I was stuck in traffic for a little while yesterday, and I got distracted by how many people in the opposite lane were on their cell phones. I checked each car in the line: texting, texting, texting, not texting, texting, texting, not texting. Then there was a longer stretch of cars containing people who were looking at the road and I started to feel more positive about things again—and had to slam on the brakes as I nearly hit someone because I was counting how many people weren’t looking at the road.

********

The jeans I used to like at Lane Bryant were replaced awhile back by a new version that seems made for a completely different body type than mine: they squeeze hard in some places but fall down in others, so that I feel unhappy and uncomfortable and uncute. Also the inseam is about three inches too long so I have to roll them up, and I feel as if I finished with rolling up my jeans somewhere around college. I went on eBay and found a couple of used pairs of the ones I liked, but finally even those had worn out to the point of rising panic. The holes in the thighs were so large, I had to sit as if I were wearing a skirt.

I’d heard many good things about Torrid, so one day when the wind was right and my spirits were high and I was able to imagine facing the try-on session as long as I could get lunch afterward in the food court, I headed for the mall. I took samples of three different styles of jeans with me to the fitting room—and to my incredulous delight, every single pair fit great and looked good. One pair was slightly less good, so I took the other two pairs to the register—and the clerk manipulated coupons and deals until I ended up with one pair free. I practically FLEW home on wings of jeans happiness. I had expected a trip of torment, and instead had found easy success.

As soon as I got home, I put the jeans through the washer and dryer. Then I put a pair on, and took all the stuff out of the pockets of my tattered jeans to put into the new jeans—and the new jeans had no pockets. No. Pockets. The pockets were fake. They LOOKED like pockets, but there were no pockets. I looked at the second pair: that pair had pockets, but they were about a third the depth of regular pockets: instead of being able to put my cell phone in there, I could only fit half of my cell phone, and only if I turned it the long way.

It was a crushing betrayal. You will understand, I think, when I tell you I sank deep. What was the point of anything. Who even cares. I considered purchasing a fanny pack. Etc.

With time comes healing, and eventually a glimmer of hope returned. It was a small, faltering flame, but I nurtured it well until it grew. One night, after making the mistake known as “We should finish off this bottle of wine or it’ll go bad,” my eye fell on one of the several sale emails I get per day from Roaman’s: the particular email offered a buy-one-get-one-free clearance section. In a flash I was sifting through pages of jeans with elastic waists, and plus-sized jeans modeled by non-plus-sized women, and pants cropped to exactly the wrong length between capri and ankle, and tight pre-ripped jeans with those familiar rolled cuffs favored by Co-ed Swistle.

I persevered, and I was rewarded: I found several pairs of jeans that APPEARED to be nice, normal jeans that a thin woman would wear, available in my non-thin size. I added one of each to the cart.

Then my eye fell on these:

(image from roamans.com)

It was hard to tell, especially with the shirt tucked in. Were those fashionably, refreshingly light, a swing of the pendulum back from the dark-and-darker options, or were they reminiscent of the bleached denim of Swistle Youth? The embroidery made me feel happy, but would it look silly? The model appears to be wearing cowgirl boots; does this mean the embroidery has a country vibe rather than the flower child vibe I would prefer? Well, I had three pairs of plainer jeans in the cart already, and it was buy-one-get-one-free, so the embroidered ones would be free. The last of the wine kicked in, and I pressed the button to complete the order.

When the package arrived, I let it sit for almost two weeks. Schrodinger’s Jeans: as long as I didn’t open the package and observe the jeans, maybe they would fit AND be cute AND have pockets.

This past Friday night, I was in a teary slump. Everything was terrible. Nothing was okay. This is the perfect mood, in my experience, for doing crappy tasks: if I’m down in the misery pit, I might as well do something that would have shoved me down there anyway. I tried on the jeans. The first pair fit, was acceptably cute, and had pockets. REGULAR pockets. The second pair fit, was acceptably cute, and had regular pockets. The third pair fit, was acceptably cute, and had regular pockets.

I left the embroidered pair for last. I tried them on. I looked at myself in the mirror. I went immediately to the website and tried to order more pairs, but they were sold out in my size. I have worn them every day since. I love them.

