Monday, January 13, 2014

30 Days to a Better Man, Day 13: declutter your life


Hoo boy. Aside from memorizing that dang poem, this is the only one of these challenges that's actually been something like hard work. I am a pack rat and it's high time I ditched some of this junk.

What junk, you ask? The Art of Manliness says to focus on things like books, papers, mail, and clothes, but I also paid attention to useless things like cheap toys and gewgaws and stuff that just takes up space. I combed through the apartment and I found this crap: 


  • piles upon piles of old receipts
  • an empty key ring
  • miscellaneous plastic tools
  • a heap of old Airplane Owners & Pilots Association magazines
  • two or three wrinkled, ripped old Seoul tour maps
  • heaps of ticket stubs, travel brochures, and maps from cities across Asia
  • my derelict Nook
  • some fatuous Diversity Amid Globalization textbook
  • tax forms in need of sorting
  • my old blaze orange travel wallet with the Norwegian flag
  • a much-abused trail map of Bukhansan National Park
  • an unread copy of Sky & Telescope magazine I picked up in a Korean bookstore ages ago
  • a plastic bag of dead AA batteries

...and plenty more besides. So I bagged it all up and got it out of the apartment. Or at least I will, when I figure out where I'm supposed to get rid of batteries. And I kind of want to burn my old receipts instead of releasing them into that fraud-stricken world.

But the point is that I feel much better. I do feel like a more organized and less cluttered person now. I went ahead and re-folded and reorganized all the clothes in my closet while I was at it, and it's all squeaky-clean. It's strange what a little tidying up will do for one's psyche.

Now if only it would help me write the climax of Novel #3...

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