Packrat-itis. We all have it, to some degree or another. Come on, admit it! You might have convinced yourself you are a collector or that one day you will make that gourmet meal and that’s why you have 6 boxes full of recipes cut from magazines and newspapers. You might also tell yourself that those cute little signs with cartoon frogs with sayings like “Welcome to our Pad!” will be worth something someday or that when you die, your children will remember with fondness all the bending over lawn ladies, windcatchers for each holiday, every kind of outdoor blinking, glowing animated Christmas decoration known to man and a huge stash of Beanie Babies and Smurfs…but they won’t. Your heirs will only be wondering how much it will cost to cart the stuff away and how long it will take to do it. They will also know how your spent your time and money as they load up all the “As seen on TV” gadgets and QVC must haves you purchased over the years.

I once had a friend that had a whole Tupperware tote box FULL of slippers, neatly packed away on a closet shelf. Many of which, she said, were given to her as gifts over the years. Some in her size, some not. Why did she keep of them? Perhaps for the day she retired and would never have to wear regular shoes again. She had a pile of inexpensive watches (and a few really nice ones , too) and also has the largest collection of lighters I have ever seen. They tend to suddenly pop up in various unexpected places: TV armoires, medicine chests, garden sheds…in different levels of usage. I’m told that smokers and lighters seem to find and lose each other pretty easily, so maybe hers wasn’t so much a collection but an unconscious appropriation.

And what about Imelda Marcos and her shoe collection? Now that’s a packrat! It doesn’t matter that they are designer shoes. No one person could possibly wear them all. What a waste. I have nothing against fashion but to have a museum of shoes when people are starving? I just couldn’t do it, it seems greedy and obscene. I know there “sneaker-heads” out there that buy, sell and collect limited edition sneakers. For many it’s a thriving, lucrative business buying and reselling the sport shoes, so they have an excuse.

To be fair, there are many things that are surprisingly collectible and one never knows these days who, will buy what, on EBAY. But doing Ebay research, creating listings, selling and shipping the items all take copious amounts of time.

And while we are on the subject of fairness, I must say that I am a collector of paper. It seems I always keep catalogs for the day when I just might need something from Carol Wright or Signals or have the money to buy a nifty item from Hammacher Schlemmer for “the person who has everything” on my holiday list. I also make lots of lists (see also previous post about my propensity for lists and it’s origins). Once the list is made I tend to keep it around because somehow I never quite get all the way through that list. It rarely occurrs to me to make a fresh list. I also keep receipts of any kind. I even have a handy-dandy little accordian file to keep receipts, categorized by type of store. I tell myself it’s for tax reasons or because I might have to return something. Alas, the reciept I am looking for always ends up missing and invariably, at tax time, no matter how I try, I always end up finding additional receipts that somehow never made it into the tax file. I keep those too, thinking that if I get audited one day I may need them to show I really spent more that I was able to claim and in my mind, this will save me from the evil tax man.

Packrat-itis, comes in many forms, I bet you or someone you know has it, too and might benefit from a Packrat Anonymous meeting or two, or three…

Just a thought I caught flying by, what do you think?