, "I got a 100% on this test!") got put neatly in file folders. 

As a result, I can show you my 5th grade State Report in about 5 seconds. My fourth grade "Discover California" reports would probably take longer. Let's say 2 minutes. My 8th grade vocabulary lists? Piece of cake. Let's say 5 minutes. My twelfth grade physics papers? Ummm ... gee, I don't know what happened to those. They clearly weren't very important to me.

I did attack my whole bedroom with my cleaning and re-organizing frenzy, but cleaning out my desk was the most important thing to me. Once all my old school papers had been put away properly, I felt I could put that grade behind me. Fifth grade was not truly over until it was all nicely filed away. And then I could really start to feel like a sixth grader. Because of my summer organizing, I had much less crap than most kids. Because frankly, I was brutal. If I couldn't find a proper place for the spinning top I got in a goody bag, I just threw it out. 

I continued to do my summer re-organizing, or some sort of version of it until I graduated from college. All of a sudden, I was faced with the fact that jobs don't let you out for the whole summer. And if you only get two weeks vacation, you don't so much want to spend one of those weeks re-organizing your apartment.

So the crap started to build up. 

I have tried to get rid of my crap TWICE in the past few months. Once in February, I made it my monthly challenge. That didn't work out, so I joined Chile's "Cut The Crap" challenge. Well, it's the end of the month, and I am still ... full of crap.

So ... I don't have a week. But I have a weekend. My mission this weekend is to do the impossible. I am going to try and rid my apartment of as much crap as I can. Let's see if I am up to the challenge. 

Because seriously. Fourth grade me sets a high bar.

7 comments:

pink dogwood said...

Wow - that is amazing - I am sending my daughters over to you for training for the first week of their summer vacation :)

I moved into my current house 3 years ago - there are still some unopened boxes in the basement, I guess I don't need them?
I recently started hanging a bag in my closet for stuff that I no longer want(or it no longer fits) - when it fills up I take it to salvation army.

Joyce said...

Uh-oh, we're scarily alike. And my daughter does the annual post-school year clean-out, too. I think the whole sorting and filing thing must be genetic.

Chile said...

You can do it, Arduous, I have faith!

Sam said...

Like Joyce, its a bit freakish on how much I can identify with this. I did some major deep cleaning as a kid. To this day I can find out where things are in minutes.

Jennie said...

Wow, me too. I was always rearranging furniture and organizing my stuff. I too still have school work from elementary school, but mine is no longer organized in a file but packed in a box in my mom's garage. That's what happened when I moved cross country after undergrad.

Mad Hatter said...

OMG, that is freakish! :-) My idea of "organizing" my room was always to shove everything under my bed or into my closet. Sad to say, I'm not that much different now....

Cath@VWXYNot? said...

I was usually quite good at starting that process, but never at finishing it! From the age of about 7 onwards I've been pathologically messy.