"The things you own end up owning you."

A little quote from Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Here's another:

"It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything."

Why am I quoting Fight Club, you wonder? Well, mostly because my apartment looks like a box factory exploded. I'm 80% done with the packing for this move, which means pretty soon I'll be able to quit stressing about packing and can instead start stressing about driving cross-country with two cats and then finding a job. Let's recap, shall we?

Last Labor Day weekend I moved from New York to San Diego.

This Labor Day weekend I'll be moving from San Diego to Boston.

At this point, I'm almost ready to sell everything I own, just so I can quit worrying about packing. And moving. Freedom like that is a powerful drug.

But I'm not going to, and here's why.

Don't get me wrong, 50% of me would dearly love to sell everything, and go hitchhiking around South America with nothing but a backpack full of clothes (and a laptop, and a Kindle, and the new iPhone, and a much spiffier camera). At least I'd never have to move again, not like this, anyway.

The other 50% of me looks around my apartment right now and thinks (right after, "Holy crap, how did I get this much stuff?"), "Hey, I have some pretty awesome stuff. That I've dragged all around New York, to Virginia, back to New York, then to California and now to Boston. My stuff has more mileage than most people's cars."

And I look around at the things that have avoided all the purges so far. The $800 knives, the few tattered paperbacks that had too much sentimental value to relinquish, the photo albums, the red leather chair. The shoes from my wedding. That poster my friend Jenn gave to my friend Peg who gave it to me when I was in college, and is now proudly framed, next to my bed, still sporting college dorm room tape in the corners. The cast-iron skillet my mom gave me. The handmade cutting boards my sister gave me. The stained, torn road atlas that took me through last summer's road trip.

And then I look around at the stuff that's been purged, waiting for the Salvation Army to come pick it up tomorrow. So much dead weight, so much crap that the two of us somehow accumulated, thinking we couldn't live without it, and now clearly we can. (Nothing forces you to purge like having to move cross-country in two weeks.)

It makes me think about the difference between stuff, and crap. Crap is just that, crap. It's too many t-shirts, weird cleaning products you tried out and never threw away, those acid-washed jeans from high school, video games you played once or not at all, poor-quality cookware that has now officially died.

Then there's stuff. Granted, my stuff does not define me. I do not define my stuff. But right now, the thought of my stuff, safely stowed away, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about this move. I'll be parted from my stuff for a little while, but soon, we'll have a home again. Our home will be populated with our stuff. I will have once again faced down my stuff, separated the wheat from the chaff, proven which things are important to me and which are not. Every time I do this, the same core items make the cut. The red leather chair. Those few paperbacks. The good cookware. The photos. The memories.