2002-11-03 - 11:54 p.m.

Cleaning the Library

I'm leaving for China on Saturday, which is - gulp! - less than a week away. Holy crap!

In fact it's even less than that because I have to be up at the crack of dawn on Saturday to get to the airport on time. Okay, it's time to panic now.

One of the things that I wanted to do before I left was leave an immaculate Hamster Palace since, 1) it would be a nice surprise for Lily and 2) it would be a nice surprise for ME since it's depressing coming home to a messy apartment. Also, it would be good if the apartment wasn't a deathtrap for when the Manager comes up here and feeds the hamsters while I am away.

In typical fashion I've been putting off getting things clean, using the excuse that I have "plenty of time." Well, now I don't have plenty of time any more. I have to get moving!

Unfortunately today I got shown that I may have waited too long to get started. Yesterday I began cleaning the library, and I worked on it all day today, but I'm STILL not done! Good grief! There are five other rooms I have to clean!

The library, which is also called "the hamster room" because there are five hamsters living there and "Lily's room" because that's where her computer lives, is a terrible mess. I can't blame Lily (or the hamsters) for that since nearly all of the junk there is mine. Three of the four walls are lined with cabinets and bookshelves, so I figured today I'd dust off the bookshelves and clean all the counters, then pick up the floor and vacuum. Well, I'm ALMOST done with the first two things on the list, and I'm dirty, sweaty, exhausted and wheezing.

What took so long was that I was taking all the books off the shelves, dusting them and putting them back. I was also trying to restore order since there were random piles of books everywhere.

When I first moved into the Hamster Palace in 1998, I remember being thrilled that for the first time in my life all the books I owned could be on display in shelves, rather that stuffed away in boxes in the attic or various closets. This happy state of affairs was short-lived and now I have far more books than I can display comfortably. Some of them have to go.

I have a depressing amount of stuff. Besides the fact that there are boxes of books moving into the attic, there is already another whole library's worth of books already up there, rescued from when I was cleaning out my parents' house. Most of these books are hardcover classics, and it's sort of embarrassing that Dickens, Twain and Melville are moldering up in the attic while crap like self-help books by Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer are proudly on display down here.

One of the things I've been meaning to do is go through my books, and finally read some of the books I've been carrying around with me for the last 20 years or more. While I was going through the shelves, there were just so many of the books that I haven't read. Sometimes I think that I buy books just to ease my guilty conscience about my worries or my problems and that I believe the knowledge in the books will just sink into my skull by osmosis while the books sit on my shelves, unread. I've got so much stuff in there that I've been meaning to read "someday" that I could probably never buy another book for the rest of my life, and still have plenty to read.

One of the things I'm planning to do once I get back from China is have a steady program of either reading the books in my library or finally deciding that I'm NEVER going to read some of them, and just get rid of them. Maybe have a little "book of the day" entry here when I briefly review each book, before either heaving it or keeping it. That's an idea.

Oh, the dust that was in there! The library is only about four years old, but there is an unbelievable amount of dust on everything. Clouds of it came off the top of every book that I took off the shelves. By the way, there has got to be a better way of dealing with this, other than taking every book off the shelf one at a time and blowing on it. Any ideas out there?

While going through the library I also found ample evidence of my absent-mindedness, another depressing fact of life. I found not one, not two but THREE books that I had bought twice. Lovely. It's not like I have all that much money to waste.

Speaking of money, the most alarming find was an envelope I found snapped into a chess book as a bookmark. I opened the envelope and found a check for $120.00 dated April, 2001! Oh, dear. It was the money that I was paid for teaching the chess class back in the Spring of 2001. Now I have to call the people who ran the class and ask them if they ever issued me another check. I think they did, but I'm not sure. This is not going to increase their opinion of my competency.

Sometimes I feel like I don't own my possessions, they own me and I'm dragging them around with me everywhere I go, like a ball and chain around my leg. That's one of the things that is appealing about going away for two weeks - I get a vacation from all my frigging stuff.