U for Useless

I am a great fit for Bombay. I have major OCD that extends beyond just arranging things in order and putting 'em in their place. I hate clutter, am always on the lookout for throwing away items that are not useful. V is the polar opposite. He can never really make up his mind about whether to keep or discard anything, which means we have piles and piles of stuff that may-potentially-be-partially-perhaps-useful some day, things I think should walk out on their own into the garbage bin across the road right this minute. 

We had an incident once that made me realise how real the struggle is. This was Prague in 2015. We had trekked too much (by my standards) up a smallish hill and the sole of one of my shoes gave away. We managed to come down, hunt up a shoe shop before closing time (do you know they start closing at 8pm :O) and found a brilliant pair as replacement. I immediately wore the replacement, packed the old ones into the new box and tossed the box into the garbage bin nearby. V was flabbergasted. "How could you throw it away?" he asked me, as if I had thrown away an autograph from A R Rahman and not a worn out pair of shoes which it would make little sense to transport all the way back from Prague to India only to... throw it out. I tell you, between us, the struggle is real.

Anyway, despite my OCD and occasional arm twisting of V (figuratively), I still end up with a lot of the following. Hence, my life has become one long decluttering exercise.

• Papers - Bills, credit card receipts, toll bills, the works. Half the reason these stay is because I have conserved my consulting mentality in the hope that someone is going to reimburse these bills some day. The other half is because V keeps them in his wallet and keeps the wallet out of my sight. You may ask why something in his wallet bothers me. Just that, sometimes (most times), his wallet bulges so much that he stuffs them in his jeans pocket, puts the said pair of jeans to wash, and makes sure all my clothes come out glittering in damp credit card receipt paper. 

• Old apparel - Worn out shoes, dresses that have become too small are all stashed away in the far corner of the many lofts in this house in the hope that... in the hope that what?!

• E-commerce boxes - This one is my contribution and I am not proud of it. I ordered a small packet of decorations from Amazon, it got delivered in a large carton fit to hold 20 Maggi packets, and I retained the carton in the hope that it will come handy some day. That's not the only time I have done it. I hate you, e-commerce!

• Obsolete tech products - I have two old kindles, one old tablet, a dead laptop and a phone that no one is willing to exchange for the phones I vie for. And, I have no clue what to do with those. Those are times I know our civilisation is in decline, we will all drown in molten tech hardware someday.

This post has given me new hope. Once this blogging challenge is over, I am going to bounce back to clearing out the junk lying around here. It is too difficult to declutter and de-junk our minds, but surely it must be much easier to declutter the space we live in. No?

P. S. This post is the twenty first in the A-Z blogging challenge series for April.