One of my favorite seasons is spring. The other favorites are summer, winter and fall. Yes, I realize there is incongruousness there, and I do not apologize. Every time the seasons change, you can find me looking out a window thinking something like, "Yay! Summer's here! Tomatoes and fresh herbs and hot afternoons in the shade drinking margaritas! My favorite!" and then 3 months later you'll hear me saying, "Hurray! It's fall - time to break out the Halloween stuff and watch the leaves turn colors and start drinking hot tea again! My favorite!" I'm fickle about the seasons. I like them all extremely well.
I like spring mainly because of spring-cleaning. I like to clean house, although that's not always evidenced by the state of said house. I should probably correct myself here and state that I like to be done cleaning house, which obviously necessitates that I do the work to get it done. There's something deeply satisfying in knowing that I can actually find my tax returns, sit on the floor and play with the dog without getting covered in cat hair, or see the top of the dining room table, because it's not always physically possible to do these things at my house, and it's a fleeting state in any case. All things are temporary, and it seems that the most temporary thing in the universe is a bathtub without a ring around it.
However, true clear-out-the-crap, wade-through-the-stack-of-mail-in-the-corner, get organized, turn your life around cleaning is something I tend to do in stages, and it's generally an on-going effort. Between you, me, and the lamppost, I enjoy throwing things away. Junky things, anyway. Things I don't need anymore, things that are worn out, things I never liked in the first place. Things I'll never use again.
I'm really good at it, too. I don't get sentimental. I own many things I like very much and will never ever part with, but when I find items in the course of house cleaning that are simply a waste of space, out they go! Very rewarding. Also, often very amusing. Last time I executed a huge heave-ho of stuff was late last fall, right after Dave and I moved to our new house. We realized we'd just moved a metric ton of stuff that we never intended to use again, including several large and ugly pieces of hand-me-down furniture, magazines dating back to 1984, and other assorted unidentifiable junk. So we rented a dumpster and spent a weekend cleaning out the place. Buried deep in the boxes from my office - boxes I haven't opened since I don't know when - was a plastic baggie full of miniature cassette tapes. I couldn't recall what the Sam Hill would be on these tapes, so I busted out the mini-player and started popping in tapes.
First thing I discovered was that I still have the answering machine tape from 8 years ago when I lived with my ex-boyfriend and we had a roommate. The messages on that tape are bizarre. They were the messages from the last week I lived in the condo, when the ex (known in my circle as Cheese Boy) and I were breaking up badly. Our roommate, meanwhile, a loser who hasn't even received a snarky moniker in my circle because of the depth of his feebleness, was a truly terrible musician who had just gone into enormous debt to purchase music equipment and had precisely no money to pay rent or utilities for the last 2 months I was at the condo. Cheese Boy kept telling me to calm down and give the roommate a break, since I was making the most money of all of us, but it's extraordinarily irritating to be both den mother and credit union to a couple of college drop-outs who blast The Eagles at all hours, you know? I was having none of it, and that resulted in many messages passed back and forth via the answering machine, to the tune of, "I'd love to pay you, I really would, but I don't have the money and I can't give you what I don't have" (that is a direct quote. As previously mentioned, I have the tape to prove it) and "If you can't pay your bills because you bought too much shit, maybe you should return said shit so you can pay your bills!" The situation went downhill from there, and I moved out soon afterwards, which was best for everyone, and extremely wonderful for me as I got rid of both Cheese Boy and I'll Never Be a Financial Consultant Boy in one fell swoop.
Ah, good times.
The next thing I unearthed was a series of tapes from Grad Nite. Oldest buddy Eggman and I used the mini-recorder to document our senior trip to Disneyland, and a more thorough and useless record of events I doubt you will find anywhere. Highlights include the moment where I, in pretentious radio announcer style, gleefully report, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the sole of Eggman's shoe has just fallen off!" our 10 minute speculation that the man returning from the bathroom on the plane was Danny Glover ("No way!" "Way!" "It sure looks like Danny Glover." "That's because it is!" "No way. I think it is! That's Danny Glover dude!" "Well, maybe not, I don't know."), a recording of our actually meeting Danny Glover (yes, dude, it was him, and he was the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. I still have the picture I took with him), and the complete gross-out of everyone on our bus when a girl in the bus across from us barfed in glorious Technicolor out her window. I don't know why we thought it was critical to tape record these things at the time, but I'm really glad we did. I understand that nobody else wants to be subjected to these tapes, and I would never actually make anyone sit down and listen to them, but going through them myself brings me back to that brink of adulthood that Grad Nite embodied, when we felt we could do anything at all, because not only had we survived high school, but we were going to Disneyland to boot!
So these are good things to have found. I tossed out the answering machine tape because I have no love for the Voice of Infuriating Ex-Roommate, but kept the Grad Nite Files for further review and howling laughter with the Eggman. And then I moved on to clean out my clothes closet, and ran smack into the one area where I am inexcusably bad at cleaning.
I don't know why, but I can't seem to part with clothes. Actually, I do know why, and I think many women will nod their heads when I expose it. I have clothes in an amazing range of sizes, from my Calista Flockhart days in college to my current... well, not-nearly-so-Calista days. And my ongoing intention is to diet my way down through these clothes and wind up somewhere near the acid-washed jeans of 1991.
There are numerous problems with this plan. The most obvious one is that it's been over 10 years, and despite a myriad of well-intentioned false starts, I'm nowhere near those college jeans. Nowhere. I doubt they could get past my knees at this point. Which, though it saddens me a little, I'm actually relatively at peace with, because hey - tomorrow is another day right?
The biggest issue with the plan is the clothes themselves. The truth of the matter is that even if I were to start dropping poundage with abandon, I wouldn't wear any of these clothes anyway! I've already fessed up to the acid washed jeans, but did I mention the black off-the-shoulder madras shirt that I used to wear with them? Yep - still in my middle dresser drawer. There is a pair of Z. Cavaricci pants that I wouldn't be caught dead in occupying a place in the depths of my closet. I still provide living space to several shaker knit sweaters that I can tell you right now will never see the light of day again. And the gaily-printed body suits that were huge in '92 will never grace the torso of this woman again because they are completely out of style - and thank God for that!
So why, oh why, am I so completely unable to part with these testaments to bad taste? My current theory is that I'll just "try them on" as I go down in sizes, so that I have something other than the scale by which to measure my success. Never mind the fact that I haven't had any successes, or even near successes, in ten years, and these clothes are slowly turning the color of the dust that covers them. Disregard the fact that I have a closet full of things I absolutely cannot fit into that mock me daily when I go foraging for something to wear to work and the only thing that does for my self-esteem is to send it plummeting to somewhere around the time when I was 14 and the guy I liked was heading down the hall in my direction and just as he looked at me I sneezed and... well, you can guess what happened. No, pay no attention to these things, because the mere hope, the wisp of possibility that I will someday be able to encase my rear end once again in acid washed splendor keeps me hanging on.
If and when that day ever comes, I'm going to sit down in those jeans and listen to the Grad Nite Files from start to finish. And then I'll burn the pants. But I'll keep the tapes because they send me back to a more innocent time in my life better than any parachute pants ever could.
Until then I'll just have to steal more closet space from Dave. He'll never notice.
- KNP May 13, 2002
