Giant Dwarf vs Giant Dwarf

So I promised you a list of completely ridiculous stuff I have found in my anti-treasure hunt.  Most of the stuff I've gone through so far have been papers.  I know that computers have been around for  quite some time now and everyone and their mother scans records except for me and my mother, but I have a lot of trouble getting rid of paper and files.  I mean, you never know if you're going to need these records 25 years from now!

I FINALLY got rid of all of my papers from graduate school.  Social work research tends to be years behind anyway, and these papers were at least 15 years old.  Which means they were based on research from at least 20 years ago.  GARBAGE!  (Actually, I recycled them.  I'm a good girl.)

I had forgotten that I used to write an employee newsletter called the "Cheat Sheet" for the Magic Theatre; it was distributed with each paycheck.  They were actually quite entertaining, in my humble opinion.  I kept those.  Sigh.  But, they're like writing samples, right?

I found this:

It's my hospital bracelet from August 1991 when I slipped down the stairs at Fort Mason in San Francisco and sustained a compression fracture.  It was a workers comp injury so I kept the file.  For 23 years.  I get it when my mom keeps her hospital bracelets from when we were born.  This does not have the same significance.  SHRED IT!

I still have two rolodexes.  One from the Magic Theatre (I worked there in the early 90s) and one from my social work career, which I stopped using 3 years ago when my department issued me an iPhone.  I started filling that second rolodex in 1999.  There are dead people in both rolodexes.  Seriously.  I know I need to trash these but I don't know how.  It's a massive shredding job but if I go through each card, it will be agonizing.  And I can't think of any other way to chuck them.

Social workers:  what do you do with the materials you receive from continuing education?  I have 15 years worth of this stuff and I've never referred back to it.  I did chuck most of it, but I still believe, for a few of those classes, that I'll refer back to the material.  And yet I know I won't.  I mean, don't we all want to keep slide handouts about Personality Disorders for ten years?

As it turns out, most of the stuff I need to purge in my household is not photogenic.  However, since I'm sure you've all been anxiously awaiting photographs of items from an excavation, I'll give you those found in my parents' house, both in June and on our recent visit last week:

My book report on Rickets from 1977, I think.  A masterpiece.  I'm almost sad that I threw it away.

My favorite Angel.  She seemed like the smartest one and the one that Charlie most respected.  Her name was Sabrina and I loved Sabrina the Teenage Witch comics, and one has everything to do with the other.  Also, I loved Dynamite magazine when I was a kid.

This single roller-skate.  For a tiny little foot.  I tried mightily to find the match and was unable to, so I didn't chuck it.  Besides, when we do find the match, they'll be perfect for my soon-to-be-born nephew, otherwise known as the Crown Prince.  These were more modern than their predecessors since, instead of a key, there was a wing nut on the underside to adjust the size of the skate.  We also didn't need to wear helmets when we used these.  It's a wonder any of us survived.

Obviously, I used to collect these adorable little dressed-up mice.  We would go to Jeane's Hospital Fair every year while we lived in Philly and I could buy one of these with my allowance.  I loved them.  I can't believe I donated them, but I was in a fit of purge with my brother breathing down my back.  Especially that colonial one 4th down from the right.  How awesome is that little guy?

By the way, the yellow headboard in the background?  My friend took that bedroom set.  It was over 40 years old and she loved it more than I ever did for the last 35 years.

Last but not least, and I only post this because this blog is based on me humiliating myself:

I found the bottom bra in a record cabinet in my old room (devoid of records, by the way).  I cannot remember when I was ever a 32B, let alone a B cup at all, but it has to be mine because I know my mother was NEVER a 32B.  The top bra is one of my current ones, placed there for comparison.  I would need several of the bottom bras to fill out the top bra.

So, depending on your feedback, I have plenty more photos of random stuff we found during the purge.  But I think this is enough of a tease and some of you may even have nightmares from that last photo (lord knows I've been grappling with my emotional response since found that 32B amongst the ruins).  And I'd love feedback on the things you've kept forever and either kept or threw away and why.  I need to feel not so alone.....

