A Place for My Stuff

Boston Sunday Globe

"She couldn't just throw away the old newspapers; she had to examine them for important information. It would take years to go through all of them, so she avoided the task and went through none of them."

- from the Steketee & Frost book, Stuff

Since I brought up Boston in my last blog post, I thought I'd take a minute to mention the Boston Sunday Globe.  The Boston Globe is one of the major newspapers here in New England.  Their Sunday edition is, like many Sunday papers I suppose, HUGE.  Really, the Boston Sunday Globe is the size of an old VCR.  If you find a hoarder in New England, I would be willing to bet that in at least 90% of the case, you'll find one or more stacks of old Boston Sunday Globes in the home.  That makes for a tall pile.

Fortunately, I've never had this problem myself.  My wife buys it every now and then for the coupons insert, but we're quick about recycling the rest as soon as possible.  But the newspaper seems to be a very commonly hoarded item.  The word comes up over 50 times in the Stuff book.

What makes people save stacks and stacks of newspapers?  I think the quote at the top of this post says it all.  I'm not going to bother to elaborate on it.  At least not this time.

Note to Tourists Visiting Boston

Over the years, there have been many on-line articles and mass-forwarded emails with advice about visiting Boston, or New England in general.  I may have even mentioned some before.  But here are some of my own.

1) Please don't ask us to speak the phrase "I park my car in Harvard Yard", like we're some speech vending machine that was made for your amusement.  Besides, the phrase doesn't make any sense.  You can't get your car through the campus gates into that grassy part known as Harvard Yard, and even if you could, your car would get towed.

2) For that matter, surprisingly few people in Boston itself seem to have a Boston accent.  If you travel just outside of the city to other towns like Revere, well that's another story.  If you're still dying to hear some examples of really thick Boston accents, watch any of the local TV commercials for furniture stores and car dealerships.

3) If you come looking for the Cheers bar (upon which we'll immediately know you're a tourist), you'll be disappointed when you find out that the inside doesn't look anything like the TV show.

4) It is in your best interest if you don't wear a New York Yankees logo.  This is most especially true in South Boston.  I'm not a sports fan, nor have I ever been a sports fan, and I don't have any particular loyalty to the Boston Red Sox nor any hatred for New York things.  However, I know the reality of the situation.  Likewise, I wouldn't wear a Red Sox shirt in Brooklyn.

5) Like all metropolitan areas, we have vocabulary words that are different from ones used in other parts of the country.  I'm not one of those myopic pricks who claims that my region's words are the "right" ones and everybody else uses the "wrong" ones.  However, the difference is there.  Here is just a small sample.

• Town names.  This isn't really a vocabulary thing, but it deserves mention here. Many town names are not pronounced the way you'd expect them to be pronounced.  But don't try to correct the people who live there, claiming that you know the "correct" way to pronounce their town name, and that all of the residents have it wrong.  You will not win.  Here are some examples:
  
  • Gloucester = "GLAW - stir" (not "Glou - chester")
  • Worcester = "WIST - err" (not "Wore - chester")
  • Leominster = "Lemon - stir" (not "LEO - minster")
  • Dedham = "DEDD - um" (not "dead ham")
  • Framingham = "FRAY - ming - ham" (not "framing - um")
  • Peabody = 'pee - budd - ee" (no real stress on any syllable, but certainly not "PEE - bawdy" as in the cartoon dog "Mr. Peabody")
  • Haverhill = "HAYVE - rill" (not "hay - ver - hill")
  • Provincetown = Always verbally abbreviated as "P-Town"
  • Cape Cod = Referred to as "The Cape"

Of course, ending "err" sounds may be substituted with "ahh".

• The 'T'.  This is the subway.  Nobody calls it "the subway".  You may see buses and above-ground trans with the "T" logo, but these are never called "The T".  When you're taking The T, it means taking the subway, period.  The bus is called the bus.  The above-ground train is called the Commuter Rail.  The good news though is that the T is much, much easier to understand than the New York subway.
• Tonic.  You don't see this too often these days as it's more of an older generational thing, as is "Dungarees" (jeans).  But tonic means a soft drink, not necessarily tonic water.  If you see "tonic" on a restaurant menu, then they mean soft drinks, a.k.a. "soda" or "pop".  You can probably still find a waitress who says "For tonics, we got Pepsi, gingah-rale, ah-range, and root be-ah."
• Wicked.  You'll hear this used not as an adjective meaning "evil", but rather as an adverb meaning "very".  For example, "Wow, this tonic is wicked flat!"
• Jimmies.  These are black frosting shavings you put on ice cream, otherwise known as "sprinkles".
• Bubbler.  This is a drinking fountain.  I found out that it's actually a brand name, similar to how many people use the brand name "Kleenex" to refer to any tissue.
• Subs.  These are those sandwiches known by many other names in different parts of the country: hoagies, grinders, po' boys, and so on.  I don't think this is solely a New England thing, but it's worth knowing.
• The Packie.  The liquor store.  I guess it's short for "package store".  What the connection is, I don't really know.
• Frappe.  Pronounced "Frap", one syllable.  This is basically a milkshake.  And we've been saying it for several generations before McDonald's came out with the "Frapp - PAY".

6) My advice to people who want to visit Salem: come visit any time of the year EXCEPT October.  Yes, I know everybody wants to visit Salem for Halloween, but that's just the problem: EVERYBODY wants to visit then.  If you come at any other time of the year, most of the tourist attractions are still there, the massive crowds are gone, and you'll actually find parking.  The same thing goes for Plymouth and November.

