Assume Nothing

Since I was a wee child, I've had at least one person to lean on. I've been lucky enough to move from person to person with few gaps, so I've not ever been forced to worry about the little things. It is for that reason I had mistakenly assumed my new email client, Gmail, would anticipate my every need in the email department. Bzzzzt! I'm sorry, you are SO wrong but thank you for playing. For an email application that touts, "Never delete another email! All your worries are circling the drain! Write, receive, forward, invite others to partake of the technological Eden that is Gmail!", you'd think they would take out your trash.

After having had my newest email address for one year, I meandered to the bottom of the page today and the nice people from G00gle informed me I had already used up 5% of my limit. I was emailing my way into a full box and it wasn't even a full box of goodies from friends and family. No kids, that particular address was filled with journal notifies, employment website notifies and forwards from people who, if they don't cut it out, will no longer have access to this particular address.

Occasionally, I repsond to one of my chosen journallers or read their entries and compose a response all on my very own. As you can plainly see, my days of back and forth with friends and colleagues has reached its end. Still, that adds up to a few extra lines in my Sent file. Which is the place I headed when I realized that while I've been permanently deleting Spam from its own file, I had been neglecting to purge the garbage can. And if this stuff had been real garbage, man, it would have stunk to high heaven! Almost 1,000 messages relegated by moi to File 13 from more than a year ago, still there, still waiting around in the lame hope that I might change my mind and open one.

Unfortunately for them, The Boy and I are in the midst of purging the entire house in preparation for repairs and upgrades related to a move within the next year. We're throwing shit out and burning shit with our names on it and giving away belongings that cause our friends and family to narrow their eyes and ask,

"WHY are you getting rid of this? What's wrong with it?"

"Well, I woke up this morning and decided I had no need for eleventy-million candles so it's your lucky day!"

A local women's shelter is going to benefit from my yo-yo-ing weight and will receive a garbage bag of barely used clothes. Shoes I haven't worn for years and no longer fit into because my flippers have flattened out from a decade of padding around in bare feet at every single opportunity will be pitched because the idea of someone else wearing my shoes squicks me out.

As a pack rat, I anticipated an anxiety attack as I completed even a partial purge. Instead, I find it to be incredibly liberating. Freeing, even. I feel lighter.

So I guess from now on I'll have to shoulder the responsibility of taking out the trash my own self.

Posted at 4:25 p.m.