A Place for My Stuff

School's Out For Clutter, part 1

Here is something that I've mentioned on this blog in the past, and said that I'd get around to doing one-of-these-days.  Well, the day has come.

You see, one of the things I've kept that takes up a lot of room are my papers from school.  I went to 4 years of a private high school, and combined 5 years of both college and graduate school.  And I have saved every piece of paper from all of that.  And I do mean EVERY piece.  Anything I could take home with me, I saved.  Every corrected homework assignment, quiz, test, term paper, class notes...you name it.

And I know why I've kept it all.  It's because academia has been a major part of my life.  My LIFE was in all of those books.  The time and effort of my teenage years that I put into schoolwork was unmatched.  Not to mention all that tuition money.  These boxes upon boxes of papers were evidence of all that.  To throw them away was to throw away something I'd spent all to much for, in more ways than one.  Never mind the whole feat of simply having a complete academic collection.

But then you have to ask yourself: do I REALLY need to keep that quiz on Othello from my high school sophomore English class?  The one that I got a "C-" on?  If somebody secretly broke into my storage closet and stole it without leaving a trace behind, would I ever know it was gone?

I kept telling myself that "someday" I'd get around to looking through this and reading it.  But when the "someday" hasn't happened in 20 years, it may be safe to say that it simply won't happen.  This is especially true in the day and age when information on any subject is only a mouse click away.

So how do you get rid of the clutter, but keep the EVIDENCE?  Here's my answer:

1. Stack up all the boxes

2. Take photos:

3. Throw away the papers

4. Keep the photos

I did admittedly keep one of the boxes, namely all of my notes and what not from all my mathematics classes.  That was after all what I majored in.  But one box is certainly easier to deal with than seven.

I also had a lot of fun going through everything before I threw it away.  I'm glad I did go through it too, because there was a lot that needed to be shredded.  I'll post more oddities within the next couple of days.

Clutter Critters

"What the HELL is this?" she said, holding up the tiny rhino made of cheap plastic.  I tried to explain that we got that at...er, some place or another.  Summer a few years ago, maybe?  Well it's been sitting on my kitchen table since then.  I think I was going to give it to this friend of ours who has a song called "Heart of a Rhino".  Nah, this no reason to keep this inch-long thing.  Throw it out.

"And THIS one too," she said, as she showed me the equally small plastic frog that we got at some arcade or another.  "No, wait, let me take a photo for the blog first!" I said as she stood there with a sigh.

Finally we get to the real insect.  Yes, edible insects.  You can't see it in this photo, but that's a little scorpion in the lollipop.  Really, they do sell them:

Yes, I have eaten insect candy before.  My opinion on chocolate-covered grasshoppers?  Not bad, but I'd rather pay a fraction of the price for a Nestle's "Crunch" bar, which tastes almost the same.

I already had by grasshopper lollipop, but I never got around to eating this one.  And I've had it for several years.  Do I really have a need to hold on to a 3-year old critter lollipop?  The answer is no. Into the trash you go with the rest of the inanimate critters.  All small things, but clutter is clutter.

Oh look, hate mail!

 

A couple of weeks ago I got some hate mail.  I view hate mail as an overall good thing.  Why?  Because if you do some kind of a blog or show or podcast and you don't get ANY hate mail, it typically means that not enough people are paying attention.

What makes this all the more amusing is that it's from a friend.  I know this guy, and I know he's one of those friends who goes for the "harsh truth" approach to what he thinks is helping.  But, as we'll see, he's far from seeing the whole picture.  I didn't go soft on him, though.  Here's the original email:

Subject: i think your losing it

 

ok, Dio is dead, really breaks my heart, I wish I had met him at some point, he really influenced my life and my philosophy through his life's work, we need more like him.

as far as all that crap stuff you have that you cant deal with,.just throw it out, i own nearly nothing that doesnt have a purpose,

i say you pick up a sport that doesn't allow clutter, bike riding and boating are perfect, there is nothing on a ship that doesnt have a function, and on a bicycle even less

and ps , fuck gary coleman, once he was an adult, he was a loser

I'll take you fishing some day if you want to see a clutter less environment

Here was the response I sent him:

Gee, where to begin.

1) It's "YOU'RE losing it", not "YOUR losing it".

2) Yes, it sucks that Dio is gone.  I'm glad you and I got to see him at RCMH though.  But I don't see what any of that has to do with my "stuff" blog.  Surely, you don't think that I suddenly acquired this problem and started this blog in the wake of his death, do you?  I've been a packrat for years, and started the blog about a year ago.

