i have so much space now

i've started the clear out of my stuff and i have to say, how much shit can one person possibly own? i know i'm kind of a pack-rat, but seriously people! i have things dating back to high school tucked away and it's been many many many moons since i was in that hell hole. heck, we had our class reunion last year and my school was in a different state. did i bring this with me or has it stowed away as a grim reminder of what i used to be like? or is it some physical embodiment of my past destined to haunt me forever? well i say fuck that nonsense and in the bin with you.

i have about four weeks left til i have to move out and as i work full time and have various social outings to attend to i must start this now. as of today most of my books have been shipped to my parent's house in ballarat. this is no small task. i have many a book, as all writery types should have. although it didn't take up as much room as i thought it would. perhaps i've lost a few to friends. oh well, if i don't read them now and didn't know that i'm missing them, i wont notice their absence in the future. i think in total i had about eight boxes of stuff shipped off. i hear you say, 'eight? is that all?' but when you consider that i still have plenty of things left to pack, sell and throw away eight was a fairly good starting point.

this week we had a hard collection rubbish day on my street. which was fortunate because we got rid of so much stuff. (by we i mean my cousin cass and i - we live together and have been doing so for about five or six years now) we have this cupboard under the stairs that is just this mess of crap that has never been touched the entire time we have lived in our house (i think this is our fifth year) and this week we finally got to clear it out. (big sigh of relief) what's strange though is that we found a tv in that cupboard and half a gym set thing from our old housemate, and he hasn't lived with us in over two years. we also got rid of a broken clothes dryer, an old mattress and half a futon. (these last things weren't in our cupboard, just taking up room in our garage - neither of us drive so our garage is more like a holding area for unwanted crap. a sort of limbo before we get the urge or energy to finally get rid of it)

i'm very excited now though, because most of what's left is to be kept. the only real concern is going through my clothes and finding out what i want to keep. this scares me as there is some horrible fashion disasters in there as well as things that really should have been thrown away years ago. i don't think i've ever gotten rid of clothes in my entire history of independent living so this will be quite the mission. i told you at the start of this post i'm a pack-rat. i do get these flashes of my future though, and i'm surrounded by a kajillion cats, stacks and stacks of old magazines and newspapers and clothes that went out of style more than a century ago that i can't bear to throw away just in case they come back into style. (NB in my future i've beaten cancer and death through breakthroughs in uber-modern medicine and live to be eight hundred. although eight hundred years of pack-ratting scares me. what wonders will i keep? shudder)