LEVEL 2

As you surely recall from reading the What Is This? article on the sidebar, 363 things can be neatly organized into 11 tiers of 33 items. So, having eliminated 33 things from my apartment/life, I can proudly proclaim that I have advanced to LEVEL 2. Out of 11. Yes, Nigel: eleven.

At every LEVEL UP, I will provide a brief recap of my progress and what I'm learning. Presumably, each level will be slightly more difficult than the last, since I have fewer items left to choose from. I'm adding milestone achievements to chart my progress. Yes, it's mostly a video game metaphor.

So, how did LEVEL 1 go? Slowly. Very, very slowly. I'm finding that getting rid of things is a fairly simple job, but blogging is time-consuming, especially since every time I take a picture of something, I have to photograph it, upload the image file to my PC, re-scale it, and then upload the smaller version to the web server. Then I have to write about that thing, which is actually pretty easy in most cases.

As you can tell, I'm behind. I'm behind on the getting rid of things aspect, but I'm even more behind on the blogging component. I'll do my best to catch up (the last five weeks have been extra busy so I've ignored the blog altogether) but realistically, I may have to just admit that it's going to take more than a year to get rid of 363 things. No sense stressing out about a project that's supposed to be making life simpler.

The other major lesson from LEVEL 1 is that it's easy to get rid of things, but it's very hard to stop acquiring new things. Now that I'm spending a bit more time thinking about de-cluttering, I am all the more conscious of how the universe is constantly trying to dump its leftover junk in my apartment. The universe seems to be very serious about this plan. And so it takes a pretty serious effort on my part to prevent all that extra clutter from invading my personal space. So far, I'm not doing a very good job of holding off the new stuff. I need to keep practicing.

Anyone want a novelty mini-bat from the Louisville Slugger factory?