Born to blog

This morning (I'm being generous; it was 11ish) I hopped out of bed like a little sprite and sprang into cleaning action. Last night I had stopped by Rite Aid to ready myself for the cleanliness rapture and stock up on cleaning supplies. My apartment has been filthy and crammed with random crap for a very long time now, and I really only spruce it up on the surface when I have people over. But it's been a long time (read: probably never) since I really cleaned it.

I brewed the world's tiniest pot of coffee (my new $8 coffee maker from Fred's is among the most adorable appliances I have ever laid eyes upon) and proceeded to down two black cups as I worked my way through the kitchen and bedroom. I meticulously scrubbed the baseboards and moulding. The air conditioner got a nice little rubdown, as did my dusty dresser and nightstand. But my magnum opus today? The closets.

My closets have always been prone to abuse. Call it a walk-in closet and I will eventually treat it like an offsite storage unit, crammed to the brim. But lately I've been feeling so insane and so suffocated by unseen forces that every time I opened my living room or bedroom closets, I fantasized about saying something dramatic and throwing myself off a bridge. Yes, it got that bad.

So today I was ruthless and just started chucking stuff and piling everything else up to take to the Goodwill. My old stereo, DVD player, desk lamp, printer, feather boa, phone, answering machine, beaded curtain, you name it. If it was in my closet and I haven't touched it in six months (aside from my old Dell and my box of old drawings and journals, which I'm still not ready to part with), it's gone.

Kind of. It's all sitting in my hallway right now, but that's only because I want to drop the stuff off during the Goodwill's business hours. And I also kind of figured I might unload some of the electronics stuff to people I know. But by tomorrow evening, that shit is outta here. I feel a hundred pounds lighter. Not in my ass, unfortunately, but in my heart. I just lug so much around with me that sometimes I can't breathe from the weight of it.

Does this mean I'm done with being a slobby packrat? Hell to the naw. That's in my genes. And besides, if I wasn't a packrat, would I be able to up and produce a gem like this letter I wrote to Dear Abby when I was twelve? I think not. Behold! A twelve-year-old's infinite, pithy wisdom: completely uninformed, yet full of opinions. And to think I've continued that legacy to this day. Amazing!



[This is funny on its own, but to think that just seven or so years later, I'd be writing something like this? Priceless.]

Day 316 — Packrat

See all this stuff? This stuff follows me around wherever I go. I have tried time and time again to exorcise my clutter demons, and I have given bag after bag after bag of stuff to friends and Goodwill. But still, at all times, no less than ten substantial boxes of ... stuff ... trails behind me, stashed in a closet, in a bureau, under the bed, in some spare cabinets.

I'm talking broken Furbies, miniature sticker books from when I was 12, every diary I've ever owned, broken desk lamps, loose-leaf notebook paper containing serialized and incomplete stories, sketchbooks from high school art class, billfolds given to me for Christmas when I was in third grade, creative-writing journals from my senior year, three Ziploc bags full of lead pencils and highlighters, CDs I haven't listened to in years, dusty paintbrushes given to me by my grandmother, a lamp with broken colored glass glued to it that I've never once been able to hang up, erotic poster-board paintings of featureless women, the business card of an Indian restaurant I ate at the first time I ever visited New York City, a stuffed Aflac duck, keys that go to who knows what, four spools of unmarked CDs, three boxes of photographs, my (incomplete) Sidelines clip file, bills from 2004, tiny beaded change purses stained by melted candy, wallets I've never once used, scrapbooks that have gone untouched, Christmas and birthday cards I've accumulated over the past decade, a broken ceramic angel my sister gave me when I was confirmed in our church, my old Dell desktop and its accessories, bags and purses I never use, letters from my dead grandmother and great-grandmother ... the list goes on and on.

I have this ritual once or twice a year where I pull everything out of its polite hiding place and go through it in order to "clean up" and hopefully get rid of some stuff. It almost always ends up being an exercise in pointlessness from a purely pragmatic standpoint. I throw out maybe one garbage bag of paperwork. But it gives me a chance to get reacquainted with all the stuff I've stashed and forgotten about. I get to read through my horrible adolescent poetry and cringe at the creative-writing journal I actually let a teacher read and grade my senior year. I get to tear up at the recordings of our band concerts (we were good for a bunch of little twerps). I get to remember all the bands I absolutely loved and then completely forgot about. I get to reconnect with the people in my family who have moved on, but who left me little pieces of themselves in letters and photographs.

I am a sentimental fool, see. Having little bits of my past kept stacked up in my closet helps keep every passing year within reach. If I threw these things out, how would I remember the circumstances in which they were created? My memory's not so good. I need all the help I can get.

A lot of people don't understand this attachment to things, this tendency to hoard. I think we packrats don't understand the capacity to so easily throw most things away.

Project 365