On purging

You know what I love doing? I love to purge! Love it. Now I don’t mean “to purge” in a food sense either. I mean I revel in getting rid of things! Clothes that either no longer fit, those that I think are ugly, those I never wore, or those that have lost complete sentimental attachment. Almost the same goes for books, although it’s much more difficult for me to let go of most of them because they’re either one of my favorites (i.e. my small Dave Eggers collection), or they are associated with a time in my life that deems them important. I’m not quite sure exactly what it is about purging that I enjoy. I think it makes me feel a bit less downtrodden to no longer feel like I’m carrying all of this weight of the things that I own, so I go through this process every 6 months or so to make myself feel a little lighter. Perhaps I feel as if I'm clearing out my life one shirt at a time. On all of those television shows about cleaning your home or finding a new wardrobe the “expert” asks the subject of the show if they have either worn or used said object within the past 6 months and if not then it’s going. That’s sort of the mindset that I have when I go through my things and generally it works out pretty well.

Anyway, I decided that now was a good time to start to get rid of some things, particularly clothes, a few books, jackets and shoes. I’m leaving in a little over a month and I’d like to “clean house” before I go. I even got my mom in on this venture. She was in a rush to go somewhere, but I asked her if she could quickly go through her closets and drawers and pull out whatever she didn’t want anymore and throw them in a pile. Seriously, in 5 minutes, that woman created a 3 foot high mound of sweaters, t-shirts and pants. This was the pile we ended up with:

I dropped off my items behind my favorite Goodwill store in East Brunswick at their drop-off location. I decided that I should take a look inside to see if there were any goodies I could take home. Right next to the Goodwill is a store called Amros International Foods that sells mostly Russian, Eastern European and Israeli foods. I've always wondered what was inside so off I went! Although I didn't find anything appealing in the Goodwill, I did come home with these yummies from Amros:

The pastries with the apricot marmalade in the middle are "hamantaschen" predominately served around the Jewish holiday of Purim. The other one, I think, is also a hamantaschen, but they're filled with a sweet poppy seed mixture and they're too delicious for words.