I always use to tell myself that I don’t really get into this “holiday” that always seemed to be “celebrated” in school by watching the scene of Saving Private Ryan where some guy gets his guts blown out. I have always been a firm believer that destroying people’s lives doesn’t solve anything, but never looked at the big picture.

I was looking at the idea of war without taking into account the circumstances. For example, if Hitler had ruled the world after World War II there probably would have been a lot less freedom than we have now. People sacrificed their lives so that we could live in a better world. At times like this war is in self defense, so it can be justified in the same way as regular murder can be justified.

War is sometimes necessary, but always as a last resort when all other options have been exhausted.

Anyway, here’s a minute of silence for all those people who had to go through something as terrible as war.

You can’t kill time without injuring eternity. -Henry David Thoreau

I just watched an episode of House where they have to amputate a woman’s leg. And the emotions that I felt were a combination of pity, sadness, fear. Mix in guilt from eating too much chocolate, and what precipitated out was a sudden clear realization that I need to live and experience my life.

I spend so much time dreaming about the future. Thinking about how great the future will be when I finally have enough money to travel abroad, when I finally start a webseries on youtube, when I finally get rid of enough stuff so I’m not constantly cleaning my cluttered room.

Photography by Jessica Buckle (jessicabuckle.com)

But it doesn’t work that way. There are so many things to do here and now.

Sure, it’s important to plan for the future, but it’s also important to enjoy now. To do something you like doing (I signed up for a dance class on Mondays, and it’s great!)

Dear readers, what amazing, wonderful things do you do in real life?

And why are you still reading my blog! You should go out and do something.

I’m sure some of you can remember what you need to do, and can prioritize, but for those of us who have trouble with that, I’m working on a method that I can use.

Image credits

- Do small tasks as soon as you receive them, so they never go on your list

- Keep a master to-do list (A small notebook that can fit in your pocket) where you write everything that you need to do. At this point, neatness or layout are not a priority, just get everything on there

- Sit down every day (I do it right before I leave work) and take a fresh piece of paper. Look through your list and pick a few things to do, things you expect to get done that night

- Leave the master to-do list in your purse until tomorrow. Only look at it if you finish everything on your nightly list.

This has helped me become a bit more efficient over the past week. It takes more time but offers me the peace of mind so I don’t have to declare “to-do list bankruptcy”.

Until now.

This summer, I’ve started to do the 100 Things Challenge, where you try to get rid of all your personal belongings except for 100. It’s all the rage among the people on the internet.

So far, I’m at around 270 items and am still finding things I forgot to catalogue. In the category of “clothes and accessories” alone I have more than 100 things.

Today, I’m about to make a breakthrough. It starts with a travel mug.

At one point in 2007, everything was going perfectly in my life. Or at least that’s how I remember it. On Thursdays, my friends and I had a book club, then usually went to Brewed Awakening the local coffee shop, then I had dance.

I was going through my list, getting rid of things I didn’t need, and I found that I had two coffee mugs on my list. The first was a leaky broken one from Brewed, and the second one was a pretentious Starbucks mug with a really clever design.

I tried to fix the old mug. It reminded me of that time, and it looked more like a proper coffee mug than a green piece of eco-friendly bullshit. But not even crazy glue could keep it from leaking.

But I still held onto it.

Until today, when I snapped a picture of it and threw it away.

Dear coffee mug, you had a good life. You held my mint tea when I first bought you in the evening light on West Street, and have smelled like mint tea ever since. You were there when I tricked myself into believing that mint tea made me smarter (I defined “self-fulfilling prophecy” in English class, and the prof thought I was reciting it from somewhere but I’d really just said it off the top of my head – I never do anything really well in English, so it had to be the mint tea. I now give mint tea credit for my grades.)

You tolerated me dropping you on the floor twice in a row in Leo’s, and have scars to prove it. You have often helped me keep my eyes open in dynamics class when our prof used those soporific things called powerpoint slides.

(Note: Soporific means something that makes you sleepy. According to my computer’s built-in thesaurus.)

O coffee mug, though you look very classic and you smell very sweet, it is time for me to let you go. You’ve become old, you leak fluids where you shouldn’t, and you tend to fall over a lot. It is my hope that you go quickly to coffee-mug heaven and coffee-mug-Jesus will be there to greet you or whatever goes on in heaven.

And now, moving on, I have 269 items left and I’m going to attack my t-shirts. Assuming I do laundry once a week, I have about three times as many as I need.

Ciao!