Six months after deciding to organize and purge the apartment of things I don't use, I sold a few items on ebay yesterday. The whole process amazes me. People from anywhere can browse and bid on other people's stuff from anywhere. Once you win an auction, the stuff is mailed to you, and you never meet the original owner of whatever you bought. At the most, you get a return address, so I guess you know more about your item than you would if you got it from a thrift or resale shop. Nonetheless, there's a lot of trust involved. How can anyone be sure my best friend didn't die in those Paper Denim & Cloth jeans and decide to haunt them from deep within the stylish dark wash? Or that I didn't kill my upstairs neighbor by stomping him to death in the wedge shoes, which easily wipe clean?

When I was in high school, I bought a copy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s a rare book in itself, but I found an autographed copy on ebay at the same time. I collect autographed books, so I gushed and appreciated and pined…and bid five dollars on an unautographed copy. I was fifteen, so money was tight and ultimately, not mine. Imagine my surprise and annoying repetition of “Serendipity! Oh my God!” when I received the autographed copy of Blacks after placing a winning bid of five bucks. I took it to be part of a master plan, and knew I’d feign ignorance if FoolishBookseller, or whatever his name was, tried to undo his mistake. Fortunately, I never heard back from the seller.

But that pizza guy who mistakenly delivered the wrong pizza to me – one even tastier and bigger than the one I’d ordered - and then called ten minutes later wanting to pick it back up, so he wouldn’t get yelled at? I still feel a tiny bit bad about that. Between mouthfuls, I tried to let him down easy. “Umm, yeah. You see, I’ve eaten almost the whole thing.” Oops?

The three items I sold on ebay affirmed my sense in it being a small world (although one big enough that I would prefer not to paint it – thanks, Stephen Wright). The designer jeans my best friend didn’t actually die in are going to a bargain hunter in Brooklyn. One dvd set is heading to Pennsylvania once funds are transferred. The other is going to the University of Texas residence hall where I worked as an RA for two and a half years. The floor where I lived my first year, actually.

That’s cooler than finding out the gorgeous secondhand wedges look great dressed up or down and can kill a man. Well, almost.