3) To say "just throw it out" is as idiotic and ignorant as telling an alcoholic "just stop after one beer".  You'd have to be completely fucking stupid to think that it would be that simple for the person with the problem.  If it WAS that simple, then obviously, I wouldn't have the problem in the first place.  So you're obviously quite clueless as to the nature of the problem and compulsive disorders in general, never mind the progress I made.

4) Speaking of being clueless, you're also ridiculously wrong in assuming that taking up a sport would somehow not lead to any more clutter.  There are indeed bicyclers, to use one of your sporting examples, who are compulsive hoarders.  And not surprisingly, a lot of them acquire bicycle-related clutter, either bought on their own or as gifts, that they don't get rid of: extra helmets, locks, numerous squeezy bottles, stacks of bicycling magazines they don't read, extra socket wrenches, bicycle parts, riding gadgets...the list goes on.  Getting a new hobby would, if anything, ADD to my clutter.  (And again, you are a fucking moron if you think the answer is "Well just don't buy those extra things, then.")

5) Say what you want about Coleman; I still stand by every word I said on the blog.  He was still better than Jesus.

6) Thanks for the offer, but I have absolutely no desire to go fishing.  And I don't need to "see a clutterless environment".  That won't solve anything. I already have enough painful reminders of what one looks like.

Oh well, I least I got a new relevant blog entry out of it!

Shooting Through Clutter (part 2)

As the clutter conquest continues, I managed to find some old targets I shot.  They're not all that flattering, which is all the more reason to throw them out.

One is dated from the early 90s, which dates it to Boy Scout summer camp.  I used to go every year.  It only lasted a week or two, but it felt like a whole month.  I managed to earn the merit badges for rifle and for shotgun.

Fast forward to 2007 in Las Vegas.  I went to The Gun Store, a place that lets you pick and shoot a gun in their target room.  No license needed.  You also get to pick which poster you want to shoot at.  Damn, that was a fun time!  I shot a .44 Magnum, a la Dirty Harry.  I also got to fire an UZI.

The instructor took a look at my target when I was done, and said the same thing which I'm sure they say to everybody there, but it's still a good line: "Yeah, I'd say he's dead!"

Speaking of repeated phrases, I know people say this all the time, but it bears repeating: shooting a gun is nowhere near as effortless as it looks in the movies.  For one, these dang things are heavy!  

Rather than keep these posted rolled up and taking up space, I just took a couple of photos and got rid of the posters.  Keep the evidence, kill the clutter.

This is the point where I'd normally end on some kind of closing pun that has to do with firearms, but unfortunately it's quite late and I can't think of one.

Guns don't kill people. Clutter does. (part 1)

The theme for today's clutter is...firearms!

I stumbled across this unused bumper sticker that my dad got from somebody, then passed on to me when I was a kid.  (And before my fellow Bill of Rights supporters get angered by this, just calm down.  It's just a silly pun.)

Then I found this brochure:

 

Yes, "The Sport of the 90s"!  They don't mean that in a retro way.  They mean that in a "Hey, it's the cool new decade!" way.  That should give you some idea of how long I've been holding on to this piece of crap.  What more can I say?

I'll have some more to post tomorrow.

Where's That Confounded Bridge?

At the top of my hallway closet rested one of those big pieces of clutter that's hard to get rid of.  Yet I'm sure it has people asking "WHY?!?"

This is a bridge made of Popsicle sticks.

So, what's the story behind this ugly thing?  Allow me to explain.

When I started college, we had a week-long orientation program for freshman.  It was excellent.  We eased into this new world, and adulthood itself for that matter, with a bunch of different activities that were fun or informative or both.  This was an engineering college, and at some point we were put into different groups and were assigned an engineering task by our Orientation Leader: build a bridge of a specified length that would be able to withstand a given amount of weight in the middle, using only these Popsicle sticks and glue.  This was the bridge that my team and I built.

Why have I held on to it for so long?  I know exactly why.  It's because of what it represents for me.  I absolutely loved college.  I especially loved my first year there.  And this bridge represented the most fun time there.  It was a time before any of us had become disillusioned or bitter in college.  It was a time before people got stressed out over classes.  The women were still making eye contact and smiling.  We were all still having fun and making conversations. 

I don't know how universal this is at colleges, but at mine, students rarely made any friends after freshman year.  After freshman year, the students become entirely apathetic.  They go on to become curmudgeon engineers.  The students would often complain that there was nothing to do in our town, but when when the school would finally put on an event, they'd complain they had no time.  These were guys who ended up spending every weekend night sitting in their dorm rooms with the door closed, glued to the Nintendo.  Then they'd wonder why they couldn't find a girlfriend.

