House of Eratosthenes

I really can’t think of anything that’s more my calling, than an exercise making such a rigorous demand of 1) a talent for writing endlessly about very little, and 2) personal knowledge of how & why otherwise well-organized people become slobs. This, clearly, is a feat for which I was born.

There’s no need to alter my reply for posting here. Not even by so much as a single word.

Oh wow, what a hot button. I think I might be in a great position to help meet this challenge. There’s the “deliberate” form of collecting stuff, as in, “I think I’ll start a baseball card collection.” I’ll avoid that completely and concentrate on the accidental variety.

I’d break it up, because right off the bat I can see three distinctly different reasons people accidentally collect stuff, that have nothing to do with each other. You’ve come to the right place because I’m richly experienced in all three, and as you know when it comes to filling up X many pages with bloated crap, I’m without peer. Accept what follows as my contribution; take what you like, leave the rest.

There’s the personality-driven motive. One of the characteristics of the Myers-Briggs INTP personlity type (I read somewhere, can’t find it now) is a very narrow viewpoint at any given time with respect to tangible objects. We think about the project underway, not about the things we own — even tools we need to do those projects. And so, when a person fitting this personality type is doing something with the movie collection, and he has to trip over eight pairs of shoes that weren’t put away properly, the shoes simply don’t exist in his mind. Until there’s a project underway to pick up shoes, the shoes sit.

There is the psychologically-driven motive. Feelings of guilt, anger, resentment and grief can bubble to the surface in the form of a compulsive need to stockpile things. This is usually a hard case, reaching extraordinary dimensions in volume, intensity of chaos, and length of time. The tip-off is that the state of order itself is treated as an inimicable entity. If the pack-rat has an attic, the attic will become a junk pile. If he has a basement, it will be flooded with garbage. Every place a mess can be made, it’ll happen.

There is the motive driven by the domestic situation. When you’re living with someone you take turns going through the “White Tornado” hot flash (usually the gal, sometimes the guy). The challenge that comes up is when you get a piece of paper in your hands that belongs to your sweetie, but you can’t tell if it’s important or not. Doesn’t look like it is, but it might be. And you have dozens and dozens of these…s/he’s out doing errands, or off doing something. So these pieces of paper all go into stacks. Nice neat stacks, but getting taller and tippier and more and more top-heavy.

I’m looking at a few stacks like that right now. I’m pretty sure they’re 90% crap. But neither one of the two of us has the independent authority to make those decisions…and the dirty little secret is, while couples might collaborate on a bunch of other things, they don’t collaborate on this. So the stacks grow. Funny thing is, this is hitting us especially hard at the moment, even though we’re both home all day. She’s recovering from surgery, sleeping a lot, and I don’t want to get in her face about stuff. So there’s an interesting paradox: If you happen to like the person and want to be something of a sweetie-pie, the ultimate effect this has on the mess, is to make it grow.

Sometimes, the domestic situation can be very different and still contribute to this. Like when you despise each other. In the household that is about to be divided, we have an inclination to credit ourselves for whatever is good about the united household, consistently blaming the other party for whatever is unattractive or unappealing about it. And so we pile it high with junk. This is overlapping somewhat with #2, the psychologically-driven motive. Except this one is fused with a simple failure to accept responsibility.

I’m afraid we’re still short of the three pages, so I’ve let you down. Sorry, I really don’t have much more of an opinion about it.

I should add that since I sent that off, he wrote back and was extremely grateful. Also, my lady woke up from her nap and used her one good arm to clear off all those stacks of useless crap. Without getting up, I’m very sure there are some new stacks of paper junk getting ready to tip over in the study, with my name all over ’em.

Our house is not a pigstye. And there’s one major reason for that. I’m married to that reason.

My dad was a horrible stockpiler. I didn’t notice it growing up. We moved a lot and that kept it down. But the last place he lived … he was there for a good 25 years or so… and stuff built up.

My garage is a mess. And there’s lots of stuff in the attic.

I have another friend whose problems go waaaaaaaay beyond mine — she is totally guano-psycho with it, and piles grow everywhere piles can grow. But I digress. Back to me.

I think I figured out that mine grew out of a background of relative poverty. I don’t want to throw anything away that might be useful. And I’m a McGyver … lots of things might be useful.

