A Bit More About Decluttering
May. 5th, 2025 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI posted an incense burner that I’ve had sitting on my desk for … years. It was a gift, and I don’t burn incense. I put a battery tea light in it, because it more or less fit and looked mildly cool when lit. But I never turned the light on after a few times. It just sat there, being an incense burner that I had zero use for, and reminding me that just because I’ve known someone for over thirty years doesn’t mean they know me very well at all.
Anyway. These days, when my eyes land on something like that, I ask myself a simple question:
“I wonder how fast and how many people would respond if I put it on FB Marketplace for free?”
And it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea. So I posted it. And like, a half dozen people immediately expressed interest, but when I followed up, crickets. Finally (as in, maybe 12 minutes into this process) someone committed to picking it up tomorrow. I feel confident that whether that person appears or not, it’ll be gone in a couple of days, max.
But that many people that fast was a little unexpected, so I belatedly did a little research. This looks like a Pier One type object, but some of those Pier One type objects got weirdly valuable over time. It is heavy, probably bronze, and says “Made in China” in block letters (English) on the bottom. Supports the Pier One type object hypothesis. It’s a “double ear” pagoda, but it’s round on the bottom so not a cool animal or anything, and it’s only 6” tall. It’s definitely not an antique — if it were, it wouldn’t have English on the bottom. Google lens found me larger / older / nicer versions of the same thing, and Amazon found me crappier incense burners that look quite different. All of which supports the Pier One hypothesis.
The 3rd (?) edition of the Clearing Your Clutter with Feng Shui book was $4.99 on Amazon, so I bought it because I really kinda wanted to revisit that. I read the first one in the late 1990s, and haven’t ever reread it. This isn’t exactly rereading. It’s not starting off great, and I expect it to get much worse as it goes along, so this could be quite a ride.
ETA: Someone came and picked up the offending pink purse that A. kept trying to use and failing (it has that cute but useless shape where the opening is really small, and it gets wider towards the bottom), a lilac handbag which has too short of a strap for me to ever use, and the purple beaded bag like the black beaded bag that came from R.’s aunt and which has never been used. I had originally put A.’s bag out to go to Savers, but like many things, I’ve pulled it back into the house and listed it and it went away that route instead. R. commented that it looked like a very high quality bag, and I remarked that I didn’t keep crap around the house, with the exception of a stuffie that is nearly as old as I am and some paperbacks, ditto, that I keep for sentimental reasons.
I distinctly remember being 19 years old and telling my boyfriend M.J. how I wanted to someday live in a home — it didn’t have to be big, and it didn’t have to have much in it — in which every single item in the home was really, really nice and quite valuable. I think at the time that meant about a hundred dollars (hey, it was the 80s and I was poor). I did recognize at the time that this could not include items of pure utility, but my general thought process was, if you bother to own it at all, and you could have it be the really nice version of something, that’s what I wanted when I was a Real Adult.
I find that kind of memory deeply uncomfortable, altho I’m not entirely certain why.
Anyway. I really only wear crossbody handbags, and I’m tall-ish, and big in a variety of dimensions. The strap cannot be short. Once I realized just how annoying too short straps were on handbags, I decided to Fix That. Step one was buying Tom Bihn bags, and that indeed was a good choice. I really should have listened to K. years ago when she suggested them. Step two was a tape measure, to work out the minimum, and the desired lengths. I was telling R. about some of this today, and he was, why can’t they just make them longer so they’d work for everyone. And I said, look, fashion has long tail energy, and the heaviest consumers of handbags are short, thin women, who often carry a handbag NOT crossbody, and tucked right up under their armpit. If you make it long enough for me, and you halve that length, that won’t work on her. It’s hard to make an adjustment that can do more than half.
Step three is successfully acquiring attractive replacement straps. The bag obviously has to permit replacement straps (not all bags do), but while it’s possible to get straps, it’s not always easy to find ones that coordinate and the metal hardware works aesthetically as well. But I’m going to at least try; I’m waiting for an Amazon order with a couple straps that should at lest be long enough. The good news is that I now understand in a lot of detail what does NOT work for me, so I’ve at least mostly quit buying the wrong things. Mostly; there’s a baggalini I’m still regretting.
