All posts by Chaos Coordinator

About Chaos Coordinator

B.Sc. Journalism, University of Oregon, USA. M.A.Ed, Elementary Education, University of Phoenix, USA.

DAY XCIX

100 Days, , , ,

“You might say clutter is a way of avoiding life.” – Don Aslett in How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend (©2000), another decluttering book, and definitely one of the best there is! Every so many pages I found myself getting up off the sofa to work through another box of stuff. I tossed out things I’ve been lugging around for years… decades… even that I’ve had since I was a little kid! The Korn’s Bakery wrapping paper roll is gone. A dozen pieces of rusty O-gage toy train track are gone. Two bags of clothes, mostly t-shirts, are gone. My collection of seven Elvira, Mistress of the Dark / Coors Beer standup displays, dating back to 1987, are gone, folded up in the cardboard recycling bin. Those were tough to part with, but how likely is it that I’m going to ever set up an Elvira beer display in any room of my house? I checked prices on eBay before ditching stuff. The Elvira displays might have been worth thirty bucks apiece,  but shipping costs from where I currently live made selling them untenable. I threw out an old Marx toy metal barn. That was really hard. My brothers and I got that set from our grandparents when we were very young. Sadly, in addition to being ungainly to store, the barn had rusted quite badly. I did, however, keep the farm animals and accessories. I also tossed a plastic model kit of a London bus I purchased only a couple of years ago. I was swayed by a “fun” looking photo group on Flickr combined with a visit to the annual Honolulu NNL model car show to spend eighty dollars – eighty dollars – buying a plastic model kit. I had started on it, didn’t get very far, and it’s been taking up a lot of space ever since. The likelihood that I will spend my free time building a huge plastic model of a double-decker bus is pretty slim right now. I have too much other stuff to do, both things I need to do and things I “should” be doing. The bus model was so far on the back burner that it was never gonna happen. Tossing that felt like tearing up dollar bills – more like, tearing up a handful of twenty dollar bills – but it’s done, it’s gone, time to keep moving.

Last week we rented a storage unit to help with the decluttering. After reading How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend, I realize there are probably at least two large tubs of stuff I’ve already hauled to storage that I’m ready to part with. Next trip, I’m bringing those two tubs home and purging them.

Even though they’re beginning to sound a bit dated in some respects (the technology world, in particular, has changed a lot in the past fifteen years), Don Aslett’s decluttering books are definitely still the best on the market.

DAY XCVIII

100 Days, , ,

Finished reading Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself by Rich Roll (2012).

I’ll start by mentioning a line from page 195: “It’s not at all like me to engage in self-congratulatory hyperbole.” Oh yeah? Start with the title, “becoming one of the world’s fittest men and discovering myself.” The book became quite a slog as Rich paints a lengthy picture of himself as being “the worst” at everything — uncoordinated, weak kid who hated school and got picked on on the one hand, but excelling at swimming by age 8, reaching the national level by high school, maintaining perfect grades, and being accepted to both Princeton and Harvard but instead opting for Stanford. He is even better at being a drunk that anybody else, chugging his first taste of beer rather than sipping it, and living the life of a party animal for a decade starting in college, supposedly managing to drive a car and remain fully functional with a blood alcohol level that would be fatal to most people. Despite showing up drunk to present an important paper in law school, his writing and his presentation were so effective and insightful that the Russian embassy asked to share his paper with a group of Russian legal experts. Despite being, according to himself, possibly the worst employee ever during his law clerk days, he was invited to join a high-profile law firm; from there, despite being a hardcore alcoholic prone to binge-drinking and blackouts, he moved up to an even more successful firm. Ultimately, obviously, Roll quit drinking, and suddenly became the healthiest man in the world by turning to a vegan diet. And despite his claims to have never been a runner or being particularly athletic (huh? Nationally-ranked competitive swimming isn’t athletic?), within mere months he somehow went from “overweight” and gasping for breath while climbing a set of eight stairs to competing in Ironman-distance triathlon events, and within a couple of years to completing the first EPIC5 event, five Ironman-distance triathlons on five separate Hawaiian islands over the course of five (extended to seven due largely to technical and scheduling issues) days.

What almost had me throwing the book across the room, which I couldn’t in good conscience actually do since I borrowed the book from the library, was when he referred to a ten-minute mile running pace as “slovenly.” Well, screw you, Mister Fittest Man in the World; for me, a sustained ten-minute mile pace is really pushing hard. And despite being overweight and tending toward lazy, I’m in a lot better shape than most people I know.

