As my college roommates can attest, my room tends to fall apart at a pace consistent with the disarray in my life generally. I confess that I am not a particularly neat person to begin with. I know this. But every now and then I hit this wall where I lose the will to do anything more than prop a pillow under my head and keep a box of Cheez-Its within arms length while I watch a marathon of Veronica Mars. When this happens, my tolerable clutter rapidly descends into something straight out of Hoarders. Or Wall-E.

This is usually one of the things that triggers my return to life. I look around and decide that this disaster I am living in is really the problem and if I can just clean up my space, I can clean up my life. The second will magically follow the first. IT IS INEVITABLE.

Things have gotten pretty bad lately, in part because I spent most of last week (barring my random DC road trip) wallowing in self-pity instead of actually dealing with things. My emotional whiny bullshit problems aside, I have serious clutter issues. My room contains:

1. The contents of my last college dorm.
2. The contents of my apartment before that, which includes furniture (exempting the bed, which is elsewhere)
3. The contents of my high school life and furniture
4. Lots of miscellaneous shit from before we moved…which happened when I was in high school.

My room used to be an attic so it’s a bit bigger than a two car garage, but the original ceiling/walls are one — with the slant going all the way down to the ground. To give me some sort of normal walls, the walk-in closet has this incredibly strange storage space. It’s about four feet wide and one foot high on the short side, five-ish on the tall side, and it runs the entire length of my room — so about as deep as a garage. This does not need to make sense. What is relevant here is that I have this creepy large hidden storage space in my room.

I am a total pack-rat. Part of it is the sense of nostalgia I get when I try to go through shit. The other part is that I am really fucking lazy. I open a box, see that its contents make absolutely no sense, and decide that it’s best to just close that box and put it back away. And since I have this insane storage space I HAVE SO MUCH ROOM FOR USELESS BOXES!

But because I have never properly unpacked from a major move, I have several layers worth of boxes-I-never-got-around-to-whose-useful-contents-have-probably-already-been-replaced-anyway.

We had a house fire in 1999. It was really bad, but most of our stuff was salvageable. Some of those boxes went unopened for years, partially because this avoidance tactic is a family trait, but also because the smell of smoke that punches you in the nostrils when you open those boxes makes it a bit much to deal with. We probably still have a couple such boxes. I verified this weekend that while I don’t have any that were never opened, I have boxes that still have almost the exact same contents.

At some point on Sunday I was trying to figure out which BSC books in my massive collection I needed to reacquire for Childhood Trauma (because I save everything) and I assumed (correctly) that some of them had to be in those boxes. Since I was sick and tired of being a pathetic blob of useless, tearing my room to shit and filling an empty room with my boxes of crap seemed like a good life choice. In theory, I have a system for how I’m going to re-sort all of this shit and maybe hopefully throw away or donate a lot of it. We shall see how this plays out in reality.

In addition to finding most of my books, I found several of those old boxes. Aside from reeking of smoke, they were essentially my 10-year-old self reduced to construction paper and faded art projects. I found scribbled journals about my childhood crushes. I also found a photo album from our trip to China. I was 13 and my brother and I were stopped about eight times a day by people who wanted to take pictures with us. After looking at those pictures and all of the insane awkwardness that accompanies that time, that memory horrifies me. The fact that dozens of strangers have documentation of one of the most awkward years of my life is a serious tragedy. As is the fact that I’m at work right now and can’t scan the sparkly purple gradient flare jeans that I was so fond of. I’ll let your imagination handle that one.

A lot of this seems almost legitimate. People keep plenty of useless crap because it has sentimental value. You might be thinking, “No, this isn’t that bad. Everyone keeps mementos like that.”

But those mementos comprise only a small fraction of the bigger picture of nonsensical crap that I found. The discovery of each item went something like this:

“OH MY GOD, THIS SPINNY LIGHT-UP THING FROM DISNEY WORLD THAT NO LONGER WORKS. WHY THE HELL DO I STILL HAVE THIS?” Then I push the button about 19 times in the hope that through sheer optimism I can make the battery function again. I give up, and toss it back in the box and go back to rummaging.

Other gems currently sitting in my box-sorting-facility:

We have owned this thing since we lived in California. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually belong to me, but it’s pretty irrelevant who it does belong to because it is absolutely useless. Also, while it’s not Shake Weight inappropriate, it definitely looks pretty pornographic in use.

I also found a VHS of American Beauty, the American Girls guide to hair styles (you might be hearing about this again later), an impressive collection of thoroughly useless shit that either lights up or glows (or, rather, used to), and an even more impressive collection of denim mini-backpack purses. Usually adorned with glitter and/or flowers.

I considered having some sort of blog give-away, but none of this shit is even worth the cost of shipping. FUCK IT. The person who can suggest the most creative alternative usage for the Ab Roller in the comment section will totally receive that sucker in the mail the VHS of American Beauty, because the Ab Roller would be seriously expensive to ship and I’m poor, guys. BUT DON’T YOU WANT YOUR VERY OWN VHS COPY OF AMERICAN BEAUTY?

In short, as I am without an adorable little robot to put my fucking life back together for me, I have to actually do it by myself. This is unfortunate, as I was content to let my bones turn to jello while I hovered around in a La-Z-Boy.