Well, as usual it has been a while since I’ve posted here. Apologies to those who have been checking for an update for the last 1.75 months.

The biggest thing worth mentioning is within the next couple of weeks I will finally be leaving the shelter and comfort of living with my parents and moving out of home.

The most daunting (yet surprisingly good) thing about moving out is that I am now forced to seriously clean up my room. There is no point in moving across things I no longer need or use, especially when I am moving into a room more than half the size of my current room. This means I will finally be getting rid of things that I have had since primary school that I haven’t touched in over 10 years. Things that I keep around because I can still imagine a scenario where it could be useful, or it is personally significant in some way. Pieces of paper with notes written on them, boxes for products I have bought, old exercise books from primary school and high school - the list goes on.

Today I dealt with one group of items that hasn’t been sorted out in a while - my clothing. I have clothes lying around my floor and in and on my chest of drawers. I sorted my clothes into a number of piles - clothes that needed to be ditched, clothes that could be donated, clothes that I still wore (or had worn within the last year) and clothes that I don’t really wear but can’t bring myself to chuck.

It turns out the reason I have clothes all over my floor is because my chest of drawers is full of clothes I no longer wear. After sorting through the contents of my packed drawers I only kept my school jersey, a jumper, about 4 t-shirts and a couple pairs of socks. Amongst the clothing I ditched were:

  • a handful of items either totally worn out or covered with paint
  • clothing I hadn't worn since the 6th grade (1993)
  • pjs I had never worn
  • underwear I had worn out
  • roughly 10 pairs of socks with holes in them

I can now fit nearly all the clothes that had until now existed outside my chest of drawers into it. I hung onto some items I’ll probably should get rid of, but for now the sentimental attachment is holding me back (those CB shirts are just so precious).

I wonder if I am the only person to have hoarded such a collection of junk? I suspect that many guys are like this. I find that the thought of chucking something out just doesn’t cross my mind, except when I decide I have to clean my room. When something enters my room it usually still has value. Over time, however, it loses any value it once had. But I never get around to going through my stuff and dumping the things that no longer have any value. It would really be cool if when you brought something new into your house it automatically recorded a ’lifetime’ into a computer, which would then regularly notify you when the stuff you have is no longer worth keeping.