erratio

On Friday I moved back in to my parents' house so that I would have less to worry about while I get ready to move to America for my PhD.

It took me until Sunday morning to decide I was going to go crazy if I didn't clean the house (and my room).

This is because the entire house is filled with clutter from end to end. My bedroom is filled with notes from university and high school, and with old toys and hobbies. The bookshelf still has books on it aimed at eight year olds. And on top of that I have the spare double mattress I left in there when I moved out of my Maroubra apartment and 2 dead computers sitting on the floor, which may or may not still have working parts in them. On the floor and under the bed are more books, more notes, more toys and hobby remnants, and lots of dust. The rest of the house is just as bad, if not worse, albeit without the layer of dust.

The funny thing is that I never really noticed it that much when I was living at home. The house has always been cluttered; what difference would a little more or less make? But now I've come back from living in places where I had to be a lot tidier because I was living with people who hadn't grown up surrounded by clutter, and everywhere I look I see things that should have been thrown out long ago and things that we don't use and aren't going to use any time in the near future. It's not quite so bad that we could have been featured on one of those reality lifestyle shows, but there are definite improvements to be made.

So, I'm formally declaring war on the house clutter. I've already listed most of the larger items on classified sites. Yesterday I threw out a large bag of rubbish and 2 crates of paper from my bedroom, with more to come as soon as the council empties the bins. And every weekday will be more of the same until the house reaches a passing resemblance to 'tidy'.

Today was Yom Kippur, the day of judgement where God decides whether we will live or die during the coming year. I find it fitting and symbolic, even though I didn't intend it this way, that today will probably be the last day that I self-identify as Jewish.

It's taken me a long time to reach this point. Even though I haven't believed in the rituals of Judaism or in the existence of a Judeo-Christian God for years, I still fasted on Yom Kippur, avoided bread during Passover and kept an abbreviated form of kosher (no ham/pork/etc) out of some sense of tradition and obligation towards my family and my past. I think I'm over that now.

What happened? Well, I read an article last night about the difference between actually believing in something and only half-believing, in the way that most of us don't believe in ghosts but would still get freaked out if we spent some time in a haunted house. And that caused something of a personal epiphany, where I realised that I've been behaving as though I half-believe in Judaism, even though I'm sure that the monotheistic God doesn't exist.

Today I fasted, because it seemed like a bad idea to change my beliefs when I had such a huge incentive (being able to eat normally) for deciding to give up on religion on the spot.* Starting tomorrow, I will be making an effort to discard my last observances of Judaism. From now on, I will only identify myself as Jewish in the sense of having had a Jewish background, not in the sense of currently identifying myself as one. Let's see how it goes.

*Probably also because as soon as I realised that my personal epiphany happened to match up with the most serious day of the Jewish year, that determines your fate for the entirety of the coming year, I couldn't resist the temptation towards symbolism.