Shipping in a material world

In several posts I have complained bitterly about the fact that our boxes had not arrived. I moaned about shoes I couldn't wear, utensils I couldn't cook with, unfamiliar towels and linens.

I take it back. I take it all back.

Our boxes arrived this week -- sixteen huge, battered, torn, squished boxes, stacked on top of each other and all sitting in our living room (we've moved the furniture to the dining area in desperation). Many of them rattle mysteriously or are missing corners. In an honest moment I must confess to being mildly excited at seeing the box labeled "18 pairs of shoes." It was like Shoe Santa Claus arrived in our home. Each layer of shoes I peeled back revealed another set of shoes that I hadn't realized how much I missed.

We did not have the same reaction to the contents of all boxes. Let me itemize for you some of the utterly ridiculous things we packed, on that far-off and long-ago day of Salem materialism:

• 2 sushi plates -- because god knows normal plates won't suffice if there is some kind of norimaki emergency
  


• water bottles that must be three or four years old (and look it)
  


• a shot glass -- and not a normal, free-with-liquor-purchase kind but a hand-decorated, handwash-only one
  


• a box of power bars -- worth at the most $15
  


• measuring cups that measure in ounces and measuring spoons that measure in tablespoons (think about it)
  


• seven (seven) usb cables
  


• 125 hangers (I can actually remember a conversation where one of us said, "Honey, we need to at least bring our good hangers")
  


• six pillows (which brings the total number of pillows in this 800-square-foot, two-bedroom house to twelve) and about a thousand towels in varying conditions of wear
  


• clothes I don't even like that much including several pairs of jeans that don't really fit



• a pair of sandals that tear the skin off my heels when I wear them -- but were bought in Aberdeen in 2005 so they had to come -- and a pair of boots I literally last wore in 2006 but seemed appropriate as they are lined with fake fur
  


• two silicone liners for cookie sheets . . . but only one cookie sheet . . .
  


• a 23-year-old copy of Little Women
  


• a substantially older game of Scrabble that I'm pretty sure is missing an "a"

In sum, although the British have the second highest rate of consumption in the world, this volume of stuff seems completely mad even by British standards.

And what didn't I bring? An extra pair of mittens, a cupcake pan, a regular pan, an ice cream scoop, a decent razor, logic, a reasonable sense of what is truly necessary to sustain life in 95% of the world. The outcome? We are actually donating clothes to charity shops. We brought clothes 5,000 miles so that we could donate them to charity shops which, because they are not registered 501c3s, cannot issue us a receipt for a tax deduction.

Sigh. Well, off to visit my shoes. They've gotten lonely after two months on a Chinese freighter.