So, in a couple of months my family will be moving in to a new apartment. I really, really, REALLY don’t want to move, but then it’s not like anyone asked me what I thought before they made this decision. Apparently, my dog was a present to help soften the blow of having to leave all my friends behind and move to the new place — which, I’m pretty sure, is going to suck.
One of the things our parents want us to do before we leave is to spring clean the house. I pointed out that it’s still winter, so technically it’s not the right time of year to do this, but they didn’t buy my logic.
Enraging activity
So, last weekend, we had to sort through all our toys and decide what we wanted to give away and what we wanted to keep. Apparently, there’s some new show on TV about tidying up, so we could only keep things that ‘sparked joy’ in us.
‘Spark what now?’ you ask. Spark joy. As in, happiness; pleasure; ‘Woohoo’ feelings. Grown ups are so weird. Toys are fun to play with. They’re cool. They’re exciting. But unless your Lego Technic has a loose wire I don’t know if toys are supposed to ‘spark’ anything.
So we had to hold each and every toy we owned and wait to see if it made us happy.
Well, this ended up sparking more rage than joy.
“Hey! What happened to Gogo the sting ray’s eyes? Where did they go?” I cried.
Pesky Brother looked around shiftily.
“What did you do?”
“Remember that big fight we had over who made better fake burps? I kind of got mad and…”
“Well! Wait till you see what I did to your entire Pikachu collectibles set.”
“What? What did you do…You drew moustaches and beards on them? Well! Don’t open your Beyblades box unless you want to cry like a baby.”
By the time we’d finished fighting and apologising (forced to!) to each other, we were pretty tired. We figured our Lego box might be a better place to work on. Less chances of killing each other and all.
Then we realised we had five boxes of Lego to go through. FIVE! Suddenly, all those tiny mini fighter sets and mini figures we whined and begged for seemed like HUGE problems. Who wants to hold three bajillion Lego heads, mini figure arms, legs and teeny tiny Lego pieces and see if they spark joy?
To be honest, at that moment they sparked misery. If I have to do this kind of not-yet-spring cleaning, I’d rather have less toys.
We survived the weekend — just about. We have less toys now, but I guess they are the ones we like to play with. That can be my own version ‘sparking joy’, right? I went to bed on Sunday night promising to never buy another toy again. Ever.
Wait, wait! Video games don’t count, right?
RIGHT?
