Cleaning up (or, the lengths I will go to in avoiding reading Wallace Stevens)

I cleaned my room today. I have not cleaned my room for several months, so there was a lot to do. It's still a bit messy, but at least now I have gotten rid of all the boxes people sent me things in at Christmas. I've been hanging on to them in case I needed to use them to mail stuff home in at the end of the year, but I've decided to be a wild optimist and assume that I will be able to get everything into my suitcase plus my duffel bag. Hopefully just all into my suitcase, because there are few things less fun than hauling tons and tons of luggage from here to Gatwick Airport. Or from any airport to anywhere, or from anywhere to any airport. I hate the process of getting onto planes, though I love to fly. WHOOSH.

But anyway. I performed an intensive cleaning project today after I got through reading all the Romantic theorists, because I did not want (and do not want) to read the Modernists. I put all of my books on the bookshelf, and it turns out that I own 26 books in England, of which I am only taking three, or possibly four or five, back to my home. The rest I am abandoning to charity shops, because apparently the charity shops come round and hang out in the squares so that students can give them all the crap they don't want anymore. I hope that's true; it will be an impossible nuisance to bring all my crap into town.

I also found some exciting things that I didn't realize I had, including

a) two spare socks that do not belong to me (I have disposed of one because it was yucky, and the other one I believe I accidentally stole from home when I was there over Easter)
b) a little water gun that came out of a Christmas cracker and somehow found its way into my room
c) SO MUCH PAPER. It is ridiculous. I am going to take it into the squares where there is a place to recycle paper, but I have a grave concern that I will fill up the receptacle, and also that once I have done so it will turn out that I am not allowed to put cardboard in
d) a Sunday crossword puzzle that my mother gave me to do on the plane flight to the UK in October. Still undone. I think that on the flight in question I was too busy wishing that baby would just stop crying, or that the chatty guy with children would stop chatting and let me sleep, to do a crossword.
e) the bubble bath that I bought by mistake because I thought it was body wash when I first got here. It is enormous, and shames me because it proves that in a tired state I lose the ability to read.
f) a red bracelet thing that I paid a dollar for to support AIDS a year and a half ago, and a glow-in-the-dark wrist band that I think I stole from someone in England at some point
g) my Slinkie!

And back to Wallace Stevens. DAMN IT. I will have to indulge in frequent imaginative reconstructions of his brutal beating at the hands of Ernest Hemingway (whom, I want to stress, I do not like EITHER).