Mine!

I need to reorganize.

Specifically, reorganize my living space. You see, I may as well just come right out and admit it — I’m a packrat. I hate to throw anything out just in case I might want it later, so over the years I’ve amassed a fair amount of old junk. I’ve got handouts from high school, class notes from university, exams, completed projects, and even scraps of paper with scribbles on them. I found my 1992 tax return. I’ve got mail piled up on top of the fridge. I’ve got parts for my old Atari 8-bit which hasn’t worked for 10 years, manuals for every game I’ve ever bought, bits of electronics scavenged from old equipment, and enough 5.25″ floppies to tile the walls. Do they even make them anymore?

Eventually though, all this stuff starts to take up a fair bit of space. It never really bothered me before. If I’ve got the space, why not, for all I know I really *will* need something in there one day. In the back of my mind though, I knew it still wasn’t ‘normal.’ The landlord and previous building manager had expressed concern, my mother wondered what I was eventually going to do with them, and I was hesitant to let people even see my apartment lest they think it too weird or creepy. There are enough other reasons for them to think that without giving them more. :-P

So, it *has* begun to bother me, more and more. Maybe I’m just caving in to peer pressure, but I worry that my collected stuff is some symptom of emotional immaturity, or that I’m stuck in the past, or they really are just a nuisance that drives people away, or…well, a lot of things. I sat down and looked through a few of the older papers, and when I found one that got rather mediocre marks, I got angry. Genuinely angry, even more so than when I first got it back since at the time I was just happy it was over and done with. Angry first at the unknown marker who dared to disparage my work so casually, and then at myself, for not having been good enough to have done better in the first place.

But it’s irrelevant. This is all old stuff that nobody cares about on topics I’ll never discuss again from people I barely knew. There’s no reason to get worked up over it, but as long as it’s here I will. So, out it goes, and hopefully I’ll be better off for it.

I have the same problem at the office too, and that’s sort of what prompted this in the first place. I’m moving to a different office and even though it’s just around the corner, I was amazed by just how much crap I’d collected in such a small space. Of course there I’m dealing with trade secrets and internal documentation and such so I’d better be a bit more careful about what I throw away…