I always fought against that whole mindset.  I loved college.  I loved learning.  I had a passion for what I was majoring in.  And here was my fragile little bridge back to that happy world of ingenuity and creativity.

But do I need the actual 2-foot long, dust-collecting, closet-shelf hogging, impractical bridge to capture and remember all of that?  Or will some high-resolution digital photos of it work, and maybe just one or two pieces from the bridge, work just as well?  I think I can settle with the latter.  So long, bridge.  you are gone but never forgotten.

I managed to find a few other things along the way, including yet another damn floppy disc.  This had a PDF file on it.  I think I used this disc to transfer the huge file (or at least huge for its time) from work to my home computer which was still using a dial-up modem at the time.  Well, I already have local copies and burned CD-R copies of the same file, so there's no need for this one now.  Into the trash you go.

I also found a little sign I made upon the death of Jerry Falwell in 2007.  But I also have a saved .JPG file somewhere of this same picture that I printed out, so there's no need to keep the paper around. 

It sure shocked one of my co-workers at the time, though.  He wasn't an evangelical Christian, but tried to guilt-trip me for the whole idea of being glad that another human being was dead.  I stood my ground and made no apologies.  I'm still glad Falwell's dead. I'm also glad I got to throw more stuff away.

Clerical Clutter? No, nothing is sacred.

A clutter-related article somebody recently showed me [source].  Yes folks, even holy relics can become clutter.  Thank God I don't have that problem.  Yes, that was a pun.

Clerical clearout of odds sods

IF YOU like nothing better than a good house clearance sale, a rare opportunity has come up to have a rummage around the contents of a monastery and choose from items such as incense burners, church pews and benches, candelabras and antiques.

The contents of Mount Argus monastery in Harold’s Cross will be auctioned off by Herman & Wilkinson next week, with more than 600 lots of clerical clutter on offer. “It’s all saleable stuff with lots of odds and sods, bits and pieces,” says auctioneer David Herman. The items, which will be on view Sunday and Monday include statues, candle sticks, vestment cabinets and a large glass case containing a plaster scene of the Last Supper.“We also have a lovely set of the Stations embroidered in wool.” He has noticed an upsurge of interest in in religious items he reckons will be bought by people for their homes.

Among the antiques going under the hammer are an 18th century oil painting of Mary Magdalene, a grandfather clock made by Schriber Dublin, a William IV Pembroke table and a substantial Victorian sideboard. There is also an assortment of clocks dating from Victorian times to the 1930s.

The monastery, built in 1863, has been vacated and the remaining community of 18 Passionist priests and brothers has moved to a purpose-built monastery on the grounds. Father Pat Sheridan says while they will miss living in a monastery, the running costs were “astronomical”. Not that he thinks they’re going to make a killing at the auction. “The purpose of the sale is basically to empty out the building. Nothing at the auction is considered extremely valuable,” he says.

The fate of the old monastery depends on whether developer Twinlite gets planning permission for the site. In January an Bord Pleanála refused permission to build over 200 apartments on the site which would have involved demolishing part of the monastery and refurbishing the remainder.

David Herman says one of the more unusual items in the sale is a beautifully crafted 9ft 6in grandfather clock made by a brother from Mount Argus in the 1880s. “It’s a fine thing but it’s so big the market may be limited.”

There are also practical items including bentwood chairs, armchairs, church benches, wardrobes, chests, stainless steel work tables and hospital beds.

Like a Rainbow in the Dark

Time for a quick comedy break.

The "Fail" internet meme is a funny little phenomenon.  Some mistakes are just so dumb or incredible, that the only reply is to simply point and say "Fail!"  I could spend hours surfing on Failblog.com

Here's a personal contribution from me.  I saw this on a club's website, and knew I just had to whip open good ol' Microsoft Paint and whip up a proper "Fail" pic:

 

"Hi, I'm Bill" (part 4)

As promised, here's part 4 (go click here if you haven't even seen part 1) of my look at Clutterers Anonymous, or CLA for short.  Sorry if the details of this aren't "juicy" enough for you, but hey, it was what it was.

Despite some difficulty I managed to find the place and show up right on time.  Aside from the two women who seemed to be administering things, I was the first one there.  There ended up being about 8 or 9 of us in total.

With the exception of me, everybody else at the meeting appeared to be women in their 50s or 60s.  I still have no idea what to make of this, but I sure don't pass it off as coincidence.  Maybe there's something about women being more inclined to seek out help via a support group, but I'm still curious about the age similarities.  If anybody has some hypotheses, let me know.

