“What people in the world think of you is really none of your business.” ― Martha Graham

"What you do speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying" - Henry Adams

03 June 2016

Declutter Your Life

I've been on a year long journey of decluttering my life and my space in order to have things that I love rather than just a bunch of things just because I've always had them. I started out following the principles of KonMari which have been very popular on YouTube lately, and then resorted to asking myself questions about my things beyond the book in order to try and curb my hoarding tendencies I have gotten from my parents. It's been a long and occasionally somewhat painful journey, and the hardest part is it's far from over. I'm in a constant state of declutter in order to keep my hoarding capabilities from running wild. Cleaning is cathartic for me which is nice because it makes me want to clean, but it takes up a lot of my life just to keep the clutter at bay.

Most of the past few months I've been pushing myself to get rid of things I don't use, which is often the hardest thing for me. My weakness is keeping things simply because they haven't bee used up, and I've spent many a day holding expired lotion bottles and the like over a trash bag convincing myself to let go of it. The rest of the things that may still be usable I've been giving to friends or donating in hopes that it will make me feel much less like I'm throwing things away and more like I'm giving back somehow. For a long time I put myself on a strict no-buy policy, but recently I have let myself purchase the things I need since I have been working so hard to get rid of all the excess sitting around. Of course, I'm still following my No Cart Rule. (I'm not allowed a cart in any store because it keeps me from following my instinct of buying whatever I want, and in most cases I'm not allowed a basket in a store either simply to avoid picking up tons of excess. This of course is unless I have a list of things I plan to buy and require a cart to carry it all.)

02 June 2016

My Horrible Car Buying Experience

For all intents and purposes I'm leaving out the name of the dealer because it is not my intention to give them a bad rep as they did nothing legally wrong, except for making my last month or so the most stressful month of my life.

I recently went and bought my first car, because my hand me down was starting to go up and getting expensive. I carefully picked my car, and went to the dealership to drive it. I sat on the decision for a few weeks before going in at the end of the month to purchase. For starters, the agent from my test drive made an appointment with me to come in on his day off and sell me my car, and then didn't show day of despite the appointment being his idea. We decided to complete the purchase with another agent instead of waiting for him to come back the next day, so we began the process. Everything was going well at the beginning, but the staff seemed to be tripping over themselves to make up for their coworker's blunder. They made a lot of mistakes they shouldn't have made along the way and then most of the time were hounding me to come in and fix them as if it was my fault they messed up the paperwork or couldn't print things correctly. And more importantly, it too seven hours for me to finish the process. I know buying a car takes a long time, but seven hours?

The first hounding was because they didn't check my diploma I emailed them to ensure they could read and print it. And after them hounding me for two weeks and me resending it in multiple sizes I finally gave up and mailed them a paper copy because I knew the image wasn't blurry like they were telling me it was. The next time they hounded me they needed me to come back and resign a piece of paperwork because the company rejected it for not being printed properly. And after speaking to them and telling them I would be in at my nearest convenience by email they called me a total of 3 times on my cell phone, once on my home phone, and then they called my mom's cell phone and her work phone all in the course of about an hour trying to "make sure they had the right number". During the purchase process my temporary registration had both my mother's name and mine on it, which she asked them to fix and they assured us it would be fixed on the permanent one, which I received the other day and sure enough both the title and registration are wrong, and now I have to fix it. They overcharged me for my tag and title fee and sent me a check as well which is only slightly amusing rather than any type of frustrating.

All in all first month of owning my new car has hardly been a relaxing and enjoyable experience. Let's hope the next one is a little better.

3M