A Place for My Stuff

Peeps n' Jesus

(Note, this post may be offensive to some readers.  If you don't like it, you were warned!  Spare me the hate mail.  I make no apologies for this.)

Recently I was posed the question "What do marshmallow peeps and Jesus have in common?"  So I thought about it, and I came up with my own top-10 list.

"TOP TEN THINGS THAT MARSHMALLOW PEEPS and
JESUS HAVE IN COMMON"
by Bill M (http://www.aplaceformystuff.org)

10) They both get the most attention around Easter time.
9) They're both from Bethlehem (Peeps are actually manufactured by a company in Bethlehem, PA)
8) People have claimed both to be indestructible
7) People try to give you both, whether or not you're not really interested.
6) Neither of them wrote anything. Ever.
5) You can nail either one to a tree and it will stay.
4) They're not palatable to everybody.
3) Too much of either has been shown to be bad for your health
2) They're both manufactured
1) They both explode when you put them in the microwave

And if you're going to copy and paste this list elsewhere, please be sure to include my name and website to credit me with the work.  Thanks.

The Jeffersons' Junk

One of my favorite TV shows is The Jeffersons.  Being a long-time, huge fan of All in the Family, I guess it was inevitable that I ended up liking its most successful spin-off.

I was just watching the episode "Where's Papa" from the 6th season.  Much to my delight, the first several minutes deals with sorting through...junk!  Poor George thinks he's making progress here.

 

Melodramatic Logos

I'd like to think of myself as somebody who is mentally independent, and neither cares nor needs the approval or disapproval of others to form my own opinions.

But you have to admit, it CAN be rather reassuring when you find out that other people share your strange opinion on something, as baseless as it may sound.

The topic in this case are TV and movie logos.  I'm talking about the very short clips of a company's logo and their name, more specifically a company involved in some television show or movie.  For movies, the logo shows up before the movie starts (e.g., the Paramount Pictures mountain, or Universal's shot of planet earth).  For television shows, it can show up before or after, or both.

The opinion that I was pleased to see other people sharing, is that some of these logo scenes were needlessly melodramatic, if not scary.  This was especially true for a number of us who were very, very young children in the 1970s and perhaps also the early 80s.  We'd be watching shows like Sesame Street, then suddenly had some strange logo thrown at us, with hypnotically drenched synthesizer sounds, all purposely composed to be a bit catchy or emotional at the same time.  What are you supposed to make of that at age 3?

 

 

Even as an adult, there were times when I sat in front of the silver screen and thought "Hey, this preview seems pretty cool.  Or maybe it's the start of the movie?  Aw crap, it's just some logo!"

My own personal vote for the most needlessly melodramatic logo though would have to go to this one for United Artists:

 

 

Mondegreens!

Time for a comedy break.  For those who haven't seen this creation of mine yet.

 

For a good compilation of common mondegreens, I'd recommend the book 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy by Gavin Edwards, which I bought back in the mid 90s.

Another Successful Thrift Voyage

More stuff gotten rid of today:

7 hard-shell VHS cases
1 pair headphones
7 pairs socks
1 silk boxers
14 briefs
1 pillow case
2 sweatshirts
9 t-shirts
1 turtle neck

About 4 damn shopping bags of stuff!  Too bad I won't get the tax write-off for another year.

Cutting it Loose(leaf), part 2

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  More oddities of mine found in the corner of my living room.

• Rotting headphones.  Just when I thought I got rid of all my extra pairs of headphones, I come across another pair.  I guess this shouldn't be surprising, considering how many portable electronic devices I've bought in a lifetime, and how they all come with a cheap pair of headphones. I don't know what exactly makes sponge crumble to dust, but it has happened.  You can see the amassed pile of black stuff in the lower right corner of the blue tray.  Does this cheap pair of headphones still work?  Do I care?  Off to the thrift store you go.
• Spiral from notebooks.  Another item which I knew I had several of, and thought that I had already gotten rid of.  Why do I have these?  Well some time ago, a few single-subject notebooks ended up in my hands as school supplies.  I can't remember where I bought them, but I know I didn't buy them myself, because I've always stuck with loose-leaf notebooks ever since 8th grade.  So I carefully unwound the spiral from the notebooks, and popped the paper into my loose-leaf binder.  This left me with two pieces of cardboard and a spiral of wire.  Of course I could end up using this for something, right?  Like those aluminum wire sculptures we did back in art class for the papier mâché statues?  Well I'm sure it sounded good at the time.  But the reality is that if I haven't used these in 20 years, chances are good that I'll never get around to using them soon.  Into the trash you go.
• Tab labels for section separators for the loose-leaf notebook.  Of course, if you're going to put all of your subjects into the same binder, you'll need those big tabbed sheets to separate each section.  I found a tiny sheet that was perforated into 5 tear-off little cards, that you'd label and shove into these tabs.  And they're about as useful now as those spirals of wire.  Into the trash you go.
• Zip-up pencil case for a loose leaf notebook.  Geez, will the loose-leaf forever haunt me?  These used to get beat up a lot so that by the end of the year, you were ready to get a new case.  But I guess I held on to this one without using it.  Well, I'm not in school anymore.  But I could see a use for this, namely as a place to store CDs and put them with some of the other loose-leafs I have from work.  Which I'll go do now.  Hey, at least it's off the floor.
• Small photo album.  Ah ha, score!  Only had about 4 photos from 1993-95, but still, sentimental photos of me that I thought I had lost.  I move this over to the shelf with the rest of my photos.
• Instructions/solutions to a few puzzles I own.  I don't mean jigsaw puzzles.  I mean one of those big brain teaser puzzles with the giant pieces of metal linked together, and other one that's electronic.  If these are worth keeping, then they're worth keeping in one place that makes sense.  I moved these over to my file cabinet, into the folder where I keep the manuals for other stuff like my DVD player.

