Adios Amigas

This weekend I packed up about five garbage bags - bags brimming with ill-fitting dresses, neglected shoes, and pieces of jewelry whose irrelevance to my current style renders them officially moot - and headed to the Bluemoon for a full-scale Glitter Sale. In the end, I emerged slightly richer with my garbage bags slightly less corpulant. Looking at it in terms of hours to pay-off, I probably would have been equally well-served getting myself a part time job: $180 for the approximately 19 hours spent tagging, sorting, hanging, selling and loading does leave me slightly ahead of the minimum wage, but really it wasn't about the money. I get attached to "things," but I don't think materialist is quite the word for it. To the contrary, it has animistic undertones, the significance I attach to my things. Anthropomorphism lingers on the edges.

My shoes are my babies. My favorite jacket that's been with me at highschool holds a place in my heart next to cherished relatives and old friends. I remember every outift I've worn for every first kiss I've ever had, every accessory to every first day of work, and each pair of shoes for each perfect dance. My clothes become an outward projection of my own persona in the moment and through time become soaked in me and the times they experienced; they are relics of personal perspectives passed yet nostalgically cherished as the foundations of what I am today, souveniers from a period that inevitably must pass. My clothes needed to go to good owners. If somebody bought my beautiful tango shoes with the plan of wearing them to fancy parties, I don't think I could have let them go.

We spent hours tagging and hanging clothes before the sale and it almost felt like a wake, hopefully a meaningful memorial before passing these bits and parts of myself on for new incarnations. There was something sufficiently satisfying about this ritual, far nicer than simply offloading them directly to the strangers at the consignment shop. I often prefer to simply donate my things, because it sidesteps ever having to address an objective value on something that seems to transcend. Add the endowment effect - meaning I will always value what I already have more highly than I would if I were considering acquiring it, and probably directly related to the significance I project onto my things - and it can be a depressing thing to realize that your long time companion is only worth three dollars on sale. I am so not a Buddhist, but sometimes I manage to let go.