Though it’s not like you haven’t noticed, I’m not still not blogging much lately. For once, it’s not work keeping me so occupied, either. Instead, I’m keeping myself occupied with some really really time-consuming purging.

I’m cleaning out my closets for the first time in over ten years. Yeah, I know. The clothes I found in the back were scaaaaaary. Ask Patrick. He grimaced through most of the trying-on and had fits at the Hypercolor T-shirt (in flourescent pink, no less; who’d I think I was kidding?), stonewash tapered-leg Guess? jeans (I wish I were kidding now) and more. By the way, if one of you high school kids emails me and asks, “What’s Hypercolor??” I’ll be forced to track you down and kill you for making me feel so damn old.

Some of the stuff, like that listed above, was easy to get rid of, but there were some truly ugly, awful things that I had to keep, either for the pure novelty of “I WORE that?!” or for sentimental reasons. And that’s okay. I’ve resigned myself to a storage box of gross ’80s and ’90s artifacts.

I always suspected I was a clotheshorse, but this really confirmed it. Before the purging, I had over 30 pair of jeans, nearly 40 polo shirts, 8 swimsuits, 53 sweaters, and - I’m so sorry about this - 87 T-shirts. And I thought I just had a shoe problem (notice that I’m not admitting how many of those I have). With all the options clearly available, including half the Gap catalog from 1996-2000, why do I wear the same 10 outfits over and over? I’ll never know. I must be a creature of habit.

Anyway, the numbers are now trimmed considerably, but probably not as drastically as they should have been.

Along with the closets, I’m working to de-clutter my brain of thoughts, plans, assumptions, expectations etc. that I don’t need or can’t use anymore; hopefully, it’ll be a total remodel. It’s a healthy thing and very necessary, though not easy. But the clarity of even a little progress is encouraging.

With a little luck, the closet and brain work will help start a whole-life renovation. Other than a great (and better-all-the-time) relationship with Patrick, my life needs a jump start, and I’m the only who can do it. And I’m ready.