I have been absent of late because I've been moving house. Well, I've been living with my Man for months now, and have been subletting my flat, but the time has come for me to permanently vacate. I have been drip feeding my new digs with Hattie paraphernalia over the last several weeks and am now fully at home at our house :)
BUT, and this is a big but. So big in fact that Sir Mix-a-Lot would get a bonk on for it; I am a hoarder of the highest degree, which has single-handedly provoked a series of low fat nervous breakdowns.
Let me start from the beginning: Man asks me to move in in January. A couple of months later I have spent enough time alone in my flat smoking cigarettes, playing Nintendo and watching old episodes of Jonathan Creek whilst doing face masks and trying on ludicrous outfits that I am ready to bid a fond farewell to those days of shameless virtual singledom in favour of co-habiting with my man. A few months go by and we decide to make it permanent and cease my tenancy at my old place.
"Sure," I say, "it'll take no time at all. I've just got a couple of boxes of old school reports that I can store at my Dad's place".
This is how I thought things would be:
And this is how things actually were:
I had gravely underestimeated the amount of shit I needed to pack, and I'd been foolhardy enough to grandly presume that I could handle this monumental feat all by myself. Roughly 37 hours of packing and 19 large boxes later, I was still not totally finished and have had 2 or 3 fairly worrying psychological meltdowns. You simply would not believe the crap I have accumulated over the years - it has become patently obvious that I have a pathological inability to throw ANYTHING away. Old cracked pencil without a rubber? Yeah, I might need it one day, even though I haven't used a pencil since I was 7! Dog eared yellowed note pad with only 3 or 4 sheets left? Keep it, it's not good to waste stuff! A bit of frayed packaging string? Do NOT throw that away, you'll need it in a string emergency! And so on with a plethora of other useless dregs that have amassed into a metric fuck ton of a scrap heap that's so intrinsically overwhelming that I found myself in the foetal position, rocking gently and humming to myself on more than one occasion.
How the fuck did I manage to get through 26, almost 27 years of my life without seemingly ever throwing a single thing into the bin? Do I have a secret hatred of bins? Actually I kind of do - when I was 6, I was jumping on the bed having a great time and next thing I know I am plummeting head first into a wooden bin which left me bloodied and permanently scarred after a hasty visit to the emergency room and 3 stitches.
So I have spent a vast majority of the past few weeks throwing my life time of trash into endless heavy duty refuse sacks.
This needs some math! I would say I spend an average of 5 minutes and 23 seconds throwing things away every day.
Putting on man's coffee and emptying old filter into bin - 7 seconds.
Scraping cereal dregs into bin - 11 seconds.
Cleansing face and binning cotton pads/buds - 5 seconds
Sorting through junk amassed in bag from previous day and putting in bin - 2 minutes
Sorting recycling and putting in recycling bin - 2 minutes
General daytime rubbish to be put in bin - approx 1 minute.
This is pretty much how long I spend each day throwing things away (not including emptying Dex's litter once a week - 5 minutes - and act of emptying rubbish and taking out to garbage cans - about 10 minutes per week).
So that's 5 mins 23 seconds x 7 = 37 mins 41 secs, plus 15 mins = 52 mins 41 secs per week throwing out garbage.
52 mins 41 secs x 52 = 2740 mins per year = 46 hours per year
46x27 = 1,242 HOURS IN MY LIFE SO FAR SPENT THROWING OUT GARBAGE. That's 51 days and 18 hours. 7.4 weeks. Almost two months. All spent throwing out garbage - but of course I haven't been doing that until I moved house. So I have essentially spent the last two solid months throwing out garbage, and not doing anything else.
Of course I haven't actually done that, but I can assure you, that is exactly how it has felt. And that is why I have been so absent of late, and also why I have had a few fairly serious mental breakdowns.
The moral of the story is to always throw things away if you don't use them. Also, never, ever move house without hiring someone to do it for you! May this be a lesson to you all, children.
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