It's time to treat the 'smaller issues' in life seriously

I set a goal for this month at the end of last month, and it is to clean up my apartment. The obstacle here is to throw away stuff that I am attached to but is useless in the eyes of everyone else.

It is so difficult to throw things away that I think about renting a mini-storage unit. They are cheap, costing 1,000 yuan ($163) for one cubic meter's space a year. But they are in the suburbs, so I approached friends who have a car. The answer has always been a no, plus suggestions for me to throw away things.

A girl even offered me a gift last week, and it is a book about how one can get the determination to throw stuff away. It was first published in Japan and translated into Chinese. It has nearly 20 chapters, each kind of stuff being given one chapter.

The first chapter is about old clothes - the easiest to get rid of - and the last is about boyfriends. "Many girls choose to cling to the man whom they don't really have a strong emotion for because they think they need the man for the future," the author wrote. The man is similar to clothes in this way, said the Japanese lady.

I declined the gift because it gives me too much pressure: "You should never just wind up your stockings and socks into the the shape of a ball, or throw all your underwear into one drawer or two," she said. It is exactly what I do. Each kind should be arranged orderly in a specially made box, she ordered.

Then I saw on my friend's shelf about five books of the kind. When I searched an online bookstore, I found nearly about 100 books - more than half of them translated from Japanese - teaching people how to throw away stuff and arrange what is left. It is a big market.

I think my apartment can still be called tidy, but I have a friend whose place is hard to get into. Every time, she half-opens the door of her studio, recognizes me, bends down and moves away things piled around the door so that it can be opened fully.