Giant Dwarf vs Misery

Yeah, I can't write about any kind thing-purge right now.  I've got tougher stuff on my mind.  I often joke that I was probably a criminal in my previous life and now I am paying penance by being a social worker.  I mean, really, what kind of person chooses this work?  I admit that I left the theatre because I didn't feel like I was helping people or contributing to humanity (mostly because the theatre we were producing in the '90s was utter crap and the audiences were smugly validated by the playwrights and vice-versa).  But my original intention when I went to graduate school in social work was to become a sex therapist.

WHAT HAPPENED?!?

Briefly, it turned out I hated doing therapy and was more suited to crisis-oriented work (theatre, go figure) so here I am with 13 years of Emergency Room social work under my belt.  When I first started, and I was 13 years younger, we got a lot of knife and gun club members (that's ED-speak for assholes who prefer to settle arguments with weapons rather than words).  With another trauma center that opened up closer to the thick of things and a general decline in crime in our fair city over the last decade, we haven't received as many of these hardcore homicides.  

But today we did have a homicide.  And a sexual assault.  And a lonely old man who fell on a bus.  Last week I dealt with two more sexual assaults, one on a child.  I see domestic violence, substance abuse and addiction, and homelessness on a daily basis.  I see families ignoring their elder relatives or outright abusing them.  I see families who care "too much" and end up doing more harm than good.  I work with schizophrenic and bi-polar people.  Sometimes people thank me for my assistance, and sometimes a patient will curse me out with some pretty awful epithets.

And you know what?  It's exhausting.  Really exhausting.  My husband spends 12 hours on his feet in another Emergency Department and he is tired too.  But his tired and my tired are a bit different.  I deal with peoples' misery, emotional crises, and unhappiness for my entire shift.  It affects me in ways I've internalized so much that I don't even notice until something even shittier happens, like the murder of a young person.

This afternoon I ran into one of our staff who deals with employee crisis intervention.  She thought that those of us in this profession should wear something akin to a "radiation badge" that xray technicians wear:  the badge warns the wearer when the exposure is too high.  She said that we all need to wear "exposure badges" that let us know when we're at our limit.  But it won't work.  We all work beyond our limit because we want to help and we have our own addiction to this crazy, chaotic place.  When she surmised that at the point the badge tells us we're reaching our limit, the employee would be placed in another work area.  And that's when I balked.  Where else would I work?  It's killing my spirit but it's feeding it too.

So it must be penance for a previous life's transgression(s). 

Giant Dwarf vs Packratitis

In 2009, I started this blog at the urging of my friend C., who, upon learning that I took a week-long staycation to purge my apartment of superfluous "stuff," encouraged me to write about the experience.  Five years later, here's what I have to show for it:  sporadic blog entries and the continuing saga of apartment purging.  Just like a hoarder's passion, it never ends.

It's been two years since I moved in with the Spazz and we are chock full of THINGS despite the fact that we have a three-bedroom apartment.  Yes, three bedrooms.  It's shocking when I think about it too.  So let me introduce my mother:

My mother is a well-known hoarder.  It spills out a bit in guest areas, but, in general, the hoarding is confined to rooms where a run-of-the-mill dinner guest can't see the disease.  That means that all three of our childhood bedrooms are crammed with stuff, including things we don't want to get rid of and know are safe on the mothership.  There are two more bedrooms, by the way.  They are also storage areas, and one of those bedrooms my parents actually sleep in.

So last June my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary (don't worry, this is germane to the story).  My parents planned a grand trip to Berlin and Amsterdam and off they went.  A few days after their departure, I get a call from the Golden Child (our middle brother and the one my parents deemed to be the most responsible....and I'm good with that).

"Hey, you are not going to believe this," says GC.

"What?"

