“That challenge haunts all animators. We grow up thinking that our bike is cold when it’s left out in the rain, or that a leaf on a high branch is afraid of heights. ” – Andrew Stanton

“I chose, with not too much deliberation, a nice new desk at which I will accomplish many accomplishments for at least the next three years.” – Me

I’m not an animator, but I still get sentimental about inanimate objects. At the end of this month, in order to be closer to my job(s) and friends, I’m going to move to a new apartment. My last few moves were marked by ill-preparedness and last-minute all-nighters spent haphazardly throwing things into boxes. I’m trying to be a little more organized about it—I consider this my first “adult” move—but I still can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the shit I have to do before July. Not to mention the emotional strain of vacating a place I’ve inhabited for three years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since my parents’ house in high school.

So I’m trying to get started early. Today my project was to disassemble the aforementioned behemoth of a desk. It’s served me well in two apartments and through the entirety of my MFA program. I wrote a lot at that desk. But because it’s from IKEA, and because I probably didn’t care for it as well as I should have, it’s basically falling apart, its bolts missing and its famous IKEA particleboard disintegrating. I don’t think it can survive another move and I don’t relish the idea of carrying it up three flights of stairs.

So I threw it out. I broke it into pieces and put it out on the curb, this thing I spent a couple hundred dollars on four years ago. It’s out there right now, literally sitting in the rain, which “SOLID WASTE” scrawled on the side per city code.

I haven’t quite gone as far around the bend as to give it human attributes, but whenever I throw something out—especially in the midst of a move—I get embarrassingly sentimental. The childhood agony of deciding which Transformer got to sit on my bedside table on a given night (sorry, Bumblebee) is manifest in my extreme reluctance to get rid of pretty much anything.

(Not to mention the environmental considerations of sending all that wood and metal to a landfill, exacerbated by viral-video guilt trips—but that’s a whole other kettle of horse-colored fish.)

I’m getting better, though. I don’t cling to things as long as I used to, and I do semi-regular purges to keep my closets and my mental environment relatively clear. I try not to throw away anything I can’t recycle, and I make liberal use of Craigslist and eBay.

It still rankles, though, occasionally. Like last weekend when a woman whose name I never learned hauled away the desk chair I pilfered from my dad’s den after he died, and took with me to Minnneapolis, but haven’t used for a couple years. But I had to be pragmatic: I didn’t need it. A fellow Craigslist user did.

And maybe 700 years in the future a cute little robot will find a good use for that chair, and that desk.