7) Massachusetts and Connecticut still have some ridiculous Blue Laws, presumably left over from the times of the Puritans.  For example, in Massachusetts, you can't buy alcohol in a convenience store, and alcohol stores are closed on Sundays.  You also can't buy fireworks in Massachusetts.  However, New Hampshire (a big vacation state for Massachusetts people, and a state with NO sales tax) is another story.  Plan ahead.

I could probably write a whole book on this topic, but that's enough for now.

Stopping Impulse Buying

"Impulse buying" and compulsive shopping is something that shows up rather often among hoarders.  It's not universal, but it shows up frequently enough to talk about it here.  A lot of my own clutter was partially due to simply having a way higher accumulation rate than a disposal rate.  For example, going on used book or used DVD shopping sprees way more often than getting rid of things.  It took me some time to get back into the balance of things, and being a little more critical of buying anything remotely appealing that I'd pick up in a store.

MSN.com posted an article on 9 ways to stop impulse buying.  You can go click on the link to read the original article.  Here are the 9 items they list, but with my own comments on each of them:

1. Follow the time rule.

This is a helpful rule, and it shows up in the "Stuff" book.  Basically if you find something you like, the idea is to wait a little while before buying it.  The "little while" could be anything from half an hour to a month.  Chances are the initial appeal of getting the item will wear off, maybe even to the point where you'll forget all about it because it wasn't worth remembering.
 
2. Don't shop when upset.

I'd expand this concept to "Buy the item because you actually want it, in and of itself. Let need and honest desire for the item, and not some temporary emotion, drive the reason for buying."  And I HATE the new-agey sounding sentiment of the following statement (especially in the way some other people choose to word it) but it's true: sometimes people will buy an item to fill some emotional need at the time, and/or for the feeling they get from making the purchase, rather than because of the item itself. I know this because I've caught myself doing it with different things over the years.  I'd like to think of myself as a creative, intelligent person who's always interested in learning new things as well as learning as much as possible about the 3 or 4 things I'm the most interested in.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with buying stuff for that.  It sure beats spending 6 hours a day playing video games.

The problem, however, was that I ended up buying some things in a desperate attempt to get a new mind challenge or new outlet of creativity, only to not carry through with it.  I remember some time ago buying a caligraphy set.  Learning caligraphy seemed like one of those fun and creative things I'd like to do.  But what happened is the book just collected dust while I tried working on 20 other things.  I even have a number of different musical instruments sitting in my room getting dusty, for the same reason: the thrill of having something new and different and potentially creative ended up being the real motivation for buying it.  Over all, I still don't regret buying them.  But now I'm certainly a little more careful before I buy new things, and asking the magical quesiton: "Do I already have 5 really similar things just like this at home?"
 
4. Don't shop with the wrong people.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with this personally.  Maybe it's because most of my friends are misers.  But I understand why it's on the list.
 
5. Give yourself a splurge budget.

One way to do this is to carry cash on you, and use only the case to make the purchases for a given week or month.  Sounds simple, but it's amazing how fewer and fewer people bother to carry cash these days.

6. Buy only things you can return.

This rule sounds nice, but I doubt how effective it is.  It's more of a pain in the ass to buy an item and return it, than to not buy it in the first place.  And speaking as somebody who has been known to buy harmonicas as well as sheet music, I know that there are some items you simply can't return for legal reasons.

7. Remember to not be fooled by sales.

This one is self-explanatory.  But again, the bargain books, music, and movies is what used to always get me.

8. Keep a list of things you really want or need.

This is probably more effective when it comes to things like grocery shopping.  Most of the time when people go shopping, it's not for anything in particular, so there's no list.  Of course, shopping for the sake of "poking around" is someting that deserves its own place on this list!

9. Don't give yourself access to your money.

To me, this seems really extreme.  But maybe for some people this is what it takes: leaving your credit cards at home or locked in the car, for example.  I sure as hell recommend it for people visiting a casino for the first time, but that's another topic.

Organizing the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs

Over the last month and a half, I've been furiously working on a new book.  No, it's not about "stuff".  But it does have something to do with my two biggest passions in life: music and mathematics.  I've set the end of the month as a deadline for myself to complete it.  That's all I'm going to say about it for now. 

As far as clutter goes, one of my more recent areas of attack were by sticks of burned data CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.  I have these going back at least a dozen years. These days, the CD-R seems to be on its way out.  It's not just audio CDs giving away to mp3 players, but there are lots of other faster, cheaper and sometimes safer ways to store data these days: the exponentially cheaper hard drives and even thumb drives of today, data clouds, bigger webspace, faster internet speeds, etc.  I even read that a 128gb SD card in the works.  Granted, a dual layer DVD-R can store 12 times the amount of data on a standard CD-R, and a Blu-Ray data disc can store eaven more than that.  But I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years, the CD-ROM drive goes the way of the floppy drive.

Regardless, I've still got 10 years worth of data on burned discs, not all of which is doubly backed up on some other source.  Having a 1TB hard drive in the year 2001 was unheard of.  So those files had to go somewhere.  I had a few music mix CDs I burned, too.  It was time to go through these home-made discs and decide which ones to keep, which ones to throw out, and which ones to just extract a thing or two before throwing them out.  Then out of the ones to keep, it was a matter of organizing them.

To help with this, I bought an Atlantic Parade disc holder from K-mart.

It holds 96 discs total in 4 slide-out books, which you can also label in the front.  Obviously this means getting rid of the cases and insert booklets, but since I didn't really have any booklets on my data discs (I typically just wrote the description on the discs themselves with a marker) or anything fancy in the cases, this was fine.  The whole thing is about 7 inches wide.

I've talked before about storing discs in different sorts of holders in order to save space.  I still keep most of my movies in bigger 3-ring binders.  But this is another product I'd recommend if you're not concerned with keeping cases or booklets.