This week I declutter my “sentimentals” and my “collectibles”

What did we all do before we “decluttered”? We tidied. We picked up our crap, dusted under it, then put it back down again. We also used our crap. In my house we collected toothbrushes, icecream buckets and old singlets, which were used for cleaning our BMXs (the hub ballbearings would soak in kero in the buckets, the toothbrushes and rags were for extracting crud from the chain). And Dad used the old inner-tyre tubes for just about everything – fixing fences, espaliering the tomatoes and occy-strapping things to the ute.

Nowadays we buy more new stuff, and we don’t have time to get creative with re-using the old stuff. So we have more crap. And less room. But more importantly we’ve developed a raging intolerance for this clutter and a need to clear our lives of everything that could be bogging us down, physically, emotionally or spiritually. Decluttering has become a euphemism for the enema we’d like to take to our relationships, our schedules, the floors of our cars. In the US “storage solution” stores are experiencing exponential growth, while hoarding memoirs are emerging as the new “mis lit”. I tell you, decluttering is a dirty big business.

In this column I’ve subjected myself to many declutterings, consulting some of the world’s experts on the subject. I’ve overhauled my book collection, my email inbox; heck, I even did a colonic. But this week I went the next level.  I decluttered my “sentimentals” – photos, heirloomy knick-knacks, my grandmothers’ Jesus statues and the box of school certificates I’ve kept since kindergarten (for “good book work” and “trying hard during health hustle”).

Which is how Peter Walsh ended up in my loungeroom on Tuesday morning.

This week I don’t drink bottled water (actually, I haven’t drunk the stuff for several years, but I’m kinda ensconced in this “look what I happened upon this week” theme…so let’s just ride it for now).

Recently I aborted a liaison with a guy because he didn’t recycle. To be fair (to me?), it wasn’t that he didn’t recycle per se. It was the reasoning he gave for why he felt entitled to leave the carrying out of one’s tuna tins to the communal bins to everyone else. “If I start,” he moaned. “Then where do I stop?“ What he meant was, if I give a shit about my cans, won’t it just open a Pandora’s box of care from which there’s no turning back? A life of cutting plastic windows from envelopes, keeping a bucket in the shower and hypermilling? Won’t it set in train the collapse of the whole merry house of cards? Yes, yes, my friend, it will.

All of which is a loose segue to a subject I’ve been busting to cover: bottled water, and how quitting it makes life better.

Drinking bottled water complicates life. It clutters flow with needless stuff.

This is quite freaky: Architect Gary Chang has created a 24-rooms-in-one-32-square-metre apartment (translation: he’s taken a tiny apartment and converted it such that it functions as 24 different rooms….using sliding walls). Check this out:

The New York Times describes it in more detail:

The wall units, which are suspended from steel tracks bolted into the ceiling, seem to float an inch above the reflective black granite floor. As they are shifted around, the apartment becomes all manner of spaces — kitchen, library, laundry room, dressing room, a lounge with a hammock, an enclosed dining area and a wet bar.

I like how obsessive some people can become about minimizing their lives. It becomes a practice for life and it’s a good one at that. Everything you do is prefaced with the question: do I have space for this, will it get in the way, will it complicate my life further.

In short, do I REALLY need this?

Have you seen this? Somehow a reporter from Insider got to go into LL’s house and rummage through a wardrobe that’s taken over the apartment. There are not enough days left in that girl’s life to wear all those clothes.

It’s actually gross. Not the clutter, but the mindless consumption of so much stuff. It distressed me.

As the journo (can you call her that?) says,  it’s a reflection of the chaos that is Lohan’s life. Guilt-laden, unconscious and tripping.

Check out this new online gizmo. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows you to wipe yourself from social networking. Forever.

become as free as a REAL bird

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can strike you off Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. At the press of a button.

As the site says,  be as free as a real bird. A 2010 resolution, perhaps? To free yourself from the relentless tinkering with and preening of your social network sites?

I am very much hesitant about why I have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn presence. It all seems rather counter-intuitive to my search for simplicity and LESS in all aspects of my life.

This is a new series I’m starting that will flag cool gadgets and tricks and things that make life simpler and less… stuff-y. Most of it will be free stuff. All of it will be elegantly simple.

Sunday Life readers might have seen my column a month or two ago about Instapaper (a nifty filing button for “cool/interesting must-reads you find on the web when you’re meant to be other stuff but that you know you’ll never find again if you don’t read now”. Basically, it enables you to read cool shit later.)

readability: converst life into old-school, bookish fontage

Chapter two in this thinking: Readability. It’s a new FREE! INSTALL IN-ONE-STEP  button that you just add to your toolbar and it changes stuff you’re reading online into clear, simple, old-school text, getting rid of pop-up ads and annoying eyeball clutter.  When you’re reading something online, just press the readability bookmarklet on your toolbar and it converts the text into a far happier format. A treat for sore eyes!