The difficulty of giving stuff away
May. 26th, 2015 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigozealIn the wake of my mother's passing (all right, not immediate wake - it happened back in September), I've been attempting to clean house a bit, to free up space & organize, and it's proving harder than I thought for one very odd reason: it is extraordinarily difficult to give stuff away. I don't mean due to emotional attachment - the stuff I don't want to give away, I just won't. I mean, for stuff for which I honestly have no use, that would be better off in someone else's hands, it is really tough to find a new home where it will have a useful life and, if applicable, be well cared-for.
One example: DVDs. My mother liked getting DVDs just for the sake of owning the physical objects; she had a heck of a lot of movies that she never watched, or watched only once, then forgot completely. Some of these movies, for family reasons, have bad memories attached to them - so, OK! Perfect candidates for culling. Most DVDs aren't worth putting on the internet or selling second-hand nowadays, though; you'd get just pocket change for them. So I thought of donating them to this local library that runs a free DVD loan service: hey, the DVDs can finally get watched & enjoyed on a regular basis.
I took three of the most-expendable titles in as a test case, making sure beforehand that they weren't already in the library's...library. I brought them to the clerk at the front, and she took them readily. I was about to leave, but I just stopped and asked: "For the DVD rental, right?" No, apparently not; she disinterestedly said that they'd be thrown into the buck-a-item fundraising jumble near the front entrance. I took the DVDs back and left. If I just wanted to donate three bucks to the library, I'd donate three bucks, dammit.
Now I'm stuck with the damn things, and I have no idea what to do with them. I don't want them, and I know objectively that I'd be better off (even if just by a couple bucks) if I just unloaded them at the local used-multimedia store. But they were objects owned by my family and guests in our house, and it'd feel like a betrayal to me if I didn't find a good home for them.
Part of the problem is that I'm a solitary sort of person in an environment that doesn't suit me, so I don't know many people here and don't really have anyone to ask if they want stuff. I'm not sure it'd go well in any case; manners are so topsy-turvy in Maine from what's expected anywhere else that I don't know how an offer of free stuff would be taken here. To give another example, my mother had a couple still-sealed bottles of brandy she kept for company, and since good alcohol is wasted on me, I took the smaller of the bottles over to the nicest of our nearby neighbors. He was happy to have the brandy but not that polite: he acted like he was doing me a favor and never said "thanks" in any capacity. So I'm not giving him the larger bottle, but I have no other candidates for recipients.
Even clothing is proving a problem. I tried to bring some stuff my mother had bought during her post-stroke period but never got to wear - new, still-in-bag stuff - over to Goodwill. This Goodwill is apparently so bustling (at times - not when I went) that instead of donation bins or a door at the back, they have a huge separate, permanently-staffed entrance on the side for donations, complete with portico. Someone was already parked under said portico, so I pulled up behind them and went to get my (two) bags from the trunk to get the ball rolling. I started sorting through the bags just to make sure everything in there was supposed to be there, and brother, was that a mistake. A worker came out to ask what I was doing, and when I explained, she seemed all right with it; when I started putting my donations in the cart, though, she began ranting about how I was going to cause an accident in the parking lot - the car in front of me had pulled away in the meantime, another person was attempting to pull from the wrong, opposite direction, and their bad driving was obviously my fault. The worker might have had a better case if there were other people backed up behind me or if the transaction to date had taken more than a couple minutes. I don't have much tolerance for people screaming at me when I'm trying to give them stuff, so, again, the would-be donations went home with me.
I haven't managed to give away anything but that one bottle of brandy. If only we could teleport matter through e-mail, I wouldn't have this problem.
One example: DVDs. My mother liked getting DVDs just for the sake of owning the physical objects; she had a heck of a lot of movies that she never watched, or watched only once, then forgot completely. Some of these movies, for family reasons, have bad memories attached to them - so, OK! Perfect candidates for culling. Most DVDs aren't worth putting on the internet or selling second-hand nowadays, though; you'd get just pocket change for them. So I thought of donating them to this local library that runs a free DVD loan service: hey, the DVDs can finally get watched & enjoyed on a regular basis.
I took three of the most-expendable titles in as a test case, making sure beforehand that they weren't already in the library's...library. I brought them to the clerk at the front, and she took them readily. I was about to leave, but I just stopped and asked: "For the DVD rental, right?" No, apparently not; she disinterestedly said that they'd be thrown into the buck-a-item fundraising jumble near the front entrance. I took the DVDs back and left. If I just wanted to donate three bucks to the library, I'd donate three bucks, dammit.
Now I'm stuck with the damn things, and I have no idea what to do with them. I don't want them, and I know objectively that I'd be better off (even if just by a couple bucks) if I just unloaded them at the local used-multimedia store. But they were objects owned by my family and guests in our house, and it'd feel like a betrayal to me if I didn't find a good home for them.
Part of the problem is that I'm a solitary sort of person in an environment that doesn't suit me, so I don't know many people here and don't really have anyone to ask if they want stuff. I'm not sure it'd go well in any case; manners are so topsy-turvy in Maine from what's expected anywhere else that I don't know how an offer of free stuff would be taken here. To give another example, my mother had a couple still-sealed bottles of brandy she kept for company, and since good alcohol is wasted on me, I took the smaller of the bottles over to the nicest of our nearby neighbors. He was happy to have the brandy but not that polite: he acted like he was doing me a favor and never said "thanks" in any capacity. So I'm not giving him the larger bottle, but I have no other candidates for recipients.
Even clothing is proving a problem. I tried to bring some stuff my mother had bought during her post-stroke period but never got to wear - new, still-in-bag stuff - over to Goodwill. This Goodwill is apparently so bustling (at times - not when I went) that instead of donation bins or a door at the back, they have a huge separate, permanently-staffed entrance on the side for donations, complete with portico. Someone was already parked under said portico, so I pulled up behind them and went to get my (two) bags from the trunk to get the ball rolling. I started sorting through the bags just to make sure everything in there was supposed to be there, and brother, was that a mistake. A worker came out to ask what I was doing, and when I explained, she seemed all right with it; when I started putting my donations in the cart, though, she began ranting about how I was going to cause an accident in the parking lot - the car in front of me had pulled away in the meantime, another person was attempting to pull from the wrong, opposite direction, and their bad driving was obviously my fault. The worker might have had a better case if there were other people backed up behind me or if the transaction to date had taken more than a couple minutes. I don't have much tolerance for people screaming at me when I'm trying to give them stuff, so, again, the would-be donations went home with me.
I haven't managed to give away anything but that one bottle of brandy. If only we could teleport matter through e-mail, I wouldn't have this problem.
