There were personal relationships that were (in hindsight) quite toxic a decade or two ago. Those should have been decluttered, but finally just drifted off (or died). The declutter now is a result of clinging to family, some of them I barely knew, or only knew of, because of parents who squabbled with their parents. As a result, I met very few of my relatives growing up. Knowing stories about them now is sometimes associated with a thing that I know to have been theirs. It has been a process to cull the things that are no longer required in order to make the family stories mine.

I went to a lecture this evening. Actually, I went to two of them today, one at noon by the professor who was chair of my master's committee, to do with collecting tables of contents of literature anthologies going back as far as they have been produced to see what was really "canonical," and then later, the guy who established the "howstuffworks" website, programs, etc. Interesting, and in a way, he was giving people permission to do things they had been thinking about for a long time. More on that later, I'm bushed and heading for bed.

SRS