This afternoon Anna had a sudden urge to see what the living room would look like rearranged. So she found a program online, and I spent the better part of an hour or so calling out the measurements of everything. Basically, it all came to nothing because the stuff we have simply doesn't seem to work in any other configuration, but I do have a point to this...Afterwards, Anna was saying that we have too much stuff--primarily books. It isn't that she doesn't like books. Quite the contrary. She loves to read as much as I do, but she simply doesn't have the need to keep them once they're read for the most part. I like to keep a great deal of mine, mainly because I'm always certain that, at some point in the future, I will want to reread it or will need it for something, and therefore in order to save the trouble of finding and buying it again, I should keep it. In the past, I have been proven quite right in many cases. Some of my books show the wear of many, many readings. Some I may have only reread once or twice, but they are either difficult to find or simply things that I love and want around. Some are, well...
Anyway, during the course of the conversation, I burst into my usual frustrated tears. My immediate response was to go on the defensive. "I did good! I've gotten rid of a ton of stuff!" And I have been good and gotten rid of a ton of stuff. Our closet can testify to that. My gods the amount of crap we cleared out over the past few months, when one counts the storage apocalypse as well as the closet! But certain things, books in this case, I absolutely panic at the thought of clearing out. Take my "school" bookshelf for instance. There are things on there that I have used many times, and were I in graduate school right now, I would be using them again--books I have kept from various classes, some from my honors thesis, and a few (*cough* 9 *cough*) versions of the Bible for comparative purposes. The problem is that I am not in grad school and don't look to be for quite a while. I can't afford to retake the GRE without a job, nor can I afford the application fees. And besides all that, even if I got into a graduate school right now, we certainly couldn't afford to move to wherever it might be. But I just can't get rid of them. If and when I needed them, it would prove difficult and expensive to replace some of them, so I should keep them. Not to mention the fact that if I got rid of them, it would be like I was admitting defeat in a way, letting FSU's rejection decide that I'm not going to do what I want to do...
When really...it's just trading in or selling some books that I'm not using at the moment...I hate OCD.
2 comments:
I, as an English major, can relate very well to the idea of not wanting to get rid of books. I enjoy the idea of my walls being covered in piles of books, I have also seen such walls lining professor's offices. I feel that if you have a lot of books, it's okay, so long as your don't have a lot of everything else too. If you've managed to clean out office supplies, like you've said, it sounds like you're on the right track. Maybe books are just not worth it, or something to think about for another day. Also, try looking into GRE or application fee waivers? If you qualified for need-based financial aid at FSU, it is very likely you'll qualify for the fee waivers.
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