flotsam and jetsam

Thank god for Friday, and a weekend at home with no external plans.  I'm hoping to get lots and lots of writing done, and maybe start to unpack the library. 

This last move in particular drove home (quite literally) how much STUFF I have.  For the last decade, while I've moved around a lot (seven times in ten years, holy shit), I have never been in an adequate position to go through all of my belongings and discard the detritus.  (Anyone who says that moving is the perfect time to do so has clearly never had a lot of stuff, moved in a hurry, moved alone, moved with crippling depression, or had to reason their way through their own pack rat tendencies.)  Most of the time I have had just enough energy to desperately shove things into boxes and load them on a truck, with no resources to perform the executive decision-making required of a sentimental person who grew up poor to part with beloved or potentially useful possessions.

I think I have finally reached a good time to do some sorting, however.  Life has stabilized, and I really don't want my next move to be as strenuous as my last one (Steph laughed at me for planning for my next move while I was still executing my current one, but an apartment-dwelling pioneer with an eye for adventure knows that she'll never be in one place for all that long).  I have an approximate metric fuck-ton of boxes sitting up in the attic of my building waiting for me to go through them one at a time on rainy days; they can sit there for awhile yet.  I'm going to start with my books.  I have accumulated around 2,000 of them, and while that number fills my bibliophilic heart with wild elation, it's a damn lot of books to transport every time I move, and a bunch of them I know I will never read, or read again (Disputing Evolution and The Discipline of Grace, I'm looking at you).  So...time to slim down.

And I can't wait to have my library all set up and decorated, so that I can read books, listen to jazz, and write of an evening in a room filled with big overstuffed chairs and my grandmother's drop-leaf cherry table and my colorful mismatched lamps and best of all my books, my dearest friends, my wayfaring companions, my portals to every part of every real and imagined world, filling my shelves with their neat straight lines and lovely colors, artfully situated among my favorite travel mementos and collected flotsam and jetsam -- a room of stillness that testifies to a life of motion.

Oh, it's going to be glorious.