Pack Rat or Preservationist?
Posted by osiern on November 3, 2008
I come from a family with some of the worst pack rats on earth and therefore I have a great fear of it. I am also a highly disorganized person, although most would never believe this. If things get messy I fall apart. If my house is disorganized I cannot do my homework. If my office if disorganized I cannot do my work. I keep planners, maintain a strict filing systems, and everything has it’s place place. The rule of my house is “if something comes in, something must go out.” I have tried to have a collection, however find it too much clutter to collect anything. My 700 sq. foot apartment with ZERO storage space does not allow for collecting or preserving. I have some books on a bookshelf from throughout my life, I have a few photo albums, and limited number of “important items.” My most important item, my wedding dress, has been preserved by a specialty wedding dress cleaner and is at my mom’s house.
I actually love to throw things away and clean out. I donate clothes to charity four or five times a year. I am actually in the process of going through my closets and cleaning things out before my in-laws come to visit. I even purge electronic documents on a regular basis because I don’t like them cluttering up my computer. I save things for a limited amount of time and then assess whether I will need them in the future. This might be upsetting to me in later years for sentimental reasons, but I really just don’t have the space for everything. I also like to keep everything very minimal for my own sanity.
The one item I know of that my husband and I work to maintain is our picture collection. We use a digital camera and post a fair amount of pictures online. We have all of our pictures on our hard drive as well as backed up on a CD.
Another group of items I save is my work from graduate school. I currently keep it all stored on my lap top, but I don’t have it backed up any where. I guess I’m just hoping the computer won’t crash before May, when I hopefully recieve my degree. I have all my syllabi saved in paper form in a grad school file and my major research project is also saved in a paper version in the file. I felt like these were the most important items, so the only items that really needed to be saved in a hard copy.
