My Exciting Friday Evening

Although I have enjoyed the resultant comments and conversations, I have had enough writing about controversial things for one week.  It is the beginning of the long weekend, and I am going to stop thinking and writing about "big things" for a while.

So that I can move on to this:

This is my living room.  At some point in the not too distant past, it was reasonably well organized and uncluttered.  And then.

Stuff.

Stuff happened.  Christmas* and the Women's March and music festivals and camping and all kinds of other things that we never quite cleaned up from.  Where once we used to eat meals and entertain, now I just store things.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about the things I want to do in my post-breakup life, and one of the things that kept coming up was games night.  I don't love games quite as much as Creampuff and Katr, but I do love games for their combination of competition and buffer against awkward social interactions.  Playing a game is a great thing for an introvert such as myself who sometimes gets overwhelmed by the need to maintain a conversation the whole time someone is in my home. 

The only problem is, there is no game playing happening in the living room shown above.  People and games just don't fit into it.  The initial solution I had to this problem was to buy a house, which in retrospect is a slightly extreme solution to the "my living room is a pigsty" dilemma.  Thankfully, the second solution I came up with was to actually organize my living room.

Which I have been doing for the past few weeks.  Before tonight, I had:

1)  Organized my memory box, two boxes of children's toys, and one box of Christmas ornaments;
2)  Gotten rid of three bags of books, one of my two Cabbage Patch Kids, and multiple bags of Christmas things;
3)  Recycled the Women's March posters; and 
4)  Decided to get rid of the desk.

And then tonight, because I am one of the cool kids who spends my Friday nights going minimalist, I:

1)  Organized another box of Christmas ornaments;
2)  Went through every single item on the tall bookshelf;
3)  Put all my (now organized) boxes away in the storage space;
4)  Started a pile of things to sell or give to the thrift store; and
5)  Got rid of the proofs for my med school grad photos, every single note I took during residency, my ridiculously uncomfortable chair that has never quite worked, printable labels that I bought for medical school applications (in 2005!), and my Christmas tree.

There is space!  Everything to the left of and behind the table is now put away, gotten rid of, or on its way to being gotten rid of.  And the rest of it will be tackled this weekend.  I am ready to use my space again.

*Yes, I am blaming a holiday that happened almost a year ago for the state of my living room, because until earlier this evening the tree was still on the living room floor.