This Strange Feeling Must Be What It Feels Like to Be Popular
Chris and I are moving in about a week and a half. Because we had sold our house before we found a new one, we hadn’t really started packing because we hadn’t known where our stuff would go.
But now that we’ve found a house and the home inspection will take place on Monday, I am no longer able to continue living in denial and was forced by Chris to pack today.
Packing was too overwhelming for me, so instead I threw stuff away. Sometimes I think packing would be easier on me if everything simply burned down; that way I wouldn’t miss what I don’t remember. But having to look at every item and make a call on whether it should be kept or tossed is incredibly difficult — how can you blithely throw away the totally useless turtle marionette that you purchased at a street fair in Australia and then dragged home for the kids you would someday never have?
Hmm. Perhaps that wasn’t the best example. Because now it sounds really easy to toss away a marionette like that.
The only item I knew I was keeping, for sure, was my wall hanging of 12 tiny stuffed Disney figures velcroed on.
“I had to eat like 16 boxes of cereal to get that,” I told Chris when he brought it out to show me. “I don’t care what you say, but I am keeping it.”
So I kept the wall hanging, but I felt guilty about it, so I decided to throw away all my musical equipment instead. I hadn’t used any of it in the 4 years we’ve been in this house because I just got too busy with work and dogs and life, and this house just didn’t have the space I needed to set up the equipment easily. Also, I was no longer depressed, and it turns out that I can only write music when I’m depressed. (Sample lyric: “You talk of love, but the words fall out of your mouth like the tears from my eyes.”)
Rather than drag the equipment to yet another house where it would only serve to remind me of how much more productive I used to be, and also how much more unhappy, I put up a Craigslist ad offering it for free. Hopefully, there would be at least one person who wanted a bass guitar, acoustic guitar, multitrack recorder, and random miscellaneous cords whose provenance I could not determine.
I was going to include the synthesizer which my father bought for my younger sister decades ago before I reappropriated it for my music, but then I happened to go on to Ebay and found that it was selling for about $200, which, OH MY GOD, why? Well, whatever the reason, people seemed to want this, so I stuck it on Ebay at 99 cents.
Then I promptly forgot about my auction and Craigslist ad, because I had a wedding to get to. When I came back home five hours later, painfully full of really delicious wedding food, the synthesizer was up to $60 and I had over 25 emails asking for the free equipment.
“How do I choose who to give this stuff to?” I wailed to Chris, who was busy being “a ranger of Hyboria” on the computer.
“Just give it to the first person who responded,” he said.
“But the first person was stupid. He wanted to know where we were located, and I already had our town name in the ad,” I said.
“Okay, then the second person.”
“Well, she sounds too perky. I bet she just wants it to re-sell.”
“Then delete your ad and put up a new one and ask for money,” Chris said, fingers busily tapping at his keyboard, brain possibly wondering why he had wasted two minutes on this conversation, two precious minutes when he could have explored a new room or killed some kind of creature.
“That seems unfair,” I muttered. “I mean, I already said I would give it away for free.”
I thought about the problem. And that’s when I came up with my idea. I would make people APPLY for the free stuff! HAHAHAHA!!! Make them do some work for it!
“Write a quick note and tell me why you want the stuff,” I typed into my Craigslist ad. “I will arbitrarily decide who gets it. Yes, some people will lie.”
Power. Some people thrive on it and become better and stronger. I am not one of those people.
Posted by: ssjane | June 7, 2008 | 11:37 pm
Posted in: This Life | Comments Off