Day 545

I'm finally starting to get comfortable with the idea of giving stuff away. Don't get me wrong. I still don't feel any inner peace from this process of simplification, but I am able to get rid of stuff now. Maybe the reason this is all so hard is that I always envisioned that at some point I'd have this huge loft building where I could spread everything out and have lots and lots of room all my photography equipment, musical endeavors, painting experimentation, woodworking projects and so on. Maybe there would be a separate huge room for electric trains and another just for framing pictures. I don't think this is ever going to happen though. I have no desire to live in marginal industrial neighborhoods with affordable lofts anymore. The dogs rule now. A small house near a beautiful park where the dogs love to walk is a much better alternative.

It's time to toss stuff. Maybe, even though I'm a die-hard Gemini, one of everything is actually enough. Today, I took three very large CRT monitors and an old aerial reconnaissance camera down to the animal rescue resale shop. I thought this effort would clear out a large amount of space in the storage warehouse, but when I was ready to leave, the place looked just as full as ever. At first I was confused and then I realized I'd put the big stack of boxes that was blocking the door back on the shelves I'd just emptied by removing the monitors. It's slow progress, but I do feel like I'm accomplishing something.

I also finally resolved the mystery of how my recent software purchase got totally screwed up. When I made one of my daily calls to the support center, my call mistakenly got routed to the company's headquarters here in the United States instead of going to the offshore call center like it normally did. This time the representative I talked with almost instantly had a grasp of the problem. She found my account, told me that it had mistakenly gotten merged with the account of someone else and then proceeded to cancel my order as I had requested. This all took less than five minutes. When I asked why repeated calls to the support center weren't able to produce this result, the representative said. "Oh, we only provide the offshore call center with a very limited amount of information. They can't access the same database that we can." I'm still puzzling over this one. What use is a customer support center if they don't have any information? If I hadn't accidently reached the wrong person this morning, my order would still be in limbo.

It was interesting to me to see how many people seemed genuinely happy to see Lebron James fail last night. The Internet was buzzing with Lebron James jokes this morning like: Today is National LeBron James Day. Everyone gets to leave work 12 minutes early! and Why didn't LeBron James go to college? He didn't want to show up for finals. I think this all has a lot to do with people's expectations of loyalty. You certainly expect loyalty from a friend and Cleveland definitely considered James a friend. Not anymore. John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, issued a resolution today praising the Dallas Mavericks for their loyalty, integrity and teamwork. Of course there were all these people in Ohio saying the governor should be concentrating on "serious things" instead of praising the Mavericks. Hmm. I'd say loyalty actually was a serious thing.

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