Well, it looks like after I wrote the bit about partially hydrogenated fats, more people started heeding it than I anticipated.

Last week when we were eating lunch, and scott noticed me looking at the ingredients on the Easy Mac, he immediately asked, "Does it have any partially hydrogenated oils?"

After looking at it for a minute, I had to reply, "Yep." In the minutes that ensued we looked at the ingredients list on many of the inflow foods, and to our disgust, the majority of them contained the nasty stuff.

Then last Saturday, when I went to eat lunch with Jaeger, Kiesa, and Zan Lynx, Kiesa proudly proclaimed that none of the food in this meal contained any partially hydrogenated ingredients. Yay! Hearing that nothing in the food was going to poison me made me feel so much better!

Now...

On and off during the past couple days, I've been feeling fairly depressed about a lot of things. Some of it is rational, some of it is not. Some days, I do wish there were just some magic pill I could take to fix everything. But I also know there is a reason I don't do Prozac.

Deep down, I don't want my life to be a flat line. On some level, I know this even during the difficult moments. I would rather be miserable sometimes than bored all the time.

Right now, I don't even know if I'm going to continue with the big purging of my material shit. I put a big part of my foot into that pool, and maybe that was enough for me right now. Maybe I don't need to get rid of everything.

Since perhaps I didn't do a very good job of explaining myself earlier, here's another stab at why I did it:

Over the years, I have gradually come to loathe the way I find myself defining a huge portion of my identity upon the acquisition of products. Movies, cds, sound system, gamecube, you name it. While there does exist a certain aesthetic utility to each of them, after a while, it all cumulitively starts to become a burden. A mountain of treasures, carried on my back. (Usually just metaphorically, but occasionally physically as well.)

Whenever a part of me would consider the possibility of leaving any of these precious items behind, the automatic reaction would kick in. "I can't get rid of it, that's my stuff. It's mine! I worked to acquire it. It might even be a part of me as a person."

Things you own end up owning you. (I still own Fight Club, BTW.)

This is a pressure cooker that has ever-so-gradually been building for years. Over the past week, triggered in part by my readings of anti-establishment literature with a motivational component that pretty much dwarfs every "self-help" guru out there, it overflowed. I had to do something to get myself out of this rut.

A plan was hatched, and I decided to begin with what seemed like an easy and obvious start. Elusis, whose journal I bumped into a couple years ago when I started going to Onyx and read ever since, mentioned a month or two ago that she had no Buffy dvd's at all, and couldn't afford them. My reaction at the time went something like, "You poor thing!"

But of course, at that point, I wasn't even considering parting with mine. My precious.

But last week, when I realized I that I don't really value these things as much as I like to convince myself I do, I decided to take a leap. Just a little one. If I was truly serious about this, why not give a little of this stuff I wanted to get rid of to someone who actually wants it? Besides, the thought of meeting Elusis in person also held a certain appeal. :)

(I may have met her very briefly when she was DJ-ing back at Onyx, but not enough to really count.)

We shot a few emails back and forth. She, of course, was more than happy to accept them, and even offered to burn me some mix cds when she gets her burner working again. We agreed to meet up at Rock Island Sunday night. Having never been in that particular club before, it took me a little driving to find it and then park (I cursed myself for not looking on mapquest before leaving).

Once inside, I managed to find Elusis fairly quickly. She was decked out in some pretty fancy garb, which she has documented far more extensively on her site.

I walked up, made sure I knew who I was talking to, and prepared to make the transfer. When it became clear that this was no joke, she asked me if I was absolutely certain that this was what I wanted to do. I was. I had been certain from the moment the first email had been sent.

She was like, "I gotta buy you a drink!"

Me: "Ok, cool. Thanks."

We talked for a couple minutes, she strongly suggested that I sign up for an account on livejournal, and then... well... there wasn't really a whole lot else to talk about. I did give her the address of Bitscape's Lounge, but I can understand how, when you're used to dealing with all your online friends through a unified system, you don't really want to go around visiting separate web sites. Beyond that, I was not a friend. I was an odd stranger giving away crap.

Despite wishing otherwise, I wasn't in a very conversational mood either, and felt a little bit out of my element sitting at the table. I certainly didn't know any of her friends, and I really didn't know her either. You can read somebody's journal, but no matter how many months or years you spend doing it, you still don't know a damn thing about them.

I did enjoy Rock Island's aesthetic and music. In some ways, it was better than Onyx, and in others, not quite as inviting. I danced to several songs, took a piss, wished Elusis well, and left.

I did what I had intended to do, and felt neither better nor worse for it. Honestly, I thought that giving away an item of that size would make me feel something, but it didn't. I felt neither elation, nor did I particularly miss what I had given away.

I wasn't sure what to conclude from this.

As days passed, it dawned on me that developing an obsession with getting rid of stuff is really just as materialistic as acquiring new things. It's just a different variation on the same silly mindset. Both methods of operating feature a focus on things, what is done with them, and who owns (or does not own) them. It's just as empty either way.

I am glad to read that she and her friends now sound like they're enjoying something that would otherwise still be sitting on my shelf. (Ok, if the dvds had stayed there long enough, I'd probably get around to watching them again eventually, but I've already seen all the episodes at least 3 times. How many times does one really need to watch the same thing over again?)

(Ok, nevermind, don't answer that. We are, after all, talking about a Joss Whedon show here. :)

So... In conclusion. What have I learned?

I stuck my foot into a different pool of water, and discovered that the feeling there is neither better nor worse than the one I've been in. It's just as empty. I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe, like they often say in my meditation class, I need to find the middle path.