We met in a small room of a public building with a huge table, and a long line of file cabinets along the wall.  On top of the file cabinets was -- guess what?  Tons of clutter.  I had to wonder if this was part of the meeting.  Was this people's stuff they brought in?  Was it for an exercise we'd be doing?  Nope.  It was just there, and didn't belong to anybody in particular.  Something about that seemed tragically ironic for a CLA meeting.  But that wasn't the biggest irony.

What was the biggest irony, you may be wondering?  The fact that the first thing they did was give me a stack of pamphlets.  Friggin' pamphlets!  8 of 'em!  Yeah, yeah, I realize that they need some way of getting their information across, but come on.  "Hi, welcome to Clutterers Anonymous.  Here's a handful of paper for you to take home!"

The meetings start with some individual getting to speak.  Being new to this, I volunteered myself, and they accepted.  So I introduced myself, and gave a brief rundown of where I am: had a packrat problem for a long time, but I've been getting myself out of it, thanks mainly to a book and also starting a blog, but I still have some ways to go, blah blah blah.

So the meeting then kicked in with the Serenity Prayer.  Go figure.  So much for not being a religious organization.  I went along with it.  Whatever.  In all seriousness though, I think the opening line of "...accept the things I cannot change" says it all.  AA is said to drill in the idea that you are an alcoholic and that there is no cure for it.  Maybe something similar is going on here.  Something I'll think more about later.  We also took turns reading the 12 steps.

We got to pick a pamphlet to take turns reading part of.  The choices?

1. CLA: A Brief Guide
2. Recovery from Cluttering: The 12 Steps of Clutterers Anonymous
3. Decluttering Resentment, Steps 4-10
4. Declutter Your Mind
5. Finding Your Life Purpose
6. Home: Our Sacred Place
7. Spiritual Timing
8. Welcome

I chose #6, because it seemed like the most practical one to read.  So we read it.  Some pretty good lines, I must admit.  As I've said before here (but Don Aslett said better), a lot of this comes down to living the home we want to live in.  The problem is not being "too materialistic" though; it's about getting rid of that 80% of your stuff you can do without so that you can find and enjoy the 20% that really adds to your life.

We went on to give small talks.  All but one of the attendees ended up talking.  In all honesty, I am a good listener.  Sure, nobody wants to really hear another person's problems, but we were all there to tell everybody else our own problems, so it was a give-and-take situation.  Some statements were short, some long.  Some had laughter.  One woman cried as she tried to express just how overwhelmed and helpless she felt.  One woman went off on a tangent and started talking about some of the stupidest, most irrelevant stuff before finally coming back.  But some of them had anecdotes I could really relate to, and when I was talking I saw the nodding heads that let me know that I was sharing stuff they could relate too as well.  I did admittedly hear some truly tragic stories that traced back to being a junk hoarder.

Near the end, we got to mention accomplishments, give tips, and set personal goals for next week.  The goals could be "something as simple as sewing on a button!"  But as one lady I talked to after the meeting said (and I agreed), sewing a button is not making a hell of a lot of progress.  Still, I mentioned some of the recent things I did, like how I took the photo of me with my school papers.  Another woman talked about how she got a folder and organized a lot of her papers and bills.  I had a pretty good suspicion of who was going to significantly conquer their cluttering problem, and who was still going to be stuck in these meetings a year from now, with no progress.

When it was my turn to mention tips, I mentioned the book, Clutter's Last Stand.  I praised it.  It helped me a lot.  I highly recommended it.  A lot of the ladies had problems with clothing clutter, and I mentioned how there was an entire chapter on clothing.  A bunch of them excitedly copied down the name of the book and the author.

Seemed like I did a good thing, right?  Well the coordinator didn't think so.  After the meeting, she pulled me aside to explain, in as nicely a way as possible, that what I did was wrong.  I wasn't supposed to mention specific sources or authors like that.  And if some of the other regulars had been there that week, she said they would have flipped out and shut me up immediately.  "Oh," I said, trying to understand, "Is that because it's a solicitation".  No, it's because it goes against rule something or other of CLA.  I'm still not sure what it was.

And that's what I found the most silly about CLA.  Here I was, offering a practical source of help to people who needed it, and they appreciated it.  So...what was the problem?  They want to you stick to the 12-step program.  Apparently, dogma is more important than results.

All in all, I am glad that I went.  The attendees were still pretty open and supportive.  I may go again.  If anything, just to lend some practical help to other people who show up there.  Maybe I'll sell stacks of the book to people after the meeting, when they can't bust me. 

