About Me

Shelving Self-Help

,9:57 pm

I was half-napping in the family room today, beaten semi-comatose by the April rain, when a row of books caught my eye. A dozen or so, lined up neatly on the highest shelf of the bookcase. Self-help books. I studied them briefly from my position on the couch until seized, suddenly, by the urge to […]

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Just Stuffing

,1:35 am

At this early stage in my blog, I realize that I haven’t yet examined my philosophical interest in the physical aspect of this quest, that is, the giving up of material things. That may seem a trivial concern when we are talking about, say, a pink-and-purple beaded skipping rope with one handle missing, but, wait […]

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Things I Gave Away: Today’s Shortlist

,10:28 pm

to the Goodwill: a bagful of my clothes including some distinctly unsexy flannette pajamas (I think I can hear my husband cheering somewhere off in the background); a bagful of kids’ clothes, unexamined by myself, chosen and gathered by my older daughter — thus energized, she then went on to rout out and re-organizer her younger […]

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Prayer Beads & the Pursuit of Happiness

,6:58 pm

About a year ago, I bought some prayer beads from a little shop downtown. I don’t recall what prompted this acquisition, no doubt it was inspired by some article I’d read, a theory I’d latched onto. The beads are lovely, an irregular rainbow, copper next to coal-black next to mustard, pale mauve, Caribbean green. They […]

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Dumping Superwoman

,12:39 am

I am restless, today, irritated, like there’s a sliver in my thumb that I can’t extract. I feel pulled in too many directions, overwhelmed. No matter where I am in the house I see a task that needs doing: a stack of clothes to be mended, memorabilia to be sorted, laundry to be washed, dried, […]

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Trophies I Gave Away

,1:25 pm

And away they went, six trophies from the run-bike-swim days of my mid-to-late twenties. Medals from cross-country ski  races. Toastmaster ribbons and certificates. A celebratory mug from law school… why is it that we keep these things? Come to think of it, why do we collect them in the first place? A question like that could […]

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Stuff I Gave Away – Today’s Shortlist

,8:08 pm

In today’s de-cluttering news, we have the damaged, the unused, the faded and the boring: • sandbox toys that were sun-faded and cracked; • perfectly good weather-stripping that we don’t need; • tennis balls faded to grey; • decorative Christmas twigs spray-painted a garish gold that have left sparkly droppings everywhere they’ve been for the […]

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De-Cluttering my Daughter’s Desk

,3:49 pm

I am sitting at my daughter’s desk attempting to cure her computer of a virus. There is a lot of waiting involved in this task, as the computer chugs through scans and multiples re-boots. As I sit, I contemplate the chaos of objects littering the surface of her desk. My daughter is much like her father, […]

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Missing the School Bus. Seizing the Day.

,5:08 pm

This morning my daughter missed the school bus. It used to be that driving her to school wouldn’t have been a big deal because we lived only eight minutes away. Now, though, my daughters attend a French-language high school in another city, a forty minute drive south. I had already planned to drive to the […]

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