The Conical Glass: The secret life of a stuff-a-holic

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The secret life of a stuff-a-holic

My mom called me on Friday afternoon to tell me that I just had to watch that day's "Oprah" show. It was a program titled "Inside the Lives of Hoarders," or more specifically one hoarder, a Maryland woman named Sharyn who had managed to amass 3,000 pairs of shoes, 3,000 handbags and an ungodly number of stuffed animals and other knick-knacks. The organizational expert on the show was Peter Walsh, a fave of mine from his now-defunct TLC show "Clean Sweep." (BTW, I was a little disappointed to see that his next book is a diet tome called Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? Aw Peter, are you trying to be the new Dr. Phil? Maybe that's what hanging out with O does to you.)

Anyway, the show -- a two-parter; unfortunately I missed the first part, but there's a summary online -- was riveting TV. I was not the least bit surprised to hear that clutter leads, in something like 80% of cases, to health problems. I've written before about how my own decluttering (not to mention packing to move) has made me sick; I'm highly allergic to dust, and I believe that breathing in too much of it compromises my immune system. Once all of Sharyn's junk was removed from her home, Peter Walsh discovered black mold, and his own work in the house made him ill -- "During the cleanup, he says he developed a fungicidal infection that spread from his leg to his scalp." Yuck!!!!!

Now that we've been living in our new home for almost 3 weeks, I've noticed that there is much less dust here than there was in the condo. I guess that's probably because we don't have the popcorn ceilings here that were in the old place, and we're not so close to a major highway. Good news for me, anyway.

Even though I'm nowhere near as bad as Sharyn -- that woman is like the Babe Ruth of clutter, and I'm merely a pee-wee leaguer -- the "Oprah" show reinforced my determination to try and keep as much "stuff" as possible out of the new house. It's always been extremely difficult for me to integrate new items into my environment, and as a result it can take several months for me to put away birthday or Christmas gifts, unless they have a really obvious home, like, say, the bookshelf or sweater drawer.

I'm going to try to pare my CD and book collections down even further, although it gets to be more and more like pulling teeth. I was pleased to note that eMusic finally added the New Pornographers' Challengers album, since I'd resisted buying the disc, preferring to wait for the digital download. I know the fidelity isn't as good, but I'm kind of tin-eared anyway, and it's much easier to store the files on my hard drive than to find room for a CD. Anyhow, I wasn't expecting to like the album as much as I do -- I mean, it's the band's fourth disc and I figured it would kind of be more of the same. But it's really excellent and I think "All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth" might be my favorite NP song yet. You can hear it on this NPR All Songs Considered podcast of the NP's recent D.C. gig, though I think the studio version is better -- the live rendition doesn't have that nifty flute bit; at least I think it's a flute -- it could be a synthesizer that sounds like a flute. That's the one disadvantage of not having the physical product, I guess: no musician credits.

posted by 125records @ 5:46 PM

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