Packrat gene
Oct. 2nd, 2004 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_tectonicI have a hard time throwing stuff out.
There are several factors that contribute to this failing. The first is that I am convinced that there's a gene that codes for packrat behavior. My father hoards food (he's a VERY good mormon, and has an entire garage filled with stored food). His father hoarded, I kid you not, construction materials. We're talking lumber and roofing materials here. I manage to mostly channel my instincts into hoarding information, which is at least a lot more compact.
Then there's the issue of waste. I feel really guilty throwing out anything that's in working order, even if it's totally useless, because I know that our society is terribly wasteful and that we put far too much stuff into landfills and so on. This leads to things like keeping the stupid AOL tins because I might use them in a craft project someday or something. Likewise, there's a part of me that knows it's just wrong to throw out edible food, because, y'know, there's starving people out there.
But the worst contributor is the fact that objects hold memories. I have a lot of stuff that reminds me of people or events or times in my life, and I worry that if I got rid of it, those memories would never be prompted to rise to the surface. I don't have a great memory for details. Abstract patterns, general concepts -- no problem, but details... often the details fade. Except when the memory gets triggered by something.
Or, as Kung Fu Monkey puts it, I have chi invested in my belongings. My ice cream maker broke several months back. Now, there is no use whatsoever for a broken ice cream maker. BUT. This one had a story.
When I was in second grade or so, I went out East with my mother to visit my grandparents in Connecticut. While we were out there, my Mom and Harriet (my grandmother) and I took a trip to Boston to visit some museums. (My mom was a museum curator for most of her career; I think it was a work-related trip.) I know we went to the museum at Harvard that has all the glass flowers, along with a bunch of gems and minerals. I remember a gigantic selenite cluster in particular.
Anyway, while we were walking around Cambridge, I walked off a loading dock. It wasn't an accident, it was one of those things that little kids will do. Whee, gravity! I noticed a little bit of a stinging on the backs of my legs (I was wearing shorts) afterwards, but didn't think much of it.
Until my grandmother said "Ooo, that looks like it hurts."
And I looked.
There are moments when you really, really wish that you could rewind time and take back the last five seconds. Because it didn't actually hurt until I looked back and realized that I had basically scraped all the skin off the backs of my thighs. At which point it began to hurt. A LOT.
But we were on foot, in Cambridge, and it wasn't bleeding or anything, and my Mom needed to do the stuff we were there to do, so I put up with it and spent time standing in front of fans and stuff like that.
And for being very brave, I got an ice cream maker as a reward.
So, when this Terribly Meaningful Object finally broke, it took me some time to divest it of its stored chi and bring myself to throw it away.
I'm working on not being so damn sentimental, but it's hard.
Still, today I threw out the damn AOL tins!
Into the recycling bin.
There are several factors that contribute to this failing. The first is that I am convinced that there's a gene that codes for packrat behavior. My father hoards food (he's a VERY good mormon, and has an entire garage filled with stored food). His father hoarded, I kid you not, construction materials. We're talking lumber and roofing materials here. I manage to mostly channel my instincts into hoarding information, which is at least a lot more compact.
Then there's the issue of waste. I feel really guilty throwing out anything that's in working order, even if it's totally useless, because I know that our society is terribly wasteful and that we put far too much stuff into landfills and so on. This leads to things like keeping the stupid AOL tins because I might use them in a craft project someday or something. Likewise, there's a part of me that knows it's just wrong to throw out edible food, because, y'know, there's starving people out there.
But the worst contributor is the fact that objects hold memories. I have a lot of stuff that reminds me of people or events or times in my life, and I worry that if I got rid of it, those memories would never be prompted to rise to the surface. I don't have a great memory for details. Abstract patterns, general concepts -- no problem, but details... often the details fade. Except when the memory gets triggered by something.
Or, as Kung Fu Monkey puts it, I have chi invested in my belongings. My ice cream maker broke several months back. Now, there is no use whatsoever for a broken ice cream maker. BUT. This one had a story.
When I was in second grade or so, I went out East with my mother to visit my grandparents in Connecticut. While we were out there, my Mom and Harriet (my grandmother) and I took a trip to Boston to visit some museums. (My mom was a museum curator for most of her career; I think it was a work-related trip.) I know we went to the museum at Harvard that has all the glass flowers, along with a bunch of gems and minerals. I remember a gigantic selenite cluster in particular.
Anyway, while we were walking around Cambridge, I walked off a loading dock. It wasn't an accident, it was one of those things that little kids will do. Whee, gravity! I noticed a little bit of a stinging on the backs of my legs (I was wearing shorts) afterwards, but didn't think much of it.
