Moving in... and heading out! -- AIDS/LifeCycle

Yippee, I'm almost moved in. Sure, the apartment still looks like a disaster, but nearly every box has been emptied. Now it's just a matter of storing it all away and having a great big garage sale. :-)

Last March when I was packing up my house in Portland, I found myself astonished by how much stuff I had accumulated. It was impossible to avoid the question: does one person need all of this?

Now I'm shoehorning the contents of a two-bedroom two-story full-basemented home into a one bedroom apartment (thus, the garage sale :-). This move has forced me to go through every box; there's no option for just storing away those "mystery" boxes for the next move.

Better said: I'm choosing not to explore the other options. I thought about putting some of my furniture in storage, and boxes along with it, but I've had some pieces in storage for three years already. The process of purging feels... liberating. We attach memories and emotions to objects. In their presence we can be drawn back to the past. That's not always a bad thing, but too much of it is a distraction from the here and now.

And so I downsize my personal stash of stuff.

I must say, though, that there have been a few lovely surprises. A couple of years ago I thought Schick was discontinuing the three blade razor that I liked, so I went online and stocked up. When I opened a box last week and found 80--yes, eight zero--razor blades, you would have thought I'd struck gold.

It's been great to get my CDs back. And all of the clothes, shoes, and jackets have made it feel like Christmas around here.

I'm also really excited to have my bike back, though with the rain I haven't ridden yet.

THE BIKE ALSO GIVES ME THE OPPORTUNITY to do something that I've thought about doing for a long time but finally got off my ass and registered for this year: the San Francisco to Los Angeles AIDS/LifeCycle. The ride covers 545 miles in seven days. June 3rd is less than four months away, so I have plenty of training ahead of me.

I'm riding to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. HIV and AIDS appeared on the scene just as I was about to come out; I'm sure I stayed in the closet for a few years longer than I would have otherwise. I have countless friends living with HIV; thankfully, I've lost very few to the disease.

HIV/AIDS has many faces. It's a manageable chronic illness here in the U.S. In the developing world, it's a devastating plague that continues to take people in the prime of their lives.

I'm doing the ride. If you'd like to support me, check out my LifeCycle page.