Roll is an elitist, coming from money, working as an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, and utterly failing to pass himself off as either a “regular guy” or as someone disinclined to “self-congratulatory hyperbole.”

A disappointing read, and definitely DE-motivational. All this book did was emphasize how pathetic and UN-exceptional I actually am, and I already knew that.

DAYS XCVII

100 Days

A blah week of being exhausted by and at work, during which I have accomplished very little. I have been trying to complete the necessary paperwork, which really isn’t much, to list our house for sale with the Multiple Listing Service. I’ve been too tired and cranky after work to put much effort into it, other than one evening during which I completed most of it. Additionally, my spouse, who claims she really wants to sell the house, comes up with one excuse after another for putting it off. I don’t think she really wants to sell and move. Or possibly she is just overwhelmed by thoughts of moving. She keeps catastrophizing about how difficult a move will be — most of the challenges centering around dealing with her five cats.

Five stinking cats. Literally stinking. The exterior of our property reeks of cat urine, particularly when the humidity is high. Personally, I think that is likely to turn off any potential buyers right there. My spouse does not notice the stench. I suspect that I have become so inured to it that I no longer notice how bad the inside of the house smells. But anyway, her concerns over throwing a few cats into shipping containers and putting them on an airplane, even though we’ve done it before, apparently outweigh the benefits of possibly profiting by hundreds of thousands of dollars and being able to significantly reduce our living expenses while enjoying a much higher standard of living.

DAY XCIII

100 Days, , ,

Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life (©2009) by Gail Blanke is written in a breezy, informal, almost stream-of-consciousness style that ultimately begins to feel rather forced and disingenuous. She totally lost me on page 171 with, “I hadn’t heard back form a financial institution about whether or not they were sending me to Dubai to give an important speech to some of their most valued people in the Asia Pacific Rim.” Nevertheless, I slogged through the book to the end, wading knee-deep through the author’s gloating anecdotes about winning a regional swimming competition at age 12, ibeing the manager of special promotions for the New York Yankees at the age of twenty-four (“Yup. The only woman in Major League Baseball with what they called a front-office job”) and appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, of course she got the Dubai gig. The brief sections on “re-inventing yourself” were nominally interesting, but beyond that, I found the book lacking in helpful advice and I found little in the examples and anecdotes to which I could relate.

DAY XCII

100 Days, ,

Finished reading Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding (2nd edition, ©2014) by Tolin, Frost, and Steketee. A statement on page 45 made me laugh out loud because it so accurately describes my response to little bits of string, cardboard, or plastic packaging materials:

People with hoarding often run into trouble because of their intelligence and creativity. One way this occurs is when the person engages in over-creativity – the tendency to think of more and more uses for an object.

The passage goes on to describe a hypothetical situation with cardboard toilet tissue tubes! Yes, I periodically begin to compulsively save cardboard tubes because of their potential uses in diorama projects. Sometimes, when the clutter is particularly bad and I can’t find the box in which I’m collecting tubes, I simply pitch them into the room, intending to put them in the appropriate place when I get around to clearing the room.

Eventually I go on a cleaning binge and discard all the tubes. They burn really well in the fireplace… altho’ that is another potential reason to hoard them. Currently, however, I do not have any cardboard tubes stashed anywhere… altho’ yesterday I was tempted by an even more desirable paper towel roll tube!

Other than the quote above, I did not find Buried in Treasures to be particularly helpful or enlightening. Of course, being the third book I’ve read in the past few days on the same topic, it was unlikely that I would discover anything particularly new. Buried in Treasures takes a “workbook” approach to the process. To me, it seems like the book itself could be distracting, as it is filled with forms to fill out, surveys to take, and “experiments” to complete. The process as outlined in this book calls for quite a bit of writing. It’s an excellent book for people who like to procrastinate. There was a time when I would have happily immersed myself in the surveys and introspective writing exercises. At this point, I’m looking for insight into the psychological aspects of being attached to “sentimental” items, for practical tips on cutting ties with things and getting rid of stuff, and for motivation and “pep talks” to keep me rolling.

I have taken at least three filled trash cans out to the big trash can since starting to read these decluttering books, and I’m putting items to try to sell on eBay into a couple of clearly marked tubs. I am going through my boxes and tubs again, sorting things a bit better, and trying to thin things out. It’s slow going, and I still hang on to too much stuff. I also cleared away more outdoor clutter, like piles of yard debris and some broken tools and containers. I have some areas in mind on which I’d like to focus my attention next.

