What to keep... or is it what to take?
Even as I'm typing this, I'm getting instant messages from Nat, as she goes through all the boxes of stuff she recovered from Alexei's apartment. Her family had been paying the rent through June, hoping he'd return, and had actually already sent in the rent for July when she came to confront me. She'd had some movers empty the place out a few weeks ago, which filled a room in her condo, but now she says she's got a decorator coming in a few weeks to make that room into a nursery, so it's time to sort stuff out. She was going to bring the whole lot down to the Salvation Army, but figured I might want some of it.

Um, yeah.

So we're going down the list. It looks like my stuff is more or less still all there, so my thought that he might have been selling some on ebay looks to be false. I speculated that Alexei might have been planning on returning it to me at some point, but Nat thinks that would be giving him too much credit. The last month and a half has made her bitter toward him, methinks.

I'm keeping all the toys and videogames, but I find that this is an exceptional way to prune some of the other collections. Comics, for instance, we're breaking down by title. She starts at the end of one long box, tells me the first title she finds, and I try to say what I want to keep from memory. The tinking is that if I can't remember it well enough to specify it, it's not worth keeping. So the entire Steven Seagle run of "Alpha Flight", gone. Priest's "Quantum and Woody", kept. Keep Mark Waid's run on "Captain America" but toss much of the rest (ooh, did she hate opening the bags to find out who the writers were before Marvel started putting them on the cover)(*). Lose all of "Youngblood" except for the two issues Alan Moore wrote before Rob Liefeld did one of his patented self-destruct jobs (what the hell was I thinking?); keep Barbara Kessel's "Ultragirl" Marvel miniseries (hey, it was cute). Yes, I want to keep a book called "She-Hulk". "Just Imagine Stan Lee...", gone, despite the expense at the time. I'll let "Planetary" go and just pick up the paperback collections sometime.

So, in the end, she wound up with two piles - one which she'll send to me, one which she'll give to her brother to take to the local comic shop, splitting the take with me. I told her it wouldn't be that much, since (a) shops don't stock as many back issues and (b) what she had left was mostly a pile of shit.

Books were a little trickier; we could mostly play yes/no by author, but that wound up being "Nat says a title, I say yes or no, move on". There were one or two where she said I wasn't getting it back until after she read it, though. There were some I didn't recognize; I guess Alexei is a reader. Nat could keep those except for the technical ones; those might be useful

Clothes... Well, I don't have a lot of use for those, now, do I? I did say I wanted to keep some of the T-shirts; I can still wear a large (the boobs make up for the height) and a shirt from Barenaked Ladies's "Stunt Show" tour is a keepsake as well as clothing, so I think I'd like to keep some of them.

"Does that include this Red Sox Nomar Garciaparra shirt?"

Nat can be mean.

I had frighteningly few CDs for a thirty-year-old; Carter was in the room for that and wanted to know how I could stand only having a couple hundred. That is, she could understand it if she didn't know I was a pack-rat, but over the last few years it's been rare for me to buy a CD more often than every couple of months.

Of course, she'd roll her eyes if she saw how many movies Nat and I have to go through.

-Martina

(*) I don't regularly bag and board; I just did for the move.
- posted 3:15 PM - - (archive use only)