Hoarding

Metalhead has insinuated that I am a hoarder. This is totally false. Hoarding is characterized by not being able to get rid of anything. I totally get rid of stuff. I just haven't cleaned out my stuff lately, thanks. :P

I know that I keep stuff that I really shouldn't, but mostly this stems from my environmental compulsion to never throw anything useful away. Mostly it's just me not wanting perfectly fine stuff to go sit in a landfill. I feel guilty when useful things sit in landfills.

Kelly is not so fortunate. My madre has what her counselor calls "an emotional attachment to stuff". She's pretty bad about keeping anything and everything that ever meant anything to her at all. I'm talking bikinis from high school, old Home & Garden magazines, and other various shit. Now, I keep a lot of stuff, but it's stuff that I intend to do something with or stuff that I actually use AND it's mostly contained in my room. Kelly just keeps stuff because she can't stand giving it up and not being able to control what happens after it leaves her possession. Plus her stuff is essentially the entire house.

Take, for example, when I decided to clean out our basement two years ago. We have lived in our house since 1998 and we now have more shit than we know what to do with, so it was about time that somebody tackled that hoarding den that is the lower floor. I came across a box full of Kelly's notebooks from middle, high school and community college. When I took them upstairs to throw them in the recycle bin she had an absolute fit and refused to let me do away with the damn things. I mean, these are notebooks full of writings my mom will never, ever use again. Do you think she knows anything about chemistry or the Latin class she took her freshman year of high school (and failed)? Hell no. Has she touched that box of notebooks in the last 10 years? Yeah right. That, ladies and gents, is a hoarder. Her reason for keeping them stemmed from the "poetry and journals" she wrote in them. Jesus mother, tearing out a couple of pages with your angsty teen diary entries is not that goddamn hard. There is no need to keep an entire notebook that is sucking up space in our already cramped basement so that you can save your stupid doodles. We ended up getting into an argument that-- I kid you not -- consisted of us performing tug of war  with a notebook. My father was just sitting in the LayZBoy looking at us like we're nuts. This ended with the recycling of about half the notebooks, and keeping the rest.

Mike the bystander is not so innocent either, he of the can't-find-it-let's-go-buy-a-new-one mentality is another contributor to the household junk pile. There's a giant metal desk that has been sitting in our basement since at least 1999 that he brought home from work. It's still got the plastic on it and everything, but nobody has ever used it. Right now it's just a platform to put more stuff on. He also has this mental disease where he can't resist free stuff. WHY do we need four stress balls shaped like grapes? What about the three kinds of omelette makers? Or the rotisserie chicken cooker that we used once? He brings home so much crap that we don't need and will never use that it's not even funny. It's just a pain in my ass.

The most recent manifestation of this was when I cleaned out our cupboard. Since we moved into our house we've had a coffee maker in the corner of the kitchen. Mike is the only person who actually drinks coffee in the house and he never uses it. Why? Because he loves 7-Eleven coffee and is on a first-name basis with the people who work there. I've never seen him use this coffee maker. The only time it does see use is when we have guests over who want coffee, and even then only occasionally. Usually dad will just go out and get a large thing of coffee from Dunkin Donuts or something. So anyway, I took the coffee maker to the basement because nobody ever uses it and we need the counter space. I also sorted through all the mugs we had because nobody ever uses mugs either (except for hot chocolate) and we had about 50 for four people. I mean, you can only use one flipping mug at a time (and even still, double fisting hot chocolate will bring you to eight) and even with a bunch of guests that number is definitely excessive. So I took about 15 mugs to Goodwill. It took Kelly about three days to figure out something was a little off about the dishes cabinet, and then she didn't speak to me for three days she was so mad. This is the kind of shit I deal with.

Since I've been in college, I've actually gotten much much better about not keeping useless things. I would say about 60% of my stuff is books or clothes, and since my friend Tiedye is about the same size as me (just shorter, with bigger gazongas) I give her all of my clothes that I don't wear anymore, and take anything she doesn't want to goodwill. I would probably also attribute it to reading No Impact Man, which is a book that was made into a documentary. It's about a guy who lives in NYC who tries to live a no impact life with his wife and daughter for a year. It's super funny, and it made me realize that my house had all this stuff sitting around that no one was using. My general rule is that if it's been sitting around for a year and no one has used it, get it the hell outta here. Except then it sets off WWIII with Kelly. Whatever. I'll probably be moving out in a few years anyway.