Got a Happy Story? Spring Cleaning Edition
Fri Apr 04, 2008 at 05:32:41 PM PDT
Welcome to Got a Happy Story? I hope everyone is having a happy Friday and getting ready to enjoy a fun weekend.
Got a Happy Story is a community gathering every Friday night where we share stories large and small that have put a smile on our face. It is a time to acknowledge the joy and wonder we experience. The Happy Story diary exists as a way to anchor the community in hope and comfort while we do the hard work of taking back our country. Everyone and all sorts of stories and pictures are welcome. May we find joy and strength here.
For me the first half of tonight's title should be "Got an Ecstatic Story" and the second should be "Return to Sanity Edition." I'm not sure why I'm feeling so blissful, on the surface my apartment never looked worse and I still have plenty of work in front of me.
The sanity can be explained by a look into my closets. Did you ever hear of the Collyer's Mansion. Well the Collyer brothers had noting on my closets. I had a facade of cleanliness, but damn that clutter was expanding.
The really scary part is that I have the Internal Revenue Service to thank for finally stepping away from the television and getting down to business.
Now I have to ask a question. Is it just me or has snail mail made your life unmanageable too?
Before online payments I had to deal with the mail but now I just can't seem to find the time to separate the necessary mail from the junk. This is all pretty stupid and very unwise but now with the ability to keep track of checking, savings and investments online I just find better things to do with my time.
Don't get me wrong. I won't even pretend that I'm not already a pack rat but that mailbox is filled with crap every night and somewhere along the line I just stopped going through it. Pressed for time during apartment cleanings I'd stuff a pile here, stuff a pile there and by the end of the year there were piles everywhere.
If I was going to file my taxes by April 15, this weekend was the deadline for cleaning up my act. So my happy story began last Saturday and continued through the entire week. I got out of bed knowing that there is a large box overflowing with mail in the closet, another disguised as a settee under the picture window in my living room, two more smaller ones under the end tables on each side of the couch and stuffed drawers everywhere.
You know how a really nasty job can get set aside by another really nasty job that is less dreadful? The tax deadline was too close to just put the burden aside and go for a walk in the park but I could rationalize that another positive motion would be acceptable. So I concluded that mail sorting could only be done under sanitary conditions.
On Saturday I gave the place a deep cleaning and after a nice dinner I stacked a years worth of mail between the coffee table and the television. If I didn't place right it in the way of any other activity I probably would have blown off the inevitable on Sunday.
I'm not exaggerating here, one year of mail came out to be at least 24 cubic feet of dead trees. Even though I've gotten off every catalogue list and canceled every magazine subscription, for being such a nice guy with decent credit corporate America (mostly banks) had sent me a small tree. Or perhaps it was a large shrub. Like Americans don't already have enough useless shrubs to deal with.
On Sunday from sunup to sundown I sorted that mail. With NPR as an early morning distraction and talking heads through the rest of the morning and early afternoon I just kept ripping and tearing through a year's worth of junk.
You know quite a bit of that mail reminded me of those Sunday morning talking heads. "Check Enclosed" is a $500 check that can only be cashed when you buy a $30,000 auto. There was more "Important Dated Material" from people I don't want to date and "Time Sensitive Membership Material" from places where I'm not a member than I could count. Letters from "Account Management" from places where I don't have accounts filled a heavy duty garbage bag. There had to be three hundred "pre-approved" ersatzes credit cards, another one hundred "offers of a lifetime" and a slew of "Act Nows!"
There was the occasional "Yahoo!" like a $400 real estate tax rebate check but once I was finished it was just an example of how much an unregulated free market cares about the environment. I did miss an opportunity to get four months of DirecTV for free and those ValuePak coupons would have been handy but the rest was just landfill.
From Sundown till John Adams I filed away important papers and carried industrial strength trash bags to the basement. As much as Sunday sucked, paper cuts and all, by night's end I felt so clean and so satisfied with my actions. Not that I hope to do a repeat next year, a little sanity and efficiency would be nice, but I really did feel like a marathon runner after that last mile.
This happy story continued through the week. I got a good deal of work this week, a happy story all by itself but all of my free time was devoted to garbage and cleaning up my act. On Wednesday between Cheers and Jeers I actually opened another closet and made it empty! I found a can of paint that exploded. I thought it smelled funny here last summer.
I cut up and cancelled every credit card outside of my primary bank so those letters can go straight into the can. I merged 401k’s so that will be one less letter a month. Someone wrote a diary recently about getting on the national do not mail list and I followed the the steps but it still hasn't kicked in, so I contacted a few of the worst pest. I called every company that I do business with and got them to agree that I would receive "nothing but statements."
Maybe tonight’s story should have been Got a True Confession? This was a little embarrassing to write and perhaps writing it down will put my nonsense to a stop. Still getting this personal burden out of the way made me happier than I’ve been in a long time. I'm walking on air now.
So what making you happy this week? And please tell me about how you deal with mail.
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