A Little Anecdote
Well, I came home tonight and decided that I would do a little reorganizing. An by “little”, of course, I mean completely remove the contents of my shelving unit, completely disassemble it, rebuild it in a configuration that maximizes the potential utilization of the space, and then restock it. Now it’s nearly 1:00am and I’m still not finished with the “restock it” phase of this task. I do, however, need a little break. So, I’ve decided to login here and share a little anecdote with everyone…
As I mentioned, I’m reorganizing my room. Now taking on a task like this is very interesting. We all do it from time to time and for various reasons. We either get bored with our surroundings or entropy, left unchecked, builds up such a nuisance that we finally snap frantically try to make up for it. Either way, there is an interesting side effect of this process.
While we organize and attempt to reorder, we are forced to look over and determine the worth of the objects that occupy the space we’re cleaning; objects that alone have no significance what so every, but that we have assigned some significance to in the past.
It’s fascinating to me how we keep these worthless objects because they mean something to us, but then as life changes these objects return to their worthless state. Take my cleaning tonight for example. While removing everything from my shelving unit, I found a “TripTik” from AAA. Now for those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s basically a spiral bound map, broken into 100 mile increments, custom printed at AAA showing you your googlemaps-style driving rout, but also incorporating vital travel information like distances between gas stations, places to stay, and details of the terrain you’re driving though.
Now there “TripTiks” are completely free to AAA members. Having one for a trip you’ve already been on is pretty much pointless. Even if you were to take the same trip again, you would want a new and updated version. How I kept this “TripTik” because it had sentimental value to it. This was a cross country trip I made alone (23 hours straight) to be with my girlfriend [at the time] on her birthday. The significance of the trip allowed me to assign significance to the “worthless” object. However, now I find myself once again holding the same “TripTik”, only it’s 2 years later and it holds no more significance. So, it ends up in the trash.
It’s just interesting that I hadn’t looked at it in two years, however, i felt a desire to keep it. If it would have accidentally been thrown away I would have never known or thought about it, but I just couldn’t consciously throw it away until now. I just thought that was an interesting phenomenon that we all experience at least once in our lives and I wanted to share.
posted by Christopher Schnese
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