Cutting a Corner, part 1

Time again to tackle another area of stuff.  This time, I've decided to go through this corner of my living room.

I've been finding so many odd items in this area, that this is going to call for a mini blog series.  Some are actually keepers.  And some have me asking that all to common clutter combat question, "Why do I still have this?"

Here's an example from this pile of what I mean:

Now normally, I don't believe in adding commentary to a picture whose comedic value speaks for itself.  But I do know why I kept these.  No, I don't have a typewriter, but they are still blank and color-coded labels which one could manually write on.  Ironically, I could use these for price tags on a flea market to sell more of my stuff.  "They're perfectly good labels!"  Yeah, but how old are they if they say "typewriter" on them?  I'm going to either put them with the other labels I've bought for such a purpose, or throw them out. 

Plenty more oddities to come, believe me.

Pareidolia's Gonna Getcha

"When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will
filter everything else out, and find the thing everywhere."
- Pi

That's one of my all-time favorite quotes.  And it's quite relevant to another "Jesus sighting" that has made it to the news.  This time, in a frying pan.

It seems these silly "sightings" are always coming up, and always with Abrahamic religious figures.  Within the last few years there was this claim of seeing Jesus in an ultrasound photo:

And who could forget the classic Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich?

Are these miracles?  No, they're examples of a known psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia.  It's quite normal to "see" faces in random patterns.  This is a byproduct of our keen sense of pattern-matching that we've evolved to have.  And when you additionally 1) have somebody who's obsessed with a particular subject, and 2) tell somebody beforehand what they're "supposed" to be seeing, then it's inevitable that you're mind is going to project stuff like this.  This is in part how Rorschach inkblot tests work.  "Oh you drew a butterfly!"  "No, I just dropped some ink on a page and folded it to make it symmetrical."

Here's what I personally "saw" in these items.  Yes, here are picture comparisons put together by yours truly.  They're just as credible as claiming to see Jesus or Mary:

 

 

Actually I got the Jane Russell idea from Michael Shermer, but I used a different photo.

Dropping My Drawers

And of course by that title, I'm referring to the immense mass of clothing that fills my tiny bureau. 

What did you think I was talking about?  Pulling down my pants? Geez you people are perverted.

 

The missus decided that she wanted to attack this part next.  Probably because she does the laundry.  (Before any feminists read this and fly off the handle: I do the dishes.  And the bathroom cleaning.  So calm the hell down.)

As I've said before, I have more clothes than my bureau will handle.  Having dirty clothes at any given time was a good thing, because my hamper/sack for dirty clothes served as a storage place too.  But it was about time this changed.

Like most clutter, the solution is not getting a bigger container.  Unless you just moved out of your parents' place and your only storage space for clothes is 2-drawer nightstand, or your only storage space is some tiny bureau you've had since you were a toddler, then chances are good that getting more drawers is not the answer.  The solution is to get rid of the stuff you never really wear.

This brings up a strange phenomenon known as the 80-20 rule.  Within the context of clothes, it means this: you end up wearing 20% of your clothes about 80% of the time. 

Now don't let the fact that those two numbers add up to 100 fool you; that's really just a coincidence. Trust me, I have a Master's degree in mathematics, I get it.  So let me explain the 80/20 rule in another way with an example:

Let's say you own 40 different outfits for work, and that you work a typical 5 day work week.  You don't wear all of those outfits with equal frequency.  Some outfits you end up washing and wearing several times per same month, and some other outfits you may not even have worn in over a year.  But you probably have 8 particular outfits (20% of 40 outfits  = 8 outfits) that you do wear frequently.  Namely, your co-workers see you in one of these outfits an average of 4 days per week (80% of 5 days = 4 days).  Another way of putting this is that those other 32 work outfits of yours only get worn about once a week.

