I've been attempting to clean out my room. Yesterday I did my bookshelves. I own too many books, but I don't like giving them away, especially if I had some emotional connection to them at some point in my life. However, I have managed to get rid of enough to actually fit all my books on my bookshelf which is a very weird thing for me. I don't think that has happened since we moved.

I didn't find any of the books I was particularly looking for (Yann Martel where are you. Julia Whitty come home) but I did find three "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and two "Complete Sherlock Holmes." I put one of the Sherlock Holmes collections in the donation box (the gilt one, because I enjoy giving my books a rough time of it and you simply cannot do that with gilt leafed books) and distributed the other two Shakespeare around the house. I don't know why our family has so many Shakespeares and why they all ended up in my room but I do know that the one thing you don't do is mess with copies of Shakespeare so I put one in my mother's room (it had her name on the inside, anyway) and one in the living room (it was gilt leaf copy).

Cleaning out my room is a bizarre thing because I hang onto bizarre things and then forget about them and then they get all piled up and then I'm left wondering why I have so many plastic dinosaurs on my windowsill. I am halfway through a filing cabinet filled with, primarily, mementos (papers! what is my love affair with paper!) of my middle school years. I don't know why I saved any of it. Middle school was a uniquely horrifying experience. Tomorrow I will try to remember to talk about some of this rubbish; there is something very sweet about the britpop cootie catcher I have got in my hand. But there is also something very wrong about this list of boys my friends had crushes on that I, for some reason, saved, even though I apparently had no great contributions. But that is for tomorrow and anyway I'm only halfway through - who knows what horror of youth I'm going find in a minute.