A few episodes of Hoarders today made me delve a little deeper into Bea's closet, which is more like the dumping ground for all of my junk. My goodness, what a ridiculous amount of useless things I have kept over the years.
I made a couple important decisions today:
1) I am throwing out all the wedding invitation catalogs that I accumulated while I was toying with the start up of "Emily Blair Designs" back in 2007. And with them go the half-dozen paper sample books that I took from my paper supply store in Illinois. It felt very professional at the time, but I'd be lying if I said I'd looked at any of it even once in the past three years.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not throwing away my hopes of starting up a paper/card-related type of business. It is an ongoing dream of mine, shared with my sister Amy. And maybe I'm just kidding myself here, but I really think we can do it...someday. Anyway, I figure if I ever do get serious about that again, there will be plenty of current invitation catalogs and paper samples to accumulate then.
2) I am throwing out (most) of my clippings from entertainment magazines which included pretty much anything I could find on Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow as a couple, Nicole Kidman in Tom Cruise days, some Mel Gibson, some Harrison Ford. In my sickness (mild hoarding that is), I've convinced myself for now that it's okay to hang onto any Audrey Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, or James Dean clippings because they're classic. Oh, and David Duchovny. I have such an extensive collection of X-files related stuff, it's in a different league. I know I will have to throw it out eventually...but not...quite...yet.
Ultimately, I know I am doing the right thing here. Or at least I'm doing a morally neutral thing, but there is still some part of me that is sad because I think that in 30 years it would be really neat-o to look through a bunch of old magazines and when I'm 60 I'll be kicking myself saying, "What I really need right now is a good full-page spread of Brad Pitt from 1997."
Help.
I have sooo many magazine/newspaper clippings... I will probably never get rid of them but I would like to organize them, at least. I used to organize them into binders by subject, but it's been ages since I've been that ambitious. And so they sit in a box and a drawer.
ReplyDeleteI guess clippings are a pretty safe collectible, though. I mean, in terms of safe = not becoming a psycho hoarder. I mean, the ARE flat.... well, until you get hundreds....
Also, my mom is often begging me to get rid of my old TV Guides, but I just can't. I mean, what if I need to write a book someday that takes place in the 90s, and my character needs to watch a TV show on a certain night of the week and I need to know what was on TV then? I mean, then what?