“Bootcut” is not the correct descriptor word, I’d say; they are more of a flare. They are fairly fitted through the thigh, and then they just wing right out free and happy, with way more embroidery than shows in the picture: there is a whole triangular inset panel of it. I will demonstrate, with a picture taken in my dark computer room, literally in a mirror, with my size 11 sneakers for scale:

(They are a little less fitted in the thigh in this photo: I was all the way to the end of day two of wearing them, so they’d loosened.) The cuffs are deliberately frayed. They are light, but not as light as they looked on the site. The whole effect, I’d say, is of a pair of extremely awesome jeans purchased quite awhile ago when flares and lighter denim were in fashion. I love them so much. I am not kidding when I say I am getting a lump in my throat thinking about how one day they will wear out. And they have REGULAR POCKETS.

As I am writing this, most sizes have sold out and they are only available in 12w, 14w, 16w, and 18w. I am not sure, but if I think back to the days when I balanced right on the edge between W and non-W sizes, what I’m remembering is that a W adds a size. That is, I believe a 16w is more like an 18-non-W? I think the transition went 14, 16, 16w/18, 18w, 20w, etc., but I am not positive about this, so check the measurements. What’s throwing me is that usually I don’t see 12 or 14 with a W—but it’s a site aimed mostly for plus sizes so they may want the sizing consistent. I bought the same size I wear in Lane Bryant and Torrid, and the fit was right.

Have you seen that picture of a guy at a protest holding up a sign that says “Not usually a sign guy but geez”? That is basically my position. I’ve never been to a protest, not because I haven’t objected to things before but because protests and signs and chanting have not been my thing.

But geez.

We are deciding right now, as a country, whether we’re going to shut people out of our country (including people begging for our help escaping an enemy we share) based on race and religion. That idea fills me with cold horror. So I vote no. And to be more precise, I vote HELL NO. And when what you want to say is “HELL NO,” a protest is a good place to say it.

Here were my anxieties, before the protest:

1. What if there’s not enough parking at the subway station.
2. I don’t know how to use the subway.
2a. I don’t know how to buy a ticket.
2b. I don’t know how to tell what direction the train is going.
2c. I don’t know how to switch lines, or if I need another ticket for that.
2d. I don’t know where to get off the train, or what to do after that.
3. The whole finding-a-place-to-pee situation.
4. I hate cities.
5. I have trouble with maps. How do I find where the protest is?
6. Should I make a sign? What should it say? I feel self-conscious.
7. What if I hate the feel of being in a big crowd?
8. What if things get violent?
9. What if we all run at once and people are getting trampled?
10. Do I have to worry about other people knowing I’m there?
11. Do I really have to leave my phone at home? But what if I need it?
12. Will there be repercussions for this, for me or my family?
13. What if no one else shows up?
14. GOING TO A PROTEST AT ALL, THE WHOLE THING

I think it helped that it happened fast. I debated about the women’s march for weeks, and eventually talked myself out of it. Afterward, I wished I’d been a part of it. This time I had less time to think, and also I could remind myself of my previous feelings of regret.

Also, Rob and William said they wanted to go with me. This increased both my anxieties and my interest in going. It added these anxieties:

15. What if they get hurt?
16. What if there are repercussions for them—colleges, jobs, etc.?
17. What if we get separated in the crowds?
18. Wait, but now we REALLY NEED our phones.
19. I don’t really know what I’m getting them into, and one of them is a minor.

Well. But we went. We did bring our phones. We turned off location and turned off the phones and we password-protected the lockscreens; according to protesting tips lists that may not have been enough, but that is what we did.

We made a flappy uncertain effort at signs, using half-size posters we keep on hand for school projects. I felt self-conscious about what I wanted to write in large letters and then hold near my face, and spent a fretful half-hour looking through pictures of other protests for things I felt reflected my thoughts on the topic. We ended up with signs that fell well within range: ours weren’t as funny or creative or clever as a lot of the signs we saw, but there were people there with signs written on the torn-off upper half of a pizza box, so.

I wanted a sign without a stick, and on flexible paper I could roll up, to make it easier to bring on the subway. But TONS of people on the subway had rigid signs with sticks, and that worked just fine, and that kind of sign is WAY easier to use AT the protest. We made a note: next time we will favor rigid signs with sticks. [Note: I have since learned that you shouldn’t use a rigid stick, because it can be interpreted by the police as “a weapon.” A wrapping paper tube works well as a “stick.”]

I’m sorry, yes, that was two paragraphs just about making the signs. Those of us who’ve been in the “not really a sign girl” category have a bit of a learning curve to deal with.

