Pack Rats vs. Rat Packs

[from www.automatoncity.com]

I suppose I’m the pack rat of the rat pack.

And I’m learned to be slightly better this month.

I’m moving out of my place within the week, and I have been going through everything in my room. Really, much of the month of May has been spent by going through boxes of things while watching movies on my computer in the background

Just in the last week, I’ve watched Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Sweet And Lowdown, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Psycho, From Here To Eternity, Eddie Murphy: Raw, Bonnie And Clyde, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Tootsie, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Third Man. I have also watched the entire third and fourth seasons of Seinfeld.

The reason I’ve been able to watch so many movies and episodes of television shows is because I have so many things to go through. Copiously stashed in every drawer, every shelf and every hidden spot are papers. Anything from eighth grade poetry to college math assignments have been around here somewhere. I’ve saved a lot, but I’ve thrown out even more this month, springing for summer.

When I moved into this place two years ago, I didn’t go through much. Instead, I just moved boxes. And maybe living in my own place has given me a new perspective on space. I’ve been throwing away entire boxes stuffed with papers it’s safe to assume that I don’t need. I threw away every college assignment except for essays. I trashed notes, but kept letters. Once seemingly important paper items, like old parking tickets, old bank letters and old notices from college, all gone.

I have always kept clearly important things, like old photographs and old mixtapes. But I usually come up with a purpose or a significance for seemingly unnecessary objects.

For example, I have the number six from a keyboard. It looks like nothing special. But it’s from when three friends and I were shooting a computer with a crossbow during a road trip while we were staying with relatives at their beautiful house on the lake in Washington. When the arrow lodged itself into the keyboard, the number six flipped through the air into one of our hands. I put it in my pocket as a token of road trip weaponry and laughter.

That’s the sort of things that are in my room. I keep souvenirs of fun times with friends.

I have a sign that says “Someone please love this girl” with an arrow pointing down, which I brought to high school basketball games because this girl Nancy always made the players treats and felt underappreciated. I have a deflated balloon of the letter “J” from my college graduation party. I have fake rose petals from when my friends and I built a restaurant for my girlfriend in the backyard. I have my winning ticket from the first time my father took me to the horse races. I have bubbles from a friend’s wedding. I have the pamphlet on “Loud Parties” that the cops gave us the first time they came to this house. And I also most of my movie and concert tickets over the years stashed in two envelopes.

However, my bedroom never looked like that of a pack rat. My bedroom usually just looked messy most of the time, and if I cleaned it up, you couldn’t tell that I was saving as much as I actually was. Most of what I have are souvenirs from spending time with family or friends. I’m a sentamentalist. Though I suppose that I do look like a pack rat in some instances, because I have stacks of newspaper. But they aren’t random meaningless newspapers, which is a sure-fire trait of actual pack rats. The newspapers I have all contain articles that I’ve written over the years, and I should just get to cutting them out sometime.

So I’m not exactly a pack rat, with my bedroom stuffed to the ceiling with broken appliances and bags of receipts. I’m a pack rat of the rat pack, compulsively saving small items of memories. It almost feels like I’ve collected trinkets from folk tales and mythical lore.

I keep what makes me happy. I go through things, catch myself reading a letter that someone wrote me when I was 16 and thought the world was too big, and later find a goodbye letter in college from someone who thought the world was just a little too small.

My father has a saying: “Throw away everything you haven’t touched for six months.”

But my mother also has a saying: “Don’t listen to your father.”

See, my father’s mother hardly saved anything. My mother’s mother saved a lot. This is where the perspective comes in. And I seem to be a mixture of the both. There are things that I can’t believe one grandmother threw away and there are things that I can’t believe one grandmother saved.

However, it seems that it could really just depend on my mood. I can’t really be sure if it’s that I’ve evolved because I’ve been in an entirely different atmosphere. Or maybe you just need to go through these things every once in a while in different moods. I suppose it’s like editing a paper over and over again, as you’re basically doing the same activity but noticing new things each time.

Let’s say you write a paper and then edit it once, do something else and come back to it. Then you edit it again, do something else and come back to it, and edit it again. And then you do something else and come back to it, and edit it again.

And then you save that paper for years, trying your best to justify having it tucked away in your closet.