A Place for my Stuff

I am in the midst of a slow attempt to streamline my enormous collection of stuff (or, if one were using more technical terms, "crap") that I have accumulated over the years.

As most anyone who knows me can attest, my ability to acquire and accrete large amounts of stuff - much of which I never actually use - is quite impressive. I am very much the proverbial pack rat. Media is usually my worst offense (DVDs, books, comic books, music, you name it), though it is certainly not the only one (I seem to have developed a horrible addiction to t-shirts lately - curse you Threadless and your ironic-yet-lighthearted collection of t-shirts for both me and The Boy or both!).

I am reminded (as should be obvious to anyone who recognizes the source of the post title) of George Carlin's excellent comedy routine on the matter of "stuff" and the need to find a place for your stuff, which leads to the need to buy a bigger house to hold your stuff, which in turn leads to going out and getting more stuff...

As is probably obvious by now, I am currently doing my damndest to avoid cleaning my office.

That all being said, I seem to have had at least a minor mental breakthrough of late that is helping me get rid of my stuff. So in my attempt to avoid office cleaning for yet another weekend, I thought I would share it with all of you, which is to say me and possibly my wife as the primary readers of my blog, since the more expedient route of walking upstairs and telling her my thoughts on this matter rather than writing them up would take far too little time to be helpful in my procrastination.

The new frame of mind that I am trying to put myself in as I look at all my crap is, in a nutshell: "When in the hell are you actually going to use this again? No, really - give me a specific instance in which you will actually use this, not some hypothetical situation in which aliens arrive and your only possible hope to survive is by digging out and watching the 'Predator' video tape that you haven't watched since 1997 and which you now own in a far superior DVD format, so any clues that might be helpful in an alien invasion would be better supplemented by the 'How to survive an alien invasion' extra on the disc anyway!"

It is amazing how much this frame of mind helps, actually (the "When in the hell..." part, not so much the alien invasion part). It allowed me to look at my collection of videotapes and decide to just donate them to charity. I'm not going to watch them - I haven't even hooked up a single one of the three VCRs I've accumulated over the years since we moved - and even if I actually wanted to watch one of the few movies I own on tape, I'm probably better off just getting the DVD (if I don't already own it) since it takes up less space and is more durable. Similarly, with my t-shirts - I have a nice stack of t-shirts that I have great emotional attachment to, but are becoming questionable to wear even just as "around the house" shirts. So instead, I'm seriously thinking about trying to get them turned into a quilt - should be comfy. At the rate I'm going, I'll probably have 9 or 10 quilts before the year is out.

Now when the hell am I going to use all those quilts?

Sadly, this mindset has absolutely no effect on my purchasing of more items. And it doesn't always work - see the comic collection that has overflowed the closet and shows no signs of stopping. But at least I'm starting to get rid of some of the pile. And now have my t-shirts organized into nice color-coordinated piles in my closet. It's a start.

Excellent. I seem to have wasted enough time on this entry that it is now time for lunch!

(I have a forthcoming blog posting that I've been thinking about that is a sort of meta-post about my internal resistance to blogging, with an intent of actually setting some direction for future blog postings and a purpose to this blog. But I seem to be encountering some difficulty in actually writing it up, so it's not ready to post yet. Ah, irony.)