Purging/Rant

[waterspyder]

I feel like life has become way more complicated than it should be.

I find the amount of paperwork I need to keep track of in my home life to be overwhelming, which means I need to file things. I'm actually in the process of cancelling bank accounts, utilities and credit cards just to reduce the amount of paper that I have to account for. I really just want to burn it all, but Canada Revenue Agency might not appreciate it, and I'll guarantee you that I'll be audited in the next 3 years because some half-wit monkeys over there keep doing reevaluations and doing them WRONG. Yes, I submit my taxes properly and they reassess me and screw them up, costing me money. I now have to keep track of stuff like "You have to clain $5.84 on your 2007 taxes as income from the interest on the money we shouldn't have penalized you for." I also want to figure out how their math works if when I submitted my taxes the first time, I got a $500 refund, and then they reassessed and I owed them $600, and then they reversed the decision and I only got $90 back. WTF? *sigh*

I also have too much clutter in my life. I am increasingly appalled by the amount of packaging everything comes with - food, clothing, everything. I seem to throw out just as much as I keep in the apartment. I wonder if there is anything I can actively do as a consumer to send a message that much of the packaging is completely unnecessary. I do not need my cookies to be able to withstand a nuclear holocaust in 2022.

I also want to purge a lot of things, but I have a hard time just chucking stuff out when I know it's perfectly good. I really should just abandon hope of finding people to give my clothes to for free and just find a charity to donate them to so they can get a nominal fee from a place like Value Village.

I just want the clutter out of my life, so I can replace it with the chaos that a baby brings.

Comments

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

Shop at Bulk Barn as much as you can, that's one way to reduce packaging. Not entirely, of course, but you can get things such as pasta, candy, spices, baking supplies, honey/syrup/peanut butter and maybe rice as well there with less packaging than you'd get at a regular store. And the packaging it does come with (that is, a plastic bag) takes up a lot less room in terms of disposal than most regular store packaging (and, when empty, could also be used for Pebbles).

Actually, if you think about it like that, you can buy as much as you can at Bulk Barn, use those bags when empty for Pebbles, and for the rest of your shopping, use reusable bags, so you don't accumulate even more plastic bags.