It sounds like a horror movie and to be honest, it feels like one. Does throwing things away expunge the soul of everything holding us down? Does it release the heavy? The “sin” of sloth?

I know two types of people, those that throw everything out, including yearbooks and old math tests from 1994 senior year without ever looking back, and then there are the hoarders. Not one of them seems particularly happy and as much as we all lie to ourselves about it, everyone is either a tosser or a keeper.

I’m a keeper. Probably not in like the relationship sense if we’re basing anything on my poor, unfortunate husband’s defeated eye rolls and sighs, but a keeper in like the “keeping the napkin I was holding the time that Prince (yeah, that Prince) sat next to me at a cafe at Universal City Walk that they’ll find under a rat carcass in the hallway when I’ve been forcibly removed from my home by Human Services or a reality show” sense. My husband is the thrower-out type. I’m surprised he hasn’t tossed me. It’s because he’s a saint.

I do not want to be a hoarder. I don’t. I see Pinterest, I am aware of the “freedom from clutter”, the Scandinavian Chic, the lie that is the Shipping Crate home. It doesn’t work for me because Pinterest hasn’t told me where to put my Prince napkin and my homework from that Italian class I took in college 20 years ago. Because what if I remember how to read in Italian, Pinterest? What good would that be if I’ve thrown away all those verb conjugations? I’d be sitting on my faux fur, white rug, backdropped by my exposed brick living room wall with nothing to read.  I also have children which means that carpet wouldn’t stay white for long. In my living room, there are currently three bins overflowing with Rock Em Sock Em Robots, torn comic books, every Lego magazine that has ever been mailed to us, a broken, plastic dreidel, trains, cars, baby toys (no babies here), broken army men, a blue and white Dodgers’ wig (it’s cursed, that’s a different post), A Tim Salmon bobblehead, and a karate belt (we’re not in karate). There’s art projects and homework papers and little notes that say “i LOvE YOU mOM”. I can’t throw that away. And yet somehow I was able to condense a huge bin of every piece of schoolwork my 4th grader ever brought home into an easy to manage folder yesterday. And if I think about all his handprints and backwards letters and spelling tests that are in the trash can now, I’ll cry. So I have to pretend that they don’t exist anymore and that’s a lot of stress. How do the Pinterest people relax and just live??

Tossers?? How do you live?? Have you no souls?

On the opposite end, I’m tired of moving no less than seven shopping bags of old fabric scraps and half-finished sewing projects every time I need to use my desk and I’m pretty sure that less stuff would give the cat hair less area to cling to. Who knows though, it tumbles down the hallway regardless.

I promised the husband that I would clean out these toy bins before the kids get home from school. I have done nothing but toggle back and forth from tumblr and this post while yelling at the cat to stop scratching the couch since 8 am.

But I’m on a quest. To de-stuff my life. It won’t be Pinterest pretty (unless someone knows of a Pinterest board that can help). Just note that I have been attempting The Purge since at LEAST 2013 blogspot days which doesn’t bode too well for me.   I think what I really need is a Roomba.

How powerful is a Roomba? Like if it found a dead rat, hypothetically, could it remove it before the reality show people bring my mom into this?