We did find parking at the train station. On a weekday that station can easily reach capacity, but it was a weekend. It was surprisingly full for a weekend, but there were spaces. We found an ATM-like machine that said it sold tickets, and I managed to figure out how to buy some. I bought adult tickets for Rob and William when probably they could have had student tickets, but I was in no frame of mind to figure out the details. I noticed that at other machines, people were asking other people how to work the machine; this gave me a happy feeling that I could have help if I needed it. No one seemed to be impatient. When I went to another city on a weekday once, the people behind us in line were reaching around and saying, “SIGH, no, like THIS,” which is helpful in its own way but also a little flustering.

There were bathrooms at the subway and we thought we’d better take any chance. In line, a girl started talking to me in a friendly way: “Not as busy as last week!” (she meant the women’s march, I assumed). And I said I hadn’t been there last week but I’d heard it was amazing, and she said “SO AMAZING. But this is looking good too!”

I joined Rob and William in the hall outside the bathrooms, and I suggested my plan: ditch the three pages of subway maps and directions, and do this by the “follow other people who have signs” method. Rob was not a fan of this plan. I persevered, and I was correct: it made the whole thing easy. We knew already which train to get onto at the start, but if we hadn’t known, we could have followed. Then we followed people off that train and onto a different line (i.e., a different train route), and then we followed them when they got off at a stop, and then we followed them down a couple of city blocks, and then we arrived with them at the protest.

I don’t know how many people were there, but “lots.” There were helicopters flying overhead, and I saw overhead photos later and it looks like just hella lots of people. I was glad to find that big crowds don’t freak me out—but if things HAD felt too close, it would have been easy to get more on the outside of the group for more air: most people were trying to get further IN.

We weren’t close enough to be able to hear the main speakers, even though they were REALLY YELLING into a microphone. (The protest was larger than expected, and we were kind of around a corner.) So that was a little boring, to stand there listening to what we couldn’t hear. Periodically the speaker would, apparently, start a familiar chant, and then the crowd would join in. Some of the chants made me feel self-conscious: I am not naturally inclined to yell things that start with “Hey hey! Ho ho!” and then add a rhyming line. But okay, fine, I did some of it. And I liked other chants better. There was one with a very catchy rhythm, almost song-like, where a few really loud people in the crowd would yell “SHOW ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” and the whole crowd would yell back “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” and I kept getting choked up. …It’s a lot better when you can hear it. I’ll bet they sing-chant it at all the protests now, so you can hear it if you go.

It felt good to be in a big crowd of people who felt the way I did about the situation. That is just always going to feel nice.

It was fun to see all the signs: there were a lot of good/funny/clever ones.

I’d wondered how we’d know it was over, and whether there’d be a mad dash for the trains. The way we knew it was over was that someone with a really loud voice said “Thank you all for coming, be safe!” and there was some cheering and then we all started walking back to the train. Probably there were some people walking briskly to get there ahead of others, but I didn’t have that impression of the crowd as a whole: casual strolling, lots of chatting. We were able to get onto the first train that arrived after we did, though it ended up being crammed full—but the subway had arranged extra trains, so there was another one coming along in 2 minutes and another one coming 2 minutes after that. It felt as if everyone (police, subway) was VERY familiar with how to deal with the extra crowds, no big deal, all in a day’s work.

I would have been more nervous about the packed-full trains (we are STANDING UP on a moving vehicle and all crammed together with strangers), but everyone else was so yawningly chill about it (reading paperback while swaying, or chatting with someone else, or literally yawning while looking out the window) and that calmed me. Also, in both directions I was right next to someone holding a sweet, calm, well-behaved little dog in their arms, and in both cases the owner said it was okay to pet the dog’s soft little ears, so in both cases I did. A calm soft dog ear is even better than a worry stone.

I was glad I’d gone. And I felt so much better getting the first one done: for me the worst part is not knowing how things will go and not knowing how to handle all the logistics. Even if the next protest I go to is in a completely different location, I’ve still learned a lot of the basics and will be much less nervous next time. And when you are in a very low-power situation, it is nice to be able to say you DID do some of the things you COULD do.

Are you familiar with the concept of “round robin” letters? I have no idea if this is the sort of thing where everyone knows it duh, or not. Wikipedia, I notice, says that round robin letters are Christmas newsletters; I don’t think that is true, though perhaps it’s another usage of the term. I could have clicked the citations but I am eager to get back to The Good Wife: I just finished the first season and that is a cliff-hanger I would like to get back to.