I do have a breaking point where I must clean and purge, and when I hit it I do tend to get more rational and purge a lot. But the wife’s breaking point is at least an order of magnitude lower than mine. And somehow the tension between our two … views … seems to work ok. I’m aware of her intolerance for much disorder at all, and she realizes that there are going to be minor messes for a while while I work on things. I realize that I’d better not let it sit around for too long and I’ve gotten pretty good about keeping the interior of our house relatively “pile” free.

The garage suffers for this, though. And it’s a one-car garage (if we actually put a car in it… which we can’t because it’s full of stuff to tile the bathroom, a table we haven’t refinished, tools, scrap wood, beer brewing equipment, camping equipment …. yeah. It’s a mess. About once or twice a year it gets cleaned up to something reasonable, and then chaos re-develops. Things that she finds in the house that she doesn’t consider something that belongs inside the house go out in the garage for me to deal with. And it usually takes me a long time to get around to it.

I spent a little time in the garage yesterday. I made a decent dent in it, but it’s still only a dent. House looks nice, though. 🙂

I’m actually grateful that my wife is a neatnick. I like living in a clean, uncluttered house. I don’t have to be embarrassed when we have visitors. And because her tolerance is so much lower than mine is … she makes sure it gets kept that way. We have the occasional tiff … “how long is that going to stay there????” and “What the hell happened to my [whatever]????” But we make it work.
- philmon | 06/16/2008 @ 12:23
My theory on this subject is quite simple: “stuff expands just enough to fill the available space.” Limit the space and you limit the junk. I’m living proof this theory works.

Kinda-sorta. Almost.
- Buck | 06/16/2008 @ 14:27
That theory is definitely true … stuff expands to fill the available space (just like work expands to fill the time allotted).

But … it turns out (and I just made this up) there is such a thing as “stuff pressure”. pV=nRS (pressure times volume = the number of items times the space/stuff constant, times the average physical volume of each piece of stuff).

I’ve seen it in action. I have a friend who has a severe psychological hoardng problem. Once the stuff expands, much like in a gas, there is established a certain physical distance between each piece of stuff or between “stuff clusters”. However, this is assuming that the amount of stuff remains constant.

If you hold the voume constant and you’re like this woman, you will also have a positive “stuff flux”. This means that there is more stuff entering the container than is leaving the container — in this case, your house (see George Carlin, “A Place for My Stuff”).

As the pieces of stuff have to reside in closer proximity to each other piece of stuff, eventually noticibly limiting even the volume of air left to breathe in your house.

Since volume is constant, and the number of items of stuff has increased — and S is a finite and positive unless you’ve started collecting anti-matter, or “anti-stuff” (which, if you discover it please inform my wife. She’d probably pay handsomely for it. Or kick me out. Whichever is easier). Anyway, given the increase in stuff, the positive value of “S”, and the also-positve R constant, the “stuff pressure” must increase.

Now “stuff pressure” manifests itself in part, but not wholly — still, it is a proportional, positive relationship — in the stress level of a certain legal co-habitant of my abode, and of many others. This pressure may temporarily be alleviated by vacating the house, say, for a nice dinner out, but the effects of the stuff pressure return immediately upon return. Flowers aren’t much help, either, as they add to the stuff pressure which has, at this point, already surpassed the threshold level. (Flowers added to a household which is still below threshold stuff pressure level, are, in fact, a good thing as long as they are removed when they start to wilt).

There are a few ways of dealing with stuff pressure … one of them would be to compress certain volumes of stuff into smaller sub-volumes, such as, for instance, closets, garages, shellving units, attics. However, this does not change the overall stuff-density of the house and some stuff-pressure effects can linger.

The only two really effective ways to alleviate the problem is to increase the volume of the stuff container (building an addition, buying a bigger house) or to induce negative stuff flux, usually intensely and over a short period of time, so that the number of stuff items actually decreases. Decreasing stuff items with a large “S” contributor will help the most, but in the end, stuff must go.

Even if we increase the size of the stuff container, eventually a positive stuff flux will, in fact, catch up to that container as well, so we should make sure that stuff flux is reduced to zero (stuff in = stuff out) or below if we do not wish to induce stuff-pressure stress syndrome once again.
- philmon | 06/16/2008 @ 20:24
Thank you all!
- McCaylen | 06/17/2008 @ 12:27

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Why Your House is a PigstyeSunday, June 15th, 2008

Why Your House is a Pigstye
Sunday, June 15th, 2008