Parting

Heather and I love movies. During our 4-years of marriage we have never paid for cable TV. This is mostly because we can't afford it, but now more so, we don't care for TV all the much. We care for movies.

I imagine it's safe to say that most people have those things that you collect, or accrue over time, things that seem to build up in your home. Ours is DVD's. Every Christmas, birthday, and sometimes anniversary, you can expect that there will be movies given and received. The result: we have a lot of movies. Our old neighbor used to come to us instead of Blockbuster to get movies she hadn't seen.

Heather and I are also planning/hoping on moving this summer. Part of moving is cleaning out lots of stuff we don't need. And we have vowed to thin out some of our 200+ DVD collection. To my surprise, THIS IS A PAINFUL PROCESS.

We went through all our movies sorting them into three piles: Keep, Maybe, and Sell. You can probably guess, the sell pile is the smallest and putting each movie in it was like saying goodbye to a long time friend. We talked and debated over sooo many in the Maybe pile, and my prediction (if I know us) is that most of those will move back over to the keep pile.

That old quote, "Parting is such sweet sorrow," is ringing true in my ears. And the silly part is, they're just movies. They're things, media, products of popular consumeristic capitalist culture: things I'm not a big fan of. But they're also part of our relationship. Many of these movies we went on dates together to see. We laughed and cried together during these movies and grew closer together. We've bonded over so many in our collection, that when it came time to part with many of them it was like getting kicked in the gut.

We first held hands during that movie. I put a move on her during this one. I grew up watching another. This one changed our view of the world, and I've never cried so hard as during that one. Yes they're just things, but somehow, we have an emotional attachment to our movies.

Anyway, here's the Sell pile. First of all, do you see any you'd like to buy? And second, what is a fair yard sale price for DVDs? I'm thinking like $3-4 per movie. What do you think?

Here we have the Maybe pile. We might be able to part with more of these if someone offered us a little more money.

And finally, here's what we couldn't part with for one reason or another. What can I say. We love movies!