GETTING MY SHIT TOGETHER: THE AUGEAN STABLES OF PARK SLOPE

The southern end of the Vault, pre-uncluttering.

The one aspect of my newfound resolve that has filled me with a Stygian dread is the task of uncluttering my studio apartment, or, as I like to call it, the Augean Stables of Park Slope.

For those who may not have twiggged to the mythological analogy in that one, during the twelve labors of Heracles — or Hercules for those of you who prefer the Roman version and therefore don't care about the irony of his real name...oh, just look it up! — one of his assignments was to muck out the Augean stables, a series of barnyards that had not been cleaned in years, resulting in piles of doody that stood as high as mountains. Heracles accomplished this impossible feat by using his superhuman strength to change the course of two rivers and wash the place out in no time, after which he resumed his other labors, hung out with Jason and the Argonauts — and his cute boyfriend, Hylas; again, look it up! — and eventually moved to Mount Olympus to hang out with the Pantheon for the rest of eternity.

Well, I do not have the benefit of living in the days of ancient heroes or being a demigod clad in the skin of a lion, there's no river to run out of my second story window, and there's definitely no chance of me hanging out with a bunch of sweaty, hairy sailors — with my cute boyfriend, Dean Cain — so the labor of cleaning out the mountain range of boxes, books, DVDs, video tapes and the gods know what else is going to be an utterly mundane and tedious chore, notably lacking the glory won by Zeus' most famous bastard son.

I'm a pathological pack rat, and I have massive trouble throwing out anything that isn't garbage, so this is really nerve-wracking for me. I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and not overexamine each and every object that's going to get chucked, keeping only that which must stay, and relegating the sellable bits to good old eBay, so wish me luck.