This is how a round robin works. Let’s say you have a friend group of four, and Friend A starts it: she writes a letter, and she mails it to Friend B. Friend B reads the letter, writes his own letter, puts both letters in an envelope and mails them to Friend C. Friends C and D do the same, and Friend D mails the whole packet back to Friend A, so that Friend A receives an envelope containing four letters: her own plus three more. Friend A reads the three new letters, then takes her own letter out and writes a new one and puts it in, then mails the packet on to Friend B. And ’round and ’round it goes: after the initial start-up, where it is just one letter and then just two letters and so on, the envelope will always have four letters in it.

Everyone can also put in photos, or newspaper articles, or recipes, or whatever, and each person just takes their own stuff back as it comes back around to them. (This system requires participants who will not lose things, and who will not put a letter in a pile of mail and not get around to it for months.)

Anyway. I just mention this concept in case it could be useful at some point. One of the things I like about it is that in order for one to start, it isn’t necessary for EVERYONE to have EVERYONE’S addresses: if one person sends to one address they know, and THAT person sends to one address THEY know, you can build a circle pretty quickly. It works even better if some people in the circle have access to photocopiers, and/or can be the hub of several circles.

Oh! That reminds me. Our old and much-loved printer finally went into well-deserved retirement, and we had to replace it. The old printer was a Brother brand printer, and so we got another Brother. This one:

(image from Amazon.com)

Brother DCPL2520DW Wireless Compact Multifunction Laser Printer and Copier [edit: it also scans]. It is excellent. We print to it from four desktop computers and two laptops. I do not know how that magic works; I have my own personal IT guy who takes care of that. But one of the things I like best about it is that it’s ALSO a regular old photocopier: you lift the top, put your piece of paper in, and press a button. It’ll even do double-sided copies. This is the ink we buy for it: one-pack or two-pack.

I don’t have many basic throwback life skills, as we’ve discussed. But if the need arises I can put out a double-sided newsletter, yo.

My social-media input is so divided right now. It’s hard to triage all of it, isn’t it? It’s hard.

I’m overwhelmed, and one set of people in my life is saying “IT’S BECAUSE THE WORLD IS ON FIRE AND WE’RE ALL GOING DOWN IN FASCIST FLAMES UNLESS WE TAKE STRONG ACTION RIGHT NOW!!!!” and the other set is saying “For GOD’S sake, this happens every four years, RELAX already!!” And I absolutely know which side I believe, and I am absolutely at a loss to explain it to the other side. I have voted in a number of elections, and sometimes my choice of candidate has won and sometimes my choice has lost, and I have always felt it does not deeply matter one way or the other, and yet this time I believe it deeply does.

It is different. It is hard to say why it’s different, to people who don’t think it is different. My mother has reminded me more than once how other people freaked out when Barack Obama was elected. How to explain the difference in type and cause of freak-out? How to explain why this isn’t exactly the same way someone else felt when Obama was elected, with the expectation of exactly the same “and everything was fine” results? I remember people saying society would fall apart if Obama won; how is that different from my fears now? How to explain the whole thing to someone in my Facebook newsfeed who says that protesting an assault on democracy is the same as making an assault on democracy, and that everyone needs to get over it / give him a chance? How to explain to someone that NO, it’s YOUR news that’s fake news—when they think MY news is fake news? How to explain that the two things are not equivalent, even though it feels like they are? How to explain it to people who think there is no problem here and that the new president hasn’t even done anything yet?

Well. I don’t know and neither do you, or else it would all be explained and everything would be fine. But in the meantime, I’m panicking and directionless. Thank you to those of you who sent me links to places giving direction, but for some reason I find those make me panic even more. It reminds me of when I heard that we can go right ahead and recycle that piece of paper, and we SHOULD, but in the meantime a business just dumped 10,000 pounds of paper in the trash: we like to say individuals make a difference, but for most of us that isn’t true. We get an electric car to reduce our carbon footprint, and a business adds to the air the exhaust of a hundred thousand gasoline engines every day. Certain individuals, certain organizations: those will make the impact here. The rest of us have to wait and see what they will choose to do, and add our individual pieces of paper to make our own proportionately tiny difference, in the hopes that all together our tiny inputs will add up to one impactful action—and in the meantime, those tiny inputs will make us feel better, by making us feel as if we’re helping. That’s basically what a republic is and does: we all do our tiny part, to give others the power to make big decisions for us.