"You know how Mom and Dad left for Europe on Friday?"

"Yes."  Okay, I'm getting bit nervous because I can't tell from my brother's voice if something really bad happened.

"I got a call from mom's friend on Sunday.  She went to check on the cat (aka The Beast) and she walked in to ankle deep water."

"Holy shit.  What happened?"

"Apparently the reservoir on the toilet in the hall bathroom has a crack and the water kept slowly draining for a day and a half.  The reservoir self-fills, so the water kept filling and leaking."

Golden Child proceeds to explain to me how he contacted the insurance company and the disaster is no-fault so they'll pay for all the damage (famous last words in regards to an insurance company).  Then he says:

"THIS IS THE BEST NEWS EVER!"

And he was right.  Because almost half of the house was flooded, many items were destroyed.  Items my parents never needed and actually probably didn't know they had.  A few weeks later, the Spazz and I and the Golden Child and his very devoted girlfriend convened at my parents house to clean up what my mother considers "our stuff."

And there was a lot.  We filled a small dumpster and made countless trips to Goodwill.  And we barely made a dent.

So the Spazz and I drove home with two small shopping bags of keepers that I just couldn't part with and my beloved woven chair from my parents' living room that I've coveted for 40 years (and that's a whole other post.)  On the way, we started talking about our own hoarding issues.  Of our three bedrooms, ours is relatively junk-free and we use a second room as a guest bedroom and tend to have that one under control (for the most part).  But the third room, aka "the office"......well, that's a disaster area.  And we vowed to clean it up.  Two months ago.

Two weeks ago we started.  The room now looks worse than when we started.  But I have found some treasures so far.....so stay tuned for the next post.  I'll be enumerating the ridiculous crap I've kept for so many years.  It's truly staggering.

Giant Dwarf vs. The World-Wide Interweb

Yes, I have been off the blogger grid.  Way off.  For way too long.  Which probably upset no one.  But I'm back, which may or may not be good news to all 6 of my sometime fans, who have all probably already given up on me.  But the Spazz challenged me tonight:  after failing to teach me one of his latest Kenpo moves, the Spazz said I'm not doing anything new and admonished me for reading too much and not writing enough.  So I'm back.

Coming back was not easy.  Imagine my surprise when I tried to sign into my blogspot account and Google showed up.  WTF?  Apparently, the one email list I am not on is the one that would have advised me of this when it happened, and I have no idea when that was.  In any case, I had to figure out how to get on with my non-Google account which Google apparently accepts as it's own anyway. If you know what I'm talking about, you are ahead of me.  It's all binary to me.

So A LOT has been happening while I have not been blogging, but most of what I've been doing is falling down the internet rabbit hole on a daily basis.  It was bad enough before I got a smart phone a couple of years ago, but now it is decidedly worse.  I can ostensibly be on the internet 24 hours a day and it doesn't cost me a thing (the Spazz pays that bill).  This is very bad.

I work ten hours a day and when I come home it takes me at least an hour, if not more, to just get through the TON of junk mail in my email account.  Then I go to Facebook and it's over.  I get sucked in by every single post until it's so late I've now squandered valuable sleep hours.  Then, when I finally get off the computer, I get ready for bed, get into bed, and play Words With Friends and look for an interesting Bitstrip to post.  Maybe I'll look at the yoga schedule if I'm off the next day.  Maybe I'll check my email and Facebook again, because it's been ten minutes and there might be something important happening (there never is).

Finally, I get the fuck off the interweb, turn down the lights, and open my Kindle.  And I read.  I read so slow it can take me a month to get through a novel.  By the time I start reading, I'm already half asleep and doze off with the Kindle still glowing in my face.

And that's why I haven't been writing. 

But that's all going to change.  It has to.  Because, even though this blog is part of the Web of Evil, it's still something creative and I need to do this.  I really do.  So any encouragement, feedback, or just plain editing is welcome.

Now, if I can only figure out how to lose weight while I'm doing this.