eHoarding

Before I came home, I got all my documents and songs and videos and pictures and Internet bookmarks transferred from my old computer to my fancy new one, and in doing so, I reaffirmed an fundamental truth about myself.

I am a minor-league hoarder.

I mean, I'm not going to be showing up on A&E anytime soon, but I definitely tend to keep things rather than throw them out.

I ran into them again a few months ago, before my mom and I threw a massive garage sale to raise money for my big move to Boston. I had kept the most random shit from my 22 years of live. What's worse, I had moved a lot of it here from Utah! There were things still in the moving boxes from eight and a half years ago, clearly untouched. I found newspaper articles from the 8th grade, books I hadn't looked at since the 5th grade and - worst, or perhaps best, of all - my Lisa Frank club binder from the 3rd grade.

(Don't worry, I took pictures for posterity before putting that thing out of its misery:)

The club rules as written by the club president ( I was totz VP)

Luckily, in the case of the garage sale my moneylust was just slightly higher than my desire to hoard and I cleaned out a LOT of stuff that I will never need or want ever again. Some trash, some donations and plenty of sales led to a much less stuff-laden Kathleen.

My hoarding tends to stem not from some psychological trauma or need, but from three basic rationalizations:
Rationalization 1: "What if I need it at some future point?"
Rationalization 2: "I paid good money for that."
Rationalization 3: "It's sentimental!"

But then there's ehoarding, and although rationalization #2 doesn't typically apply, there's a new problem: space. For physical things, I only have so much space, and I'm not into climbing over boxes and stacks of shit to get to my bathroom, so at some point that shit's gotta go. But on my computer and in my email, I can keep every document I could ever need (and many, many more that I don't), and it never feels like its taking up space.

But I know that in reality, it is. So I am making it my goal to keep this shiny beautiful computer clear of all the crap I kept stored on my last one. Starting with cleaning out over 15,000 pictures. From just the last three years. I KNOW. Ridiculous. Gots. Ta. Go.