Today I’m going to Target. I’m taking a Maeve Binchy book with me, and after I shop I’m going to go out to lunch and read my book. When I come home I’m going to write a letter to one of my senators, even though I don’t think it makes a difference, despite people saying it does. I’m going to fold laundry while listening to The 451 podcast. For the time being I am not going to research any more “Ways You Can Help!” organizations: I have set up the monthly payments to the ACLU and a couple others who have more impact than an individual, and I am going to hope that the people who are in charge of preventing the loss of our republic will do so.

This was a hard day. 1) Before leaving for Edward’s colonoscopy, I snapped at Henry and said mean things. 2) Then, on the way to the colonoscopy, I missed a turn in a big city, and ended up in a tunnel that took us somewhere else. 3) Then, Edward’s colonoscopy showed almost for sure that his medication is not adequately treating his Crohn’s Disease. 4) Also, during his colonoscopy we changed presidents.

But it wasn’t all bad. 1) I apologized to Henry when I got home, and I think I can handle things better next time. 2) The GPS helped me find my way back to the right route, and I’d allowed 45 minutes’ padding because I hate city driving, so we still arrived on time. 3) Edward’s GI doctor has a plan (biopsy results, then MRI, then we talk again), and seems chill about moving on to another medication. 4)

A week with an appointment at a children’s hospital is always a bit FRAUGHT (Edward is having a colonoscopy to check on the status of his Crohn’s Disease; we’ve been through this before, but the prep is still unpleasant, and it is still stressful to deal with the procedure / the city driving / having a child put under anesthesia / etc. ), but also it is scheduled for the same day as the presidential inauguration. So you can guess my mood. And by “mood” I mean blood alcohol content.

Also this week, I took Rob to the first medical appointment he’s had since turning 18, and it was all different: they gave HIM the permission forms to sign, and they had him sign his own HIPAA. After the appointment, he’s the one who received an email with the link to his online patient profile. And his new prescription isn’t in my online pharmacy account, BECAUSE HE IS A LEGAL ADULT AND SO HAS BEEN AUTOMATICALLY REMOVED FROM MY ACCOUNT. It is all very odd, considering he still lives at home and I’m paying all his medical expenses and picking up his prescriptions and telling him to unload the dishwasher and so on.

Also this week, there was an envelope in the mail confirming Rob’s draft registration. He can now be drafted into the military. The draft has always seemed nutty to me, but looking at my 18-year-old child it seems nutty beyond imagination. (“Nutty” is the best word I could come up with here without going off the rails, and I am not happy with the lighthearted whimsy of it, but the more-accurate words seemed to trigger multiple-paragraph rantings.) And did you know that boy children aren’t eligible for college financial aid unless they have registered to allow their government to decide whether or not they have to go fight in a war and kill people and maybe be killed? Well. The upside is that the next war will likely be nuclear, so there will not be time or need for a draft.

I will feel a countdown timer in my head from now until he turns 26 and is no longer on the draft list. I have added it to the list of Special Birthdays, alongside Kindergarten 5, Double Digits 10, and Sweet 16.

On New Year’s Eve we watched 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was my third time seeing it, and it was even worse than I’d remembered. The background sounds were nearly intolerable. It needed Stephen-King-novel levels of editing/chopping. And the major plot elements seemed divided into two types:

1. Super, super obvious insights that were presented as if they were profound. Like when someone is on drugs and starts saying things that seem MIND-BLOWING but are…not. Even if accompanied by a banging drum and a discordant choir.

2. Stuff where someone involved in the making of the movie confused “things that do not make sense” with “things that are very, very deep and profound”—either because he/she personally confuses those things, or because he/she thought the VIEWER would confuse those things and find the result impressive. Like when someone is writing or reading poetry, and thinks that the more baffling/random it is, the more meaningful/deep/profound it is.

Anyway. That was my individual opinion of the movie. I found it just about intolerable, and I never want to see it again OR be in the house while others are watching it.

In expressing this view to the people I live with, I found that Elizabeth could not have agreed more. She did not see why this was the sort of movie her father felt she HAD to see, when it was clearly annoying, boring, and faux-deep. The male persons in my household, however, wanted to argue with me. What EXACTLY did I think was, quote, SO OBVIOUS, endquote? How did I KNOW that some inexplicable parts WEREN’T actually profound? They wanted me to prove to them the unproveable (i.e., that something does not make sense), starting from first principles. Hm, what a tempting offer, but no thank you. I mean, if you say “And also, so-and-so was a terrible actor,” and someone replies, “He was SUPPOSED to be a terrible actor! That was the POINT!,” then what more can the two of you say to one another to achieve peaceful understanding?

