Moving On Up

I stopped into the new location of Village Merchants, which I first mentioned in this post a while back.  They are my favorite thrift store in town, which I thought might change after they moved, but they are even better now if that can be believed.  They are now on SE Division & 41st, about 7 blocks from their old building, which I heard I going to be torn down to make way for a new building.  Village Merchants is now bigger and better!  I mean, wayyy bigger!  They even have an upstairs!  There's more parking too, not that that was a huge problem before.  Now it'll be easier to lug bags of stuff I want to sell inside though.  Whoooppeee!!

Today was half great and half "Huh?"  I had dim sum with my friend Ann at a great place called Ocean City on SE 82nd.  We both had a feast with hot tea for under $20!!  After I ran a couple errands I took a long nap without meaning to.  When I woke up I thought it was only 6pm but it was 7:30!  I watched Twin Peaks with some friends and came back home.  I hope I get more done tomorrow, when I went to bed last night I couldn't sleep until about 4am so I think I just need a fresh start.

I've been thinking a lot about where I was last year with mental health and such, and how far I've come with managing grief, anxiety and depression.  Whoever tells you that there are these stages you go through to get to a healing place are full of crap.  The phases come and go.  I really am in a much better place but I've accepted that I'll be dealing with many of these issues for years to come.  This time last year I was having anxiety and panic attacks everyday, so bad that I went to see a doctor to make sure my heart was working properly.  I still have problems but I'm learning how to manage them instead of hoping they fade away someday.

That said, I couldn't help but notice that the blog post with the most hits was the one tagged with "mental illness".  Ha ha ha!!  Sorry, no big revelations there folks.  

Basket Slips

I put some slips of paper in a basket with some ideas of things to keep me busy when I think I've run out - it's not like I ever do, but sometimes I need something to spur me to the next thing.  I can't seem to get my head together since before Christmas.  I think it's the SAD, I can't make myself do anything until it's getting late.

The slips say things like "clean the kitchen floor" or "frame a picture".  I am just so dulled out in my mind these days.  I wish I was perkier.  Coffee is doing very little to help.

I got a haircut today at Bella Institute over on SE Division.  My stylist was from Paris!  I wonder why she'd come all the way to the humble reaches of Portland?!  She did a great job, her name is Natacha if you need a new look for 2013!

Last night I tried to gather things that I'm going to bring over to my parents' house when they have their garage sale.   I have a spot in the basement, out of view of the photos you've seen, where it's all going.  I hope the sale will happen in a week or two.

I am working on clearing out the room that will become my bedroom.  It is unrecognizable from the way it was about a month ago.  I need to clean and spackle the walls but first I will have to take apart my whole computer setup that I use everyday and move it out of the room.  I've been dreading it and putting it off, but I must work fast in case I get a temp job soon and have to put it off more. 

It's a mug's game

Here's some music while you read:

The lyrics to the song are a lot sadder than I actually feel, but I'm getting weighed down by the seasonal affective nonsense this week.  I can't seem to keep a train of thought going during the day, and I get weirdly more motivated as it gets later at night.  Right now I was going through a pile of Dylan's sketchbooks and other assorted papers to find safe spots to keep them.

I watched a terrible movie today: The Proposal.  Stupid!  I was hoping for more from Betty White, which is why I borrowed it from the library in the first place.  Sometimes I'll watch a dumb-ish movie while I do housework and I can listen to it without missing much if I'm looking away.  I don't like Ryan Reynolds at all or Sandra Bullock, let that be a lesson to me.

The fact that I had to go to the dentist today didn't help anything either.  And I forgot to bring enough bus fare to pay my way back from OHSU, so I had to walk down the hill in the gloom of a Portland evening.  I kept looking down the steep side of the hill that slopes sharply down from the sidewalk - more of a cliff, really - and thinking that a car could careen off the road and hit me and we'd all go over the edge, and I'd be impaled on a leafless tree branch!!

It's time to bring up the sun lamp from the basement, I think.  This S.A.D. is hitting code yellow, where I feel it but I'm not hopeless yet.

It's ok, I'm authorized

I forgot that I did this organizing/moving/space planning thing for a living at one time.  It's been a long time since I had a long term, full time job.  For a lot of reasons, things that happened less than two years ago seem more like a decade in the past.  Back in 2006, I worked for a company that contracted with Intel to move their office spaces and set up new ones.  I'd have to get these big groups of people to pack up their cubicles and I'd get a moving crew to take all their stuff to another place in their building.  Sometimes they'd move to a whole other building or campus.  That seems like a big job.  Then why does my house seem like such a big deal?  Wait, wait, I already know the answer to this. 