Additionally, having completely read three two-hundred page books, I think I have read more books in the past week than I read in all of last year! And I didn’t buy any of them!

We took some containers to a rental storage facility today. This will be a temporary situation, for no more than three or four months, in an effort to get the house cleaned up and listed for sale. Of my containers, I only took boxes of books today. I had thinned my book stash pretty thoroughly last summer, or so I thought. I still had seven tubs of books. I’m sure I could thin them out a bit more. I will do so before we actually move, if, indeed, we are able to sell the house.

I did not run today, but I got plenty of exercise moving boxes and tubs, plus cutting up a considerable pile of yard debris.

DAY XCI

100 Days, ,

Jogged 12.7 km today at a 7:18 /km average pace.

Finished reading the second of my library requests last night, The Secret Lives of Hoarders (©2011) by Matt Paxton. This book was skewed slightly toward providing the friends and families of hoarders insights and suggestions on how to deal with people who have a hoarding problem. The tone was lighter but more practical than the previous book, The Hoarder in You, that I recently read, with less psychological examination and more direct ways to work with a person who has hoarding or clutter issues.

The two most interesting points for me:

1. The author, who is a professional house cleaner, rates hoarders or clutterers on a five level scale he has developed over the years. He explained that in the early days of his business, “the scale that my company used was a pretty subjective one and based roughly on the number of dead cats we found in a house.” He then continues, “after years of working with clients we’ve refined our language.” I found this highly amusing, because according to his description of his current scale, I would rate myself a solid “2” on his 5-point scale (with 5 being the highest level of squalor). If someone were to carefully sort through my belongings, they would find precisely two dead cats – one a completely mummified cat carcass I discovered under a house many years ago, with the second being only a skull.

2. The author, Matt Paxton, states that in his experience as a professional cleaner, 99% of the “collections” he sees are worthless.

This last statement leaves me thinking about the things I intend to get rid of by selling on eBay. My spouse occasionally helps out one of our neighbors with filing and organizing. The neighbor pays her twenty dollars an hour for her work. When I list items to sell on eBay, at best I can process two or three items per hour, and that doesn’t necessarily include the time required to photograph the items and crop and tweak the photos, and it certainly doesn’t include the time (or space) spent storing the items or shuffling them around while I’m looking for something else. With occasional exceptions, the final “take” after paying eBay and PayPal commissions and shipping costs on any single item is often less than twenty dollars. And of course there’s always a significant portion of listed items that do not sell. Is it worthwhile, then, to keep boxes full of items that I intend to sell on eBay? I’m getting better about this in that I no longer keep items that will likely bring less than ten dollars. This is a result of rising shipping costs making the sale of inexpensive items impractical for the casual “garage sale” level seller like me. Now I’m starting to think about the rest of the items I retain for future sale.

DAY XC

100 Days, , , ,

Last night I finished reading The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life (©2011) by Dr. Robin Zasio, the first of the “decluttering” books I requested from the library a few days ago. I found it an interesting and helpful book – I have already donated a box of magazines to the library book sale that I’ve been lugging around for fifteen years!

The main idea I gleaned from this book is the concept of “cognitive distortion,” of seeing or thinking about things differently than they actually are. In fact, I strongly, strongly recognize about eight and a half of the nine listed cognitive distortions detailed in Chapter 5, including:

  • All or none thinking, or dichotomous thinking: you see all things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you believe yourself to have failed.
  • Over-generalization: a single negative event seems to you a never-ending pattern of defeat.
  • Discounting the positive: you reject positive experiences by insisting that they don’t count and ignore successes.
  • Mind reading: you negatively interpret the thoughts or feelings of others even though there are no solid facts that support your conclusion.
  • Fortune-telling: anticipating that things will turn out badly and treating the prediction as an established fact.
  • Catastrophizing: expecting the worst possible outcome and responding as though your prediction will come true. This tends to lean toward highly exaggerated conclusions.
  • Emotional reasoning: Assuming that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
  • Should statements: you try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts. The emotional consequence is guilt and a perpetual feeling of failure.
  • Labeling: an extreme form of over-generalization in which, instead of identifying an error in your thinking, you attach a negative label to yourself, such as, “I’m a loser.”

I found the book easy to read, straightforward, and helpful in understanding the psychological side of not just cluttering/hoarding, but of low self-confidence in general.