Today is “Bulky Item Pickup” in the neighborhood, and you see people cruising the streets, scavenging for treasure, da da da. I spent a chunk of time yesterday, working on the garage (filled with allllll my stuff from storage), in the effort to clear off & drag out the antique couch for BIP Day.<\/p>\n
It was a mixed deal. It’s a gorgeous piece of furniture, yet it would have cost me at least a grand to have it reupholstered, and another few hundred bucks to have the leg repaired properly (broken off). I also know my mother spent $500 for it, and she gave it to me my senior year of college for my apartment. It’s always been the couch she gave me, in my mind. There’s a lot of shit in the garage she gave me, products of shopping, mostly for herself & then clearing out her old things & giving them to me. The process of working through the boxes in the garage is a lot like confronting all of your past – reminders of my own bad decisions & purchases – and then all the stuff given to me by my mother, with whom I haven’t spoken in two years. <\/p>\n
So. It felt cathartic, throwing a ton of stuff away, putting old clothes that don’t fit into a charity bag, and then before JWo got home, I dragged that couch to the curb. I felt like I needed to do it, by myself. There’s still a lot of stuff to go through, and I still struggle with getting rid of things, but it’s astounding just how much of it I’ve held on to out of a sense of obligation and duty – not good reasons to keep them.<\/p>\n
And by 9 p.m., the couch was gone. Someone else’s treasure. May it serve them well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is “Bulky Item Pickup” in the neighborhood, and you see people cruising the streets, scavenging for treasure, da da da. I spent a chunk of time yesterday, working on the garage (filled with allllll my stuff from storage), in the effort to clear off & drag out the antique couch for BIP Day. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plazajen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}