FILE PHOTO -- The Flat Hat Jill Rowley

Confusion Corner
Packrat defends habitual hoarding

By Jill Rowley

It felt like we were trying to cram a small third world nation into a Volkswagen Rabbit; but the actual task was far more difficult. We were trying to stuff the belongings of two citizens of an over-indulgent capitalist nation into one dorm room.

I am a packrat. I have an obsessive urge to keep things that not only will never be useful, but also have no value, either sentimental or actual. I still have my U.S. history notebook from sophomore year of high school. I know, beyond any doubt, that I will never study U.S. history again. Even if I did, my notebook is illegible and would be entirely useless.

On the bright side, that notebook sits on a bookshelf at my parents' house, not taking up my valuable dorm space. The same cannot be said of the plastic magic wand, stuffed Mr. Potato Head and Matchbox FedEx truck, all sitting on my desk.

It's not that I'm materialistic, exactly. That would imply I desire things of monetary value, enjoy shopping and consider Madonna songs to be mantras. I do not, unless you count a short period of fixation with "Cherish."

Nor am I particularly sentimental. It's not as if I'm keeping heirlooms and mementos of dear friends or special memories. I don't have these three plastic water guns with me because my great-grandmother used them in the water fight in which she met her future husband. Although that would be a great story, wouldn't it?

I just can't bring myself to get rid of all this random crap I've been meticulously collecting for so long.

Normally, my hoarding tendencies go basically unnoticed. With everything piled in the closet, or laid out in a relatively even layer on the floor, the true amount of unnecessary build up is disguised.

It's only when the layer needs to be moved that I see the error of my ways. Packing it all up takes nearly as long as collecting it did, and somehow the resulting pile of boxes looks much worse than the haphazard distribution of clutter. I think the attempt at organization is too harsh a contrast to the natural chaos.

Packing this year wasn't nearly as bad as packing for freshman year for one simple reason. I never bothered unpacking. Once again, laziness paid off. I only had a few toiletries and clothes to pack up when the time came. Still, I managed to overestimate my packing skills and ended up leaving slightly late. (Translation: I waited to pack until an hour before I was supposed to leave, and ended up postponing that time by half a day.)

Moving things from the car to the dorm room, however, is just as annoying in subsequent years as it was the first time. It's just as humid as it was, and I still have to carry stuff up just as many flights of stairs. However, you get used to the trip to your new dorm room, retracing your steps with box after bag after trunk after lamp.

But the worst moment of moving in is after everything has been brought into the room, but before anything has been put away. There are suitcases, cardboard boxes, plastic bags and clutter everywhere. The furniture has yet to be arranged. The task seems insurmountable.

You can tell a lot about a person from the way they go about unpacking and arranging their stuff. Do they take into account their roommate's wishes? Do they unpack systematically? Do they put together their computer or make their bed first? Do the posters go up immediately, or do those come later as an afterthought? Do they talk to an imaginary kangaroo as they unpack?

My computer is set up now, due largely to the deadline for this column. My bed is made, because I value sleep above everything else. But the majority of my stuff remains boxed. I figure, why unpack? It's mostly useless junk I just can't bear to part with anyway.

Jill Rowley is the Confusion Corner columnist. She's accumulating more stuff and dreading the day she has to move out in May.