Again, this is just a statistical model, not a law of the universe, but it's still pretty accurate for large numbers of things.  Though the bottom line is you have a lot of stuff in your wardrobe that you never wear, and are not going to wear any time soon.  If ever.

Last year I managed to clean out a lot of clothes.  But this time, the missus and I went through one entire draw at a time.  Starting at the top, we emptied everything in that drawer on to the bed, then we sorted it by "keep" or "toss".  We put the keepers back in the draw.  Then we did this for each of the other drawers.  And we did a marathon laundry run of EVERYTHING in the laundry bag.

Here were some of the interesting finds. The top draw always accumulates weird things:

• Scünci band that doesn't "scrunch". "Scünci" is the brand name, but I guess the general term for these hair elastics covered in a piece of fabric are "scrunchies".  When you have long hair, they're helpful to use when tying up your hair before you go to sleep, because they're looser than a typical elastic and they also don't leave your hair in knots.  Unfortunately, this didn't seem to stretch at all.  I was going to pitch it, but my lady said she could use it for something.  Fine, as long as it's out of my drawer.
• By the way, that device on the far left in the photo above is one of those trimmers that shaves away lint balls from fabrics.  I still use it.  Certainly not junk.  It stays.  but the little white brush that it came with is an oddity.
• Cardboard backing to a pair of underwear (center of photo).  Why didn't I just throw it out when I got it?  I don't know.  But I'm throwing it out now.  And I don't know why I've done this in the past with other pieces of cardboard, but I have.  Other guys have too.  Go check in the top draw of some guy's bureau, and you'll find something that 1) is not an article of clothing and 2) in 50% of cases can be thrown away.
• Elastic with a twist tie and magic marker on it. I was racking my brains trying to think of WHAT the hell this could possibly be.  It looks like something I constructed.  But why?  For what purpose?  And what was it doing in my drawer?  Finally, I remembered.  A few years ago I was going to a Halloween costume ball and dressed like a guy from DEVO.  I didn't have a whip, so I coiled up a piece of black robe and hung it from my side belt loop.  And this is what I used that night to attach the rope.  Whew, glad I solved THAT mystery.  Into the trash you go.  Go forward.  Move ahead.  Try to detect it.  It's not to late.
• "Extra" t-shirts / undershirts. I wear lots of t-shirts.  I've always been a frequent t-shirt wearer.  And like anybody, I've acquired t-shirts to wear when I don't really care about what I'm wearing: stuff to wear doing outdoor housework, painting, sleeping, etc.  Shirts like this are good to have.  But you don't need 20 of them.  So I got rid of lots of extras.  Some of them were over 15 years old, like an incorrectly spelled "Poleitzi" shirt I got in 1993 for doing security at a college event called NSCRT ("Night of the Screaming Cathode Ray Tube").  The logo on the front and back were worn to near non-recognition.  Into the pile you go.
• Bathrobe. This was at the very bottom of my laundry bag.  My ex bought it for me for Xmas a few years ago.
• Silk boxers featuring Looney Tunes characters (see below).  Also from an ex...about 15 years ago.

These last two items bring up an important point about clothes, and buying clothes for other people.  And I'm getting rid of these.  Why?  Because I don't wear bathrobes, and I don't wear boxer shorts.  The only place I really wear a bathrobe is at a spa, and they give you robes to wear there.  And I already addressed underwear in an earlier blog post.

Some people wear certain articles of clothing, some don't.  Some are hat-wearers, some aren't.  Some have an all-black wardrobe, most don't.  That's simply the way it is.  And some people, especially relatives and significant others, try buying clothes for something with the idea of "The reason why this person doesn't wear X, is because he/she doesn't have X."  I'm here to tell all of you gift-givers the painful reality that it's the other way around.  It's not that people don't wear what they haven't bought, it's that they never buy what they've already decided not to wear.   

Don't get me wrong: it was a nice bathrobe.  It's still a very nice bathrobe.  But I don't wear bathrobes.  I'm not necessarily chucking it into GoodWill, but I ain't keeping it either.

 

So after this whole exercise, I've gotten three shopping bags full of stuff to bring to the thrift store. And not only do all of my drawers close with my laundry basket empty, but there's room for more stuff.  2010 tax credit, here I come!

A Place For My Stuff 101

I was reading through some of the YouTube comments from the last two clips I posted.  As is the usual case with YouTube, there were plenty of comments from clueless teenagers (who more often than not, type worse than most 8 year-olds).

So I felt the need to give a little review about what this blog is about, and what being a pack rat is about.

The Blog

This blog, aplaceformystuff.org, is mostly a documentation of my progress in cleaning my home, namely in getting rid of clutter.  I've always been a pack rat.  But last year I reached the point where it made for miserable living conditions, thus I decided to actively work on getting rid of the stuff.