Until my grandmother said "Ooo, that looks like it hurts."
And I looked.
There are moments when you really, really wish that you could rewind time and take back the last five seconds. Because it didn't actually hurt until I looked back and realized that I had basically scraped all the skin off the backs of my thighs. At which point it began to hurt. A LOT.
But we were on foot, in Cambridge, and it wasn't bleeding or anything, and my Mom needed to do the stuff we were there to do, so I put up with it and spent time standing in front of fans and stuff like that.
And for being very brave, I got an ice cream maker as a reward.
So, when this Terribly Meaningful Object finally broke, it took me some time to divest it of its stored chi and bring myself to throw it away.
I'm working on not being so damn sentimental, but it's hard.
Still, today I threw out the damn AOL tins!
Into the recycling bin.
eBay
Date: 2004-10-02 04:46 pm (UTC)Re: eBay
Date: 2004-10-03 07:00 am (UTC)People collect the weirdest stuff.
(It is true that eBay can be a godsend for stuff you no longer want. Though there's something somehow depressing about having wretched Xmas gifts that you just want to get rid of be rejected by millions of people.)
Re: eBay
Date: 2004-10-04 11:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-02 09:34 pm (UTC)Yeah, disentangling oneself from the stuff that's gotten embedded in there is a tricky business. But in my experience, the things can often be extricated while leaving the patterns wrapped around them behind... in place of the icecreammaker you can write down the story of the icecreammaker, in all the detail you can remember, with a picture of the icrecreammaker and perhaps of your grandmother and some of your favorite icecream recipes (supposing you actually ever made ice cream with it, which you may or may not have)... all of which takes up less space, and makes you feel less silly than having a broken icecreammaker around, in nothing like the way that having a marked grave is more convenient than carrying around a decaying corpse.
This is a brilliant idea . . .
Date: 2004-10-03 11:49 am (UTC)You no longer have any excuse to hoard stuff. Digitize it, and set it free.
--G
Re: This is a brilliant idea . . .
Date: 2004-10-04 11:12 am (UTC)You look familiar, but I'm having trouble placing you...
Re: This is a brilliant idea . . .
Date: 2004-10-04 11:19 am (UTC)--G
no subject
Date: 2004-10-04 11:11 am (UTC)The big obstacle is just the amount of work involved.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-03 12:04 am (UTC)My grandfather in Indiana can fix anything, and so when stuff breaks he 1)buys the replacement, because it needs to work NOW, and 2)puts the broken one in the basement, because he can fix it later. This led to a huge basement (which already housed a pool table and full shopsmith tool set) becoming completely clogged with crap over the decades. When my grandfather remarried after my grandmother died, his new wife went through the basement and threw out large amounts of stuff- no less than 6 broken a/c units, broken chairs (easy to fix- just no time!), old tools, toys, and bits and pieces of stuff we couldn't recognize but would doubtless be useful at some point. When I was young my grandmother made regular forays into the basement so we could continue to play pool on occasion (though with sawed-off cues because the piles of stuff along the walls were too high and deep) but after my folks got a pool table of their own even that was given up. My grandfather keeps his mail and papers stacked on top of the kitchen table (you've got to have an extra full-sized table for this type of thing, right?) and these days my dad goes in periodically to clear it when my grandpa's not around, trying to prevent him from becoming one of those man dies under collapsing paper pile type of statistics. My dad just threw out the rest of his college textbooks last year, after years of harrassment from my mother, who generally sneaks this sort of thing out piecemeal when she can.
I've got two generations of dilution between me and the depression-era Kentucky hill-folk frugality, but I've definitely got tendancies. I have to actively think about throwing things away, since my default is to find some nice place out of the way to store things because I might have a use for them at some point, right?
Uboat's grandparents still have several hundred pounds of sugar in the attic (post WW2 hoarding) in addition to the regular grandparent boxes of stuff. His grandfather kept every cancelled check he ever wrote, stuff his grandmother is just now throwing out. His mom is notorious about keeping items of sentimental value- I was helping them clean out storage units in Boston (created after moving from a house in Philly to a condo in the Back Bay) and was forbidden to throw out boxes containing damaged, filthy children's clothes and toys. Ditto broken furniture. Apparently she managed to send her maternity clothes to goodwill only a few years after hitting menopause. Uboat alternately hoards and violently purges. He goes through periods where he insists that we must throw out a volume equal to the new stuff we bring in- hopefully this won't kick in again until we've gotten a few more things and fully moved into our new place. Wacky boy.
So we're both at least carriers, probably of some of the strongest-expressing genes. This is probably a good reason to avoid reproducing...