The 12 Steps of Clutterers Anoymous (part 3)

Here's part 3 of a 4-part blog entry.  Go back and read part 1 if you haven't yet.

Before getting to the actual 12 Steps of Clutterers Anonymous (CLA), I want to point out some particular things they additionally mention on their website:

• "The only requirement for membership is a desire to eliminate clutter."
• "We each choose how to define 'Higher Power'. All clutterers, whether they are religious or not, believers, atheists, or agnostics, are welcome at CLA."

With these in mind, let's look at the 12 Steps, as worded on their website:

1. We admitted we were powerless over clutter -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for the knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 

Why these are all worded in past tense, I'm not exactly sure.  But let's take a deeper look:

 

1. We admitted we were powerless over clutter -- that our lives had become unmanageable.

OK, first step is to admit that you have a problem.  That's a smart first move.  Admit you have a problem.  Then you can work on being not so powerless against it, right?  Well, not quite.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

And here's where we get to one of the distinguishing 12-step features: the 'higher power'.  But wait a minute, didn't they say that atheists and others are welcomed?  Yes, and as it also said, individuals get to choose how they define "higher power".  It doesn't have to be a deity, or anything metaphysical. They add the qualifier here at the end of #3, "...as we understand God".  OK, I can understand that.  The word "atheism" after all means nothing more than "no belief in deity".  It seems to me though that they should have just worded this step "...to the care of your higher power, as you understand your higher power."  I mean after all, CLA is not a religious organization, right?

The hardcore 12-steppers will be quick to tell you "Oh your higher power doesn't have to be 'God'.  I [claim to] know some atheists in AA whose higher power is a rock, or a tree in their yard." Um, OK.  Though I'm still not sure how this placebo for a deity would work.  How exactly would you "turn your will over to" an oak tree, let alone turn your life over?

Not that this all terribly matters at CLA though, since again, "The only requirement for membership is a desire to eliminate clutter."  You can attend the meetings without doing the 12 Steps.  That's good.  But how can you both maintain a personal desire, and "turn your will" over to some other entity?  Seems silly to me.  Then again, perhaps I'm using this blog as my "higher power", since I have to "answer" to it in the sense that I have to keep making posts.  But ultimately, it's still ME driving everything.  Even the book I keep raving about (Clutter's Last Stand by Don Aslett), which has helped me tremendously, was not taken as infallible dogma.

My biggest problem with the 12-step approach is that it's based on the idea that you should be hopeless and surrender your will to an external entity.  It would seem to me that if you want control over your own life again, that you need to learn how to TAKE control and EXERT your will, not surrender.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

I'm not sure how a "moral inventory" comes into play here, at least for me personally.  Morals are more about how we treat other people.  I can see how this applies to a junkie who stole money from a friend.  Or even a packrat who, say, turned away a friend who desperately needed a place to stay for the night, because the packrat was too embarrassed to show his or her living room to any other living person.  If this is just about trying to find some of the underlying problems ("the exact nature of our wrongs"), then that makes sense.  For example, packrats who keep buying clothing they don't need, just because they get a cheap thrill from shopping.  But that doesn't strike me as a "moral" issue.   Maybe I'm just being nitpicky on the wording.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Get rid of the general underlying behavioral problems, as well as the specific problems.  OK, I get that.  Though again, this is just asking your "higher power" to do so, which again they conveniently just revert back to calling "God"...even though monotheism isn't a requirement to join.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

I can understand apologizing if the people are still in your life.  But I've heard of alcoholics who try finding people they haven't talked to in 20 years, just to apologize.  I'm not going to track down and call up every person who's ever had to step over clutter in my home!  I wonder how many 12-steppers get stuck on this step and never really do anything about their problem.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

In other words, keep on the ball.  Good advice!  But then we take a weird turn:

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for the knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

More of the "higher power" BS. But at least they finally added back the disclaimer of higher power definition, "...as we understand God".  The "awakening" here also implies that you suddenly recognize the problem and dump it.  That's often not the easiest way of getting rid of an addiction.  Sometimes you just have to ween yourself off.  Or in the case of clutter, clean it one room corner at a time.  I don't see there being one single "spiritual awakening" though.  I've certainly had moments of insight and inspiration in my de-cluttering process, but nothing that changed me or my home overnight.

Have any packrats cured their problems with the 12 Steps before?  Maybe.  But I have to wonder how many of them truly have.  I sincerely wonder how many have been going to these CLA meetings for over a year, and still haven't really conquered their problem, if not gotten worse.  That was one of the things going through my mind when I attended a CLA meeting.  More on that in the next blog entry.