Well, i’m sitting at my desk, eating dinner… how terrible I know! And i’m noticing my collection of nick-nacks is growing. Do you have the same situation? I sort of feel that we’re programmed to want to collect junk. Maybe it isn’t fair to say it’s junk, but in many cases they are just sentimental items that have neither intrinsic or functional value.
I got a paperweight the other day from the blood bank for donating 10 gallons of blood. It’s nice to look at, but seriously, who uses a paperweight? In fact I think the term paperweight is obscene for what we should really call it… an object that we don’t want to call a token.
In the Navy and else where now, people are getting coins. Coins are cool, but where do you display these things. I mean it can get out of hand. I’ll tell you I have some cool coins from ships, and just got a commemorative one for the 5K run I did the other day, but seriously… what am I going to do with it all.
We collect and keep things like:
- books of matches,
- coffee cups,
- tourist maps, and
- mini calendars,
- business cards,
- Keys to things we don’t know what they do,
- used perfume bottles,
- cables and cords,
- floppy disks,
- greeting cards,
- VHS tapes but no tape machine,
- decks of cards from casinos with the notch on the side,
- smashed pennies from a machine, and
- books to the ceiling,
- trophies and awards stashed away neatly,
- pins from theme parks or fraternal organizations,
- that first dollar we earned, and
- that rubber Geico gecko,
- your homework from 3rd grade,
- a report card with an A,
- a box of photos unlabeled where you’ve forgotten the names.
I could go on and on about what we collect and keep, and I wonder as we grow old who will care about these things. My grandfather had so little keepsakes, and neither did my dad. I know they were sentimental and cared of these crazy things, but what’s meaningful to one, may be meaningless to others. Maybe I passed by some of those things that my Grandfather or Dad thought would having that great wiz-bang meaning.
I don’t know what to do with all of my stuff. It is my stuff you know, and my stuff ain’t JUNK! 🙂