Anyway. These days, when my eyes land on something like that, I ask myself a simple question:
“I wonder how fast and how many people would respond if I put it on FB Marketplace for free?”
And it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea. So I posted it. And like, a half dozen people immediately expressed interest, but when I followed up, crickets. Finally (as in, maybe 12 minutes into this process) someone committed to picking it up tomorrow. I feel confident that whether that person appears or not, it’ll be gone in a couple of days, max.
But that many people that fast was a little unexpected, so I belatedly did a little research. This looks like a Pier One type object, but some of those Pier One type objects got weirdly valuable over time. It is heavy, probably bronze, and says “Made in China” in block letters (English) on the bottom. Supports the Pier One type object hypothesis. It’s a “double ear” pagoda, but it’s round on the bottom so not a cool animal or anything, and it’s only 6” tall. It’s definitely not an antique — if it were, it wouldn’t have English on the bottom. Google lens found me larger / older / nicer versions of the same thing, and Amazon found me crappier incense burners that look quite different. All of which supports the Pier One hypothesis.
The 3rd (?) edition of the Clearing Your Clutter with Feng Shui book was $4.99 on Amazon, so I bought it because I really kinda wanted to revisit that. I read the first one in the late 1990s, and haven’t ever reread it. This isn’t exactly rereading. It’s not starting off great, and I expect it to get much worse as it goes along, so this could be quite a ride.
ETA: Someone came and picked up the offending pink purse that A. kept trying to use and failing (it has that cute but useless shape where the opening is really small, and it gets wider towards the bottom), a lilac handbag which has too short of a strap for me to ever use, and the purple beaded bag like the black beaded bag that came from R.’s aunt and which has never been used. I had originally put A.’s bag out to go to Savers, but like many things, I’ve pulled it back into the house and listed it and it went away that route instead. R. commented that it looked like a very high quality bag, and I remarked that I didn’t keep crap around the house, with the exception of a stuffie that is nearly as old as I am and some paperbacks, ditto, that I keep for sentimental reasons.
I distinctly remember being 19 years old and telling my boyfriend M.J. how I wanted to someday live in a home — it didn’t have to be big, and it didn’t have to have much in it — in which every single item in the home was really, really nice and quite valuable. I think at the time that meant about a hundred dollars (hey, it was the 80s and I was poor). I did recognize at the time that this could not include items of pure utility, but my general thought process was, if you bother to own it at all, and you could have it be the really nice version of something, that’s what I wanted when I was a Real Adult.
I find that kind of memory deeply uncomfortable, altho I’m not entirely certain why.
Anyway. I really only wear crossbody handbags, and I’m tall-ish, and big in a variety of dimensions. The strap cannot be short. Once I realized just how annoying too short straps were on handbags, I decided to Fix That. Step one was buying Tom Bihn bags, and that indeed was a good choice. I really should have listened to K. years ago when she suggested them. Step two was a tape measure, to work out the minimum, and the desired lengths. I was telling R. about some of this today, and he was, why can’t they just make them longer so they’d work for everyone. And I said, look, fashion has long tail energy, and the heaviest consumers of handbags are short, thin women, who often carry a handbag NOT crossbody, and tucked right up under their armpit. If you make it long enough for me, and you halve that length, that won’t work on her. It’s hard to make an adjustment that can do more than half.
Step three is successfully acquiring attractive replacement straps. The bag obviously has to permit replacement straps (not all bags do), but while it’s possible to get straps, it’s not always easy to find ones that coordinate and the metal hardware works aesthetically as well. But I’m going to at least try; I’m waiting for an Amazon order with a couple straps that should at lest be long enough. The good news is that I now understand in a lot of detail what does NOT work for me, so I’ve at least mostly quit buying the wrong things. Mostly; there’s a baggalini I’m still regretting.