letting go (of compulsions)

i took a big step today. i'm trying to relax my tendencies to micromanage and monitor everything. as much as dave and the rest of the kahn brothers like to joke about "extensive records" and the keeping of such; even though i would laugh right along with them, i've long been obsessive about tracking my money, to the point of saving receipts and at times even balancing my wallet the way some people balance their checkbooks. so that i could account for exactly where all my money was going, down to the smallest coin.

today, i ordinarily would have done that for the huge pile of receipts that i had been piling up since the last time a couple of months ago. instead, i picked up the whole pile and tossed it straight into the wastepaper basket. letting go is far from easy, but i hope that this will prove to be a step in the right direction. hell, even at the grocery store this morning, i went through the checkout without having precalculated my total, so as to be sure that it came out correctly. i still watched as she did it, to make sure that each individual item was right (i don't want to get cheated), but i let the register do the addition, and didn't worry about it so much.

maybe i'm adapting to swiss behavior, and forty francs just doesn't mean as much to me as it used to, so i can spend it with less aprehension, or maybe i'm becoming lazier. regardless, i hope that by relaxing just a bit, i can simplify ever so slightly the ludicrous nonsense that makes up so much of my everyday life. i suppose that time will be the only reliable test of whether or not this is an improvement.