Entry 450: Decluttering and Toughness

It's a time of flux here at the G & G household.  S got a new job, which is good.  Her old job was fine, as I understand it, but she was getting bored with it, so the change is welcome even if it's just a change for change's sake.  That's how S is.  She likes to keep moving -- keep looking for the next best thing.  It's an illusion, I think -- there is no actual nhe next best thing -- but life's about the journey, right?  S and I are different in this way.  Meaning and self-enrichment are important qualities in a job for her.  For me, those things are not at the top of the list.  I want something low-stress that pays enough for me to pursue the things I really like outside of work.  Once S's job gets too comfortable she wants a new challenge; I don't have that same impulse.  Sometimes I think I should try to do more -- take on Silicon Valley or whatever -- but ultimately it's just not that appealing to me.  I'd rather punch in for eight hours and then spend my remaining time on things like blogging, crossword puzzles, and Krav Maga -- and spending time with the kids, of course.  That's an area where S and I very much see eye-to-eye.  We both want jobs that allow us to spend time with our kids every day.

Since S is at home, jobless for a few days, she's been doing some wide-scale decluttering.  We are probably going to look for a new place to live in the Spring, and you have to be ready to move on a dime in the D.C. housing market.  So, we're boxing up/throwing away a lot of our crap now.  I've started going through my stuff, and I'm trying to get down to just a few boxes of stuff.  I have so much shit I never use, and there is no sense in hauling it all around.  I'm giving away about 75% of my books.  I rate them all by a formula:

keepability = rereadability + coolness - thickness

Only books that rate in the top quartile of keepability will be kept.  All my old math texts are going, and I have dozens of them.  They rate high in coolness, but extremely low in rereadability.  They are also mostly thick (usually hardcovers).  My dreams of one day being a professor are not happening.  I'm never going to have an office in a university adorned with shelves of math texts.  I just don't have a need for the ones I have anymore.

I also don't really need my CDs.  I haven't had a CD player in years.  I don't even have one in my computer anymore.  I have no way to listen to CDs.  I mean, technically, I could listen to them in my car or play them on my DVD player (which I still have), but I never do that.  On-demand music streaming is so easy and prevalent now that it has made CDs totally outmoded.

Nevertheless, I can't part with my collection -- not yet anyway.  It's strictly an emotional thing.  That collection tells my life story from age 13 through 30.  Every track on every album has a meaning and a cherished memory associated with it.  I know intellectually this doesn't change if I get rid of the physical discs, but still...  I won't even miss them.  That's the really crazy part.  I know once they are gone, I won't care one bit; I won't even think about them.  But still I can't pull the trigger.

[This was my first ever CD.  It does not have sentimental value.  In fact, I think I already got rid of it years ago.]

[I redeemed myself with my second CD, which I still have and still think is good.]

Anyway...

I found a ton of old pictures and notes and stuff like that, so it was a little trip down Memory Lane.  I also found all my old wrestling awards, which were nice to see, but not nice enough to keep them.  I mean, I don't foresee myself ever displaying my "Most Inspirational Junior 1995" plaque on my mantle at any point in my life.  I did have a moment last night, however, in which I got a tiny taste of reliving my glory days.

At my Krav Maga class, we did a drill in which we had to lie down on our back with somebody on top of us, and we had 30 seconds to get up.  The goal for the top position was to not let you get up.  Usually you match up with somebody at a similar skill level, but there was only one other dude in the class, so we were partners, and he's a much higher level than me.  (I just started Level 2; I think he's Level 4 or Level 5.)  I was on top first, and I held him down the entire time.  Then when I was on the bottom, I got up twice in the 30 seconds.  To be fair, I am a bit heavier than him, but not by that much.  I just flat-out beat him, and I'm way prouder of it than I should be.  

See, here's the thing about a sport like wrestling.  (I'm about to opine in a very self-serving way; feel free to skip ahead if you like.)  There are three components to it: 1) strength, 2) technique, 3) toughness.  1) and 2) are pretty straight-forward: Are you physically strong?  Can you do the moves correctly?  But 3) is fuzzy.  It's a je ne sais quoi.  It's hard to explain, but I know it when it see it.  I used to wrestle people who could lift the weight room and do the moves with excellent precision, and within the first minute of the match, I knew I was going to win, because I just was.  I was eventually going to break them down and out-tough them.  (The flip-side of this is that I used to wrestle people who were tougher than me, state champions and the like, and I would psych myself out and not do as well as I could have.)  That's what happened last night.  Maybe that won't always be the case; maybe he had a bad day or I took him by surprise because I'm a newbie.  But, like I said, it made me inordinately proud, no matter what the case.

By the way, Lil' S2 might have some toughness in him.  He loves wrestling.  It's almost all he wants to do.  Sometimes he wants to wrestle me; sometimes he wants to wrestle his brother.  They were going at it pretty good the other day -- so much so that S was ready to ban wrestling as an activity before I got them to tone it down a bit.  Lil' S2 definitely holds his own against his much bigger brother.

Lil' S1 is different.  He doesn't seem as tough in that way, which is fine, of course.  I'm not trying to groom my kids to be MMA stars (although...).  He likes it when he's winning and in control, but as soon as the tables turn, he starts crying and doesn't want to play anymore.  He actually had an incident at school the other day where two kids pinned him down on the playground and poked his hand with a stick.  He wasn't hurt or anything, and the adults broke it up immediately, but understandably he wasn't happy about it.  One of the kids is his best buddy, and he's actually a pretty sweet kid, so it sounds like it was just horseplay that went a bit too far.  It's probably not a big deal, but still it got our attention.  I mean, you certainly don't want your kid to be getting bullied, but I don't think that's what's happening.  So, it's probably best to just let it go.  It's one of those things where you want to help your kid, but there's nothing you can really do.  They need to work it out themselves -- and they probably have and everybody has forgotten about it by now.  That's the beauty of being a kid.  It's just like Ahmad says:

Then he get mad and want to scrap
We stay mad about, ten minutes then it's like back on the bike

Until next time...