Day 11. What are 11 things your life doesn't need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?

Yeah, right.

It should come at no surprise at this point that this prompt, like its ten elder brothers but the first one, irritates the fuck out of me. I can already see the responses. Some of them will be New-Year-Resolution style. Cigarettes, fat, chocolate, stress, clutter, procrastination, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, petty arguments, compulsive shopping, debt. Others will be more in the Miss-USA vein, like so many Facebook avatar memes. World hunger, wars, conflicts, pollution, cancer, dying polar bears, abused children, beaten wives, abandoned pets, corrupt politicians, oil spills.

Gah! Was this thing really supposed to be so sappy?

(I just had a look at what people wrote, using Twitter's search, and they're either snarky of as new-year-resolutionerish or miss-usa-ey as I feared.)

Call me resistant to self-help and self-improvement, but I find it so patronizing to assume that people have as many as eleven non-trivial things they not only need to eliminate but also can eliminate. The "can" part prevents me from drawing wishful, pointless lists including pain, right-wing fucknuttery, and perfectionism-induced freak-outs.

Or maybe I shouldn't assume anything about the triviality of the things and go on and list objects, but: I have weeded out of my life all objects that needed to go when moving out from California.