in the great purge of august 2003 we have found creative ways to rid ourselves of excess belongings:

monday's theme party: come with some booze, leave with some stuff.
guests provided the beer and wine, since we're too broke to be throwing parties just now, and in exchange, they got to leave with a party favor: bubble soap, a stuffed armadillo, nail polish, jingly belly chain and matching anklet, Flying M frisbee, travel yoga mat, Quiet Stylin' hairdryer, tie-dye stationary, a handspring visor & accessories, a jewelry box that plays the Theme from Love Story...even a five disc CD changer and gold velvet vintage sofa were included in the deal. only, everyone wanted to take the cat home, instead. net gain: 5 weinhard's and 1 hangover (andy's).

Buffalo Exchange (buy-sell-trade boutique)
net gain: $27.70 and a nearly new pair of Franco Sarto heels

Rainbow Books
net gain: $17.56, but even they won't buy the awful Lo's Diary, this horrible horrible first novel in which the author attempts to create what Lolita's diary might have looked like. i'm concerned that even goodwill will refuse it.

Computer Renaissance
1 pair of computer speakers, with subwoofer: $9 (sale pending)

YWCA
if i sneak up on the donation station early in the morning and leave my stuff on the doorstep, they probably can't refuse to take that terrible novel.

my grandparent's garage sale
total sales of my beanbag chair, glass head sculpture, empty jewel cases, and other useless bric-a-brac totaled $8.75. when you subtract the japanese dishes, tablecloth & matching napkins, and gameboy games that i/andy purchased from my grandparents, the net gain was $3.75.

my mother
unused flicks movie pass: $20
dan brown novel: $20
my haircut: $50 (my mother provides financial support for my gypsy lifestyle by way of nice things that i otherwise couldn't buy for myself. moms are great that way.)

my co-worker, tim
fender acoustic guitar & pasteboard case: $125. finally, someone will play the guitar and i will be free of the guilt. i loved the guitar, it's just that i have no musical talent whatsoever and find that to be discouraging.

net gain: $273.04 + 1 pair of shoes + 5 weinhard's (now 3) + 1 hangover (now recovered) plus good karma for having given warm coats to cold kids at the women's crisis center.

moving day approacheth

after three rounds with the Blaster.Worm virus we are (hopefully) operational again.

guilty pleasure: the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. it's like sunday morning yoga for the face, as my jaw hangs open at the sheer frivolousness of the people and triviality of the news. i mean, this section actually makes Cosmo's "How to tell if he's a keeper" and "10 quick ways to move up the career ladder" sort of articles seem to have significant gravity.

a piece that rankled in particular last week:

Banshees Howl on Oregon's Dunes

...
For certain people, summer is a Tolstoy idyll on a lake in Vermont at some 21st century version of a dacha. For some, summer is a series of parties on the East End of Long Island, drinks at the house of Russell Simmons, amid nesting swans and friends that one vaguely feels one has met, probably on prime-time television. For some, summer is a group house with weekend mattress shares calculated by meticulous fractions, or the ritual of tugging red Radio Flyers from ferry landings to houses stocked with Humboldt Fog cheese and designer drugs.

But for the people here (Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area), who never considered trucker hats an ironic accessory, summer is a family camping holiday whose central activity involves screaming up the flank of a sand dune on an all-terrain vehicle.
...
(Guy Trebay)

can you believe it? trucker hats without irony?

the writer goes on to peer down his nose at the hefty $4500 price tag of a typical ATV, scoff at the idea that recreating together qualifies as a healthy family activity, and posit that none of these people are capable of appreciating the beauty of the natural world simply because they didn't mention it when he asked them questions about their ATVs.

granted, i find ATVing a distastefully noisy and moronic method of enjoying the great outdoors just as this hamptons' poolside reporter does, but at least i recognize that the irony that hip new yorkers enjoy while wearing trucker hats comes from somewhere: it's only ironic if someone else does or did it seriously once. god, given the choice of summer activities, i'd rather camp in the oregon dunes, even if i did have to ride an ATV, than bump elbows with the "certain people" of Trebay's world, sporting the latest $4500 gucci hoo-ha and doing designer drugs in some sort of modern architecture monstrosity in the hamptons.

the worm ate my computer.

in which, i continue to dream about moving. this one, i've just moved to chicago, only my new job is in san francisco. the commute is a bitch. i keep missing planes. mari is there, she runs a youth hostel and lets me stay there when i miss my flight.

in my dream i have been unhappy, in that self-indulgent depression of the over-privileged sort of way, for a long period of time, and so i gave away most of my stuff - clothes, books, electronics, knickknacks, etc., convinced that freeing myself from material possession would lead to happiness. when the dream was interrupted by the alarm clock, it hadn't become clear yet whether giving away all my stuff would make me happier; but i recall telling lots of people all about how i got rid of all my stuff and that i expected it would soon make me happy. i don't recall whether anyone else was impressed or not.

30 second dream analysis: interesting to note that in the dream giving away my stuff didn't make me happier - i just transferred the object of my worrying to something more self-involved and less material: my own psyche. i'm fretting about the logistics of moving, and moving/disposing of the stuff i own is a big part of those logistics. the more stuff i own, the more tied down and trapped i feel. it gets harder to pick up and move when i feel the need to flee or to answer the call of wanderlust. i have the jitters of a nervous bride, only it's signing a lease and a contract with a strange city (rather like marriage, i suppose), that makes me apprehensive. moral of the dream: have stuff. just worry about it less.

lots of symbols of limbo in my dreams these days, not surprisingly

oh, a new sort of nerdly pain - when someone takes you OFF his "other blogs i read" list. just like that. no call, no note, just dropped right off the list!

the fates were smiling on me; i've tricked another unsuspecting theatre company into hiring me. aside from the fact that we'll need food stamps to live off the salary, i'm excited about the position (production manager/resident stage manager). finally, i can stop being other people's assistants and actually help run a company.

internet plane ticket/u-haul/apartment shopping has exhausted and frazzled me; i go in search of take-out thai to ease my troubled mind. another good thing about moving to chicago: cheap take-out...