materialism

Matt and I just cleaned. The whole process is really an exercise in futility because i know for a definite fact that i have more stuff than we have room to put it. Despite having thrown out two trash bags worth of discarded handouts and totally reorganizing my bookshelf the overwhelming lack of space remains an inescapable fact of my life. It’s likely that i could live in an apartment where all the walls were lined with shelves and i still would have a pile of something on the floor. However, it would be a smallish pile of something unimportant, which is why shelves turn me on so much.

Semi-pornographic obsessions with furniture aside, the apartment is clean right now. Clean. Saving me from celebrating in any fashion (perhaps through sleep?) there’s also easily my weight’s worth of miscellany covering the whole of my bed, which i’ll obviously have to displace in order to sleep tonght. I have repeatedly bemoaned my unescapable bulk of possessions, but i haven’t ever addressed why i own what i own. Frankly, i’m obsessed with material things; I wish i could just have some massively easy catchall mechanism to organize every little scrap of paper and ball of fluff that i want to keep. Sadly there is no mechanism available to me that would do just that, and i’m not nearly organized enough to be able to make good use of it.

My material possessions fall into three categories: things i use or might use, thinks i need or might need, and things i can’t throw out. The first category includes things like my entire cd, book, and comic book collections, which i could easily condense down so that they would fit onto my shelf space (but what would be the fun of that?). The second category includes clothing, half of which just endlessly sits in my drawers hopelessly relegated to being the bottom layer (and with no rhyme or reason, so that some of my favourite clothes fall out of rotation for months at a time because they were the first ones i folded after doing the wash). The third category features the aforementioned balls of fluff and also includes paperclips, half used pencils, and playbills from every play i’ve been a part of or seen. I generally wouldn’t mind throwing out everything that fits into this category, but generally i’m afraid to because all of it is is marginally useful or important in that way where it’s never actually useful or important.

Today fit into that last category, by the way. And i can’t even end it by going to sleep on my own damned bed.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1696365/