Since New Year’s Eve, I have mentioned this movie several times in mixed groups. In EVERY CASE SO FAR, the female people in the group have been of basically my point of view, and the male people in the group have been more aligned with the male people in my household. People have been placed variously on the spectrum, of course, and have had various intensities of feelings. But IN GENERAL, and even with this extremely small sample size, I have seen enough to make me want to do a poll.

Update: So, this is frustrating, but I can’t make the poll work. It wouldn’t format correctly. It insisted that people log in as a WordPress user, even though I unchecked that box when setting up the poll; each time I returned to the poll settings, that box was re-checked. The poll was a nice width on my main page, but if you clicked through to the address of the post itself, it was about one word wide so you couldn’t even tell what you were voting for.

I’m very discouraged. All I can think of is having free-form voting in the comments section, but that’s nowhere near as helpful: we can get 800 votes in a poll when we’d get 25 comments, because it’s way way easier and more fun to vote than to comment. Also, doing it in the comments section is going to make everyone more likely to argue: it’s less provoking to see the numbers and percentages than to see someone saying an opinion in their own words. Also, there are people who cruise around the internet looking to fight about their pet topic: if I get 50% comments in the comments section saying “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, IT’S THE BEST MOVIE EVER, YOU’RE JUST TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND ITS BRILLIANCE,” but the poll shows only 1% of voters say they liked the movie, it’s a good indicator I have stumbled upon one of those topics. If all I have is the 50% comments section with no 1% poll, I’m going to get discouraged about humanity.

I don’t know how you can guard your heart against a title like that one.

Today’s task: finish listening to last week’s The 451 podcast while cleaning out a drawer that no longer closed: my sock and underwear drawer. Here it is at the beginning of this project, and I am sorry to say I had to look HARD at the before and after pictures to tell which one was which, so visually-speaking this is not going to be one of those giant catharsis projects:

My socks and underwear used to fit easily in two of the smaller drawers above. Let’s not waste time discussing WHO should have fewer socks/underwear, let’s just say that as I began this project, the much larger drawer I had moved them into could no longer open or close beyond what you see there, unless it was getting toward Laundry Day.

I took out the drawer and dumped everything out on the bed:

This left a nearly-empty drawer, containing only a back-up bottle of perfume I bought when it was discontinued (L’Artisan Tea for Two):

Here is the underwear sorted into “pairs I will wear” (left) and “pairs I hate” (right):

Here are the socks sorted into seven piles. Starting at the top left and going down the left hand side, it’s ankle socks, trouser/dressy socks, novelty socks, and knee socks. Starting at the top right and going down the right hand side, it’s crew/boot socks, singleton socks I needed to think about, and singleton socks that could go right into the trash :

I should not have shifted the point of view so often in this series, nor should I have put the underwear I like back in the drawer before taking this picture, nor should I have put the things I got rid of further away so that they looked smaller—but I did do all those things, so here we are. Farthest from the viewer are the things I got rid of: the underwear I hate, almost all of the novelty socks I like but never wear, almost all of the trouser/dressy socks, two pairs of ankle socks I don’t like, and the crew/boot socks I don’t like or don’t wear. Nearer the viewer is the unfortunately-still-large quantity of things I’m keeping; the largest piles are ankle socks, crew/boot socks, and white crew socks. Then some little piles: three pairs of trouser/dressy socks for the rare occasions I need them; two pairs of novelty socks for the rare occasions I wear them; and I put the two pairs of knee socks in a big plastic baggie with the ankle brace I wear them with, and put that back in the bathroom closet.

Here is the trash can, afterward, though it was half-full when I started this project:

Here is the drawer, afterward, and brace yourself for a disappointing picture of a still-quite-full drawer:

I do wish I could TELL that I had half-filled a trash can. But look, it closes:

And even though it doesn’t LOOK a lot emptier, I can now rummage around in there, which I could not do before. And sometimes I need to do a first pass before I can get rid of more stuff. It would also help if I would rotate my clothes seasonally: I wear the ankle socks in warm weather and the crew/boot socks in cold weather. But I do not rotate my clothes seasonally, so.