AceOfSpuds: Technology, Life and Art ...blogged by Richard Berlin

In praise of pack rats?

I confess: our house is overrun with clutter. I'm currently convalescing at home, and before the surgery we needed the generous assistance of friends to pick up a few of the rooms. My computer-related clutter is now packed into fashionable white boxes from The Container Store, for example. It doesn't change the fact that we are overrun with stuff. But to quote an old singing buddy of mine, now it "looks good--and that's what's important." :-)

In my defense, I know people with much worse problems than ours. You won't find our level of clutterbugging in the DSM-IV; we're just garden-variety "keepers" of more stuff than we really need. We live amidst clutter for a number of reasons: too distracted or busy to put everything away; organizing is too big a project to finish before our energy flags; and in the case of the kitchen, not enough storage for all the stuff that two enthusiastic foodies really *do* use. And of course, there's the "if you throw it out, you're going to need it" problem...which really does happen to us occasionally.

And then there's the "can't stand to throw this out because it *might* be useful in the future." In keeping house, this is probably the cardinal sin...and yet it's so tough not to keep things that are perfectly serviceable. I would like to convince myself that all of the random hardware bits I've collected in 20 years of DIY could be discarded...but about half the time that cache of junk provides just what I need to fix something without the dreaded trip to Home Depot.

And sometimes you have to be grateful for people who keep things just because. I bet a lot of people are grateful to Mary Jane Burton, for example, whose habitual saving of forensic evidence in the seventies and eighties has already been responsible for five exonerations, with more possibly on the way. (A good and proper use for DNA analysis: a match is not iron-clad--even if the samples aren't contaminated, the tests they use are essentially "hashes" rather than bit-for-bit equality testing--whereas a mismatch is definitive.)

Posted at 12:39PM Dec 23, 2005 by AceOfSpuds in General  |  Comments[1]