Stuff

George Carlin used to do a great routine about stuff and where to put it - unfortunately it never helped me figure out what to do with mine. As an artist, I know that certain things need to be kept for future art projects, but I never know where to put those things. This means stuff like scraps of ribbon, mismatched nuts and bolts, broken pieces of china, watches that don't work anymore and more plastic creepy crawlies than most people