A year and a half ago I also worked for a company that also built offices, but furniture and fixtures from scratch.  I have to remind myself that I'm a pro!

I picked up a lot of crap from my bedroom floor this morning, it's been terrible for a long time.  I'm a DJ so I keep my CD library in there, and week after week I had been putting off shelving the CDs in order.  So, I did it today.  This whole straightening business is showing me what a perfectionist I am.  I was concentrating so hard on it that I missed a big stack of random papers that were sitting on the floor and spilling in a heap off a shelf. 

I did a lot of cleanup this evening tonite in the basement after visiting with some friends.  Sometimes I get started and without meaning to I just keep going and going until I don't see anything else I can take care of in that space of time.  In this picture that I just took, you can compare a section of my work with just the previous blog entry:

I figured out something else about myself that kind of bothers me on a couple levels: I want my containers to match.  Remember the one that had a purple lid?  I had to take that off the shelf and replace it.  I don't know what I'll do with it yet.  Uniformity of some things can help make a messy sight look a little better.  It seems like a form of snobbery to need that but if it makes me feel a little better then I'm just going to go with it.

I've been doing pretty well, as far as managing my depression.  I'm just putting as much as I can into my day to keep busy and checking things off my list.  Many years ago I found that even anticipating those feelings, or considering them in any way, made me anxious.  I didn't know how to deal with them, but after some therapy and trying different things I can head off the worst of it before it happens.  Most of the time.  I also have great friends that help me all the time, I have the best friends ever.

Am I there yet?

I decided a couple weeks ago that I was going to treat this organizing project as a process, not a destination.  Only a couple days ago I was taking a long journey by car.  It occurred to me that if I thought of the trip as a series of little sections, it would be more bearable than wondering at what time I would end up at the city I was aiming to visit.  Like, if I told myself, I'll stop in Cottage Grove and then I'll stop in Grant's Pass, then  it gave me little goals to meet.  I didn't become impatient with myself for not getting to my last stop by a specific time, and I enjoyed the whole trip a lot more.

Thusly I am approaching my decluttering objectives.  If I say to myself, today I'm going to sort out this pile of papers on my couch and focus on that until it's done the way I want, then I don't get overwhelmed.  In contrast, when I look at my basement, or my computer room, or any whole room as a whole, I feel like I will never get through it.  Little bits of success make me want to see more.  You can't go through a garden and thresh out every weed in a single sweep; you must pull out each little nuisance one by one.

This process can be fun.  Additionally, I've found so many lost items while sorting that I want to see what else will turn up.

Last week I decided to apply this approach to my work in my living area.  I had been spending so much time taking things out of the basement that my upstairs was getting out of control.  After just a few hours I had a clean living room and kitchen, and the linen closet was looking a lot better too.  I had an even bigger pile of things to donate to Salvation Army, which went down to the basement to await their truck on pickup day.

I'm so preoccupied with decluttering as a hobby as well as a necessity, that I've begun treating it as a form of pornography.  I've been surfing before-and-after pictures of basements, bedrooms, closets and kitchens that underwent cleanups on Google Images.  I hunted down articles with tips and personal case histories.  I don't know if they helped so much as made me want to dive into their messes and see if I could make some headway.

Gretchen Rubin, author of the book The Happiness Project, has lots of great advice for living well, and counts decluttering as an excellent way to raise your spirits.  Read her upbeat blog here. 

 

Basement Conniption

I'm starting this blog partly to motivate myself to get my basement in better order.  This is what it looks like now, more or less:

Here's another view of it, looking towards the garage entrance:

As you can see, there's almost no visible path through the mess.  It's quite dangerous, in fact.  There's a great many things that were set down just because they could be carried no further, so they piled up on top of one another.  There's been more than one small avalanche.

These were taken about three days ago.  There's been a tiny improvement since, but not much.  This all is a result of cleaning out the store I used to run with my friend Tim, as well as the move of the publishing company I also run.

It's important for me to keep on this project for many reasons.  Besides the obvious eyesore this is, I've been struggling against depression and anxiety for a year.  Chaos like this makes it all worse for me, and when I am anxious or depressed I am less likely to complete chores like this one.  More importantly, if I feel bad I don't do the things I really enjoy doing.  Keeping my hands busy and working through this kind of stuff helps me feel better.  So in a way, this is also a blog about how I'm dealing with those issues.

I'll post some more pictures very soon with the progress I've already made, and the ideas I've had for the cleanup.  I think it will be fun, if challenging.