Day10-Nov 1

Today, as i was walking up and down st. catherine, i realized how much i shop. How much useless things i buy, and when i got home i went to my closet and counted the pieces of clothes that i've actually never worn. total = 17. My closet here is pretty full, and my closet back home is at least twice as big as my closet here, which means that the things in my closet back home that i've never worn and have no intention of wearing are double. Thats 30 pieces of clothing, from shirts, to jeans, to shoes, that i own but have never worn, and don't plan on wearing.

On my defense, i do clean out my closet about once or twice a year and i've never actually thrown anything away, i just give it to my nanny who takes it home to her family or the kids in her neighborhood. (When i say my nanny, i mean tata. Tata is the woman who has worked in my house since i was 2 months old. This means she's been with my family for 20 years, and to me she's my second mother. She's part of the family. We talk every day, i tell her more things than i even tell my mom, and i have no idea what i would do without her). And this time i did the same, i took everything to the salvation army, which i know is not a huge sacrifice but it's a lot better than simply taking the easy way and throwing it away which means that i would possibly be depriving another person of clothes to wear. I really want to keep doing this, so one of my experiments will be to clean out my closet every 6 months and take everything that i don't need/wear to the salvation army. This process will be for the rest of my life and won't repeat itself until april so i don't know if it could count as an experiment or not. But i'm not doing this for a grade, i'm doing it for myself.

So going back to my original problem: shopping. I don't really know why i always have this idea that shopping will make me feel better. I don't know why i assume that material things will somehow make me feel better and make me forget whatever is going on in my mind at the time. And also, what is my constant need for something new doing for the environment? In one of my reading reflections i made a promise that i would take the ecological footprint quiz again at the end of the semester and see if i had accomplished my goal of reducing my total earths by at least 2. This is one of the things i need to change if i plan on achieving that goal and not only to prove that i can do it by the end of the semester, but also forever. I don't want to forget all these things that i have learned throught the last 2 months, i dont want to feel passionate about it now, and just forget it 6 months from now. I want to make a real difference, i want to feel like i'm doing something to better the world somehow even if its not really measurable but rather felt.