In addition to all that, I use this blog to occasionally post rants about other subjects, or comedy clips I like, etc.  Each blog entry is tagged by one or more categories, so if you want to read just the "clutter" blogs, simply filter by "Clutter Combat".  If you find a blog with a "Clutter Combat" link at the bottom, click that link, and it should direct you to pages containing just the entries about clutter.

I don't put up a new blog every single day, but I try to post at least 4 entries a week.

Oh, and I shouldn't have to say this, but here it goes anyway: you came here out of your own choice.  I didn't force you to read my blog.  If you are offended by my views or choice of words, tough crap.

Being a Pack Rat, or "Hoarder"

In reading those aforementioned YouTube comments, it's clear that some people simply don't understand what being a pack rat, in the dangerously compulsive sense, is all about.  Sometimes conditions are simply not understood by those who don't have them.  So let me try to explain.

Being a hoarder is indeed a mental condition.  It's a mentality. Obviously, some have it worse than others.  I think we ALL have it to SOME extent.  You could grab anybody off the street right now, and have them go through their belongings at home, in storage, in their wallet, etc., and you'll definitely find some clutter.  Once the person stops, looks, and realizes it, they can find some stuff they've been keeping it for no good reason.  I've had people like this who've read my blog and got some helpful tips out of it.

Then you have the extreme cases like people in the video clips I showed last time, where there isn't even enough room for 2 people to walk.  These are the true "hoarder" types.  And as I've said before, the problem is NOT just needing a bigger place to live.  You could give these people a warehouse to live in, and they'd still find some way to fill it up.

Most people however don't seem to understand this extreme type.  Trying to tell a hoarder "Just get rid of this stuff" is like trying to tell somebody with clinical depression "Just snap out of it and smile", or telling a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder "Just calm down": that approach is NOT GOING TO WORK!  If it were that simple, we wouldn't have people with these conditions.  Nagging somebody with a mental condition achieves nothing.  More often than not, you just come off as myopic and end up pissing the person off.

Going back to that example, I don't have clinical depression, but I do know that it's a real documented thing.  For those of us who don't have depression or bipolar disorders, it seem irrational to us to see somebody who's depressed on their holidays or on their birthday.  But to say "Well that person's just stupid" is extremely short-sighted and ignorant.  Likewise, people who see these 60 second YouTube clips and dismiss hoarders as "stupid", are themselves being quite stupid. 

I've seen other people who assume that pack rats must have a lot of money in order to have bought so much stuff.  We don't, at least not necessarily.  We just don't get rid of as much stuff as the average person.  If anything, a big source of my clutter has been cheap stuff: stuff I bought at flea markets, stuff on sale, etc.

Also, this has nothing to do with being "materialistic".  There's a difference between valuing things, and accumulating things for accumulation sake.  I am unashamedly materialistic.  I always have been.  I always will be.  When I was 10 years old I bought a sign from a novelty shop that says "He who says money can't buy happiness, doesn't know where to shop."  There is nothing wrong with having physical stuff you enjoy.  BUT...to quote Don Aslett: if you keep to many things "for atmosphere", you won't be able to breathe!  In fact, my main reason for getting rid of clutter is so that I can ENJOY the other stuff I have.

Again, it's not as simple as "Just throw this away" or (even worse) "I'll just go in here and throw this stuff away for you."  Pack rats have to learn how to reassess the whole way they collect and keep things.  Trust me when I say that they -- or should I say, WE -- will use any excuse to rationalize the keeping of something.

Solutions

Having said all of that, trust me when I say I am NOT one of those whiners who tries to play the victim card.  Sad to say, I think there are some people with clinical depression or other problems don't really want a solution, because they like playing the injured party in order to get out of personal responsibilities, and get the attention.  That's not what this blog is about.  While I do think that extreme, compulsive pack rat behavior is a valid medical mental condition, I'm NOT here to say "I'm a pack rat.  So that's that.  I can't do anything about it."  On the contrary, I'm here to say "I'm a pack rat, and I AM doing something about that."

I do sincerely believe that it's a problem that can be overcome.  But as with any problem, 1) the individual has to WANT to sincerely get rid of the problem (not just get whiny friends off their back), and 2) some things work and some things don't, and 3) the problem is not going to disappear overnight.

Since I started this blog in July, my clutter is something I've been chipping away with, and with success.  I've determined that it's really a two-part process: getting rid of stuff, and learning not to accumulate so much future stuff.  Most of these TV shows like Oprah or Dr. Phil, when they do a special on hoarding, seem to only deal with the first one.  I wonder if their guest hoarders are back to their problem a year later.

And finally, I've gotten a lot of help from Don Aslett's book Clutter's Last Stand, and to a lesser extent his follow-up book For Packrats Only.  Highly recommended, even if I didn't like every part of them.

So, hopefully this blog entry clarifies a few issues for people.  Thanks for reading!