Some things are too beautiful to throw away.

I just did another cleaning pogrom in my room. And please, no flames about my use of the word 'pogrom', I think it is appropriate. Throwing away pieces of your identity is indeed a form of violence against yourself. It's like cutting. Off your fingers. Except that you grow new ones, usually. Memories, that is, pieces of identity. So, it's less like a pogrom and more like pruning. Yes, that's exactly it. Aesthetic pruning.

But yes, I cleaned out things that I hadn't even touched in a long time, those things that bug you but are easy to ignore, like under my nightstand, and one of those boxes under my bed. It really makes a difference. And I got a new lamp to stand behind my desk, and it is splendiferous. No really, I never knew my walls were so nice, I'm never using the overhead lighting again.

So every time I clean my room, I throw stuff away. In my small way, I like to think that I do my best to trim irrelevance from my life. But there are some things that I really want to just get rid of, but it would be doing the world a bad turn to have it end up in the garbage. It just hurts to be so direct in annihilating beauty. So, here's something:

It's bigger than that, about seven inches across. It was made by this woman named Yao who goes to my community college. In addition to painting, she does these really intricate paper cutouts with tiny little scissors, from photorealistic silhouettes to entire fresco-style Indian religious scenes.

She was showing me some of the stuff she had recently done, and I asked her if I could trade her something for one of her cutouts. And right on the spot, she gave me this butterfly, just said keep it. She's really a generous soul, she'd do it for anybody.

I don't really care for it, but I couldn't just throw it away. It's just so nice that it exists. Does anyone want it? It's not actually mounted on paper, so you could put it on whatever, wherever. Just email me if you're interested, and I'll send it to you. For free! I like using stamps.

ps. Okay, that took like, five seconds. Butterfly now belongs (in spirit) to girl-aflame.

11:45 p.m. 2003-07-30