for all of you who know, & kinda love, my family, this will come as no surprise, but for the rest of you: my family is a bunch of packrats. now i'm not talking packrats as in we collect bobble heads or elvis plates or precious moments figurines. but full blown packrats in that we cannot ever get rid of anything.
case in point: we have empty boxes from coffee makers, fans, computers, blenders, just because one day, far far far in the future, we may move, & we'll want to have that original box for that day. now i will admit, that once in a while this has come in handy, but usually it's just a major pain in the ass.
we have plywood, half a dozen office chairs, old school work, old school books, you name it & we have it. normally i can work around the clutter, sometimes even work with it, but lately it's become like this thing out of the depths of clutter hell that has been haunting my every day. i feel like i can't think anymore, that the stuff around me has begun taking over my space, my life, my thoughts.
all i really want is a desk with a lamp & some cute decorations, maybe a radio too, so that i can sit down & work on my thesis, finish my masters. today my mom asked me how close i was to finishing it, my answer was that i'm closer to failing it than to finishing it. which, may be, a bit of an exaggeration, but it's the way that i'm feeling right now.
ok, so i'm sure lots of you are laughing right now, because i've always been the one with lots of stuff. i go somewhere & i take a back pack, my lap top, my purse & assorted other sundries depending on the place & how long i'll be there. in a way it's a very bad habit i've collected from childhood. just like the one where i eat when i'm upset. let's go get some icecream & someone else's crap from a garage sale & everything will be keen. except it's not, not really. the stuff invades your house. it clutters your physical space, your emotional space, it clutters your psyche.
so i'm trying to get rid of stuff. it's hard. & i'll admit that right away. i'm a packrat, but i'm trying to change. it's hard though, much harder than giving up the booze, man. ok, now i'm not trying to be flippant there, & i don't need hate comments from aa-ers telling me the difficulties of staying sober. i was very addicted to booze a few years back, pulled myself out of a bottle, dried out, & got on with my life. i still imbibe now & again, but not to the point i was at before when i was living in a bottle of seagram's 7.
i know one answer is to get a huge dumpster & just heave it all in with a broad swing & a mighty grunt. but that's not so easy when all of my collected junk from over the years is intertwined with other people's collected junk from over the years, & then even in what's supposed to be my space there are bits of other people's collected crap interspersed. it's like trying to untangle a big knot, & you don't know where it starts, or where it ends, & you're only option is to randomly cut something blindly because you can't even begin to figure out how it relates to anything else.
& i've been bitching for months now, even years, that i need to get things cleaned, straightened, that i need to get it all in order so that i can think, that i can produce. & so far, nothing's happened. granted, i accept my fair share of the blame on that one. too many times i've been tired or unmotivated to take care of things. or i've seen something cute & adorable & way too irresistible to pass by without buying & bringing home to claim as my own.
what we've got here, is a failure to communicate. yup, that's what it is. i just need to get my free wheeling spendy side talking to my rational neat-freak side so they can come to some kind of argreement on things & get a home situation that will be somewhat palatable to all of the voices involved.
***btw, what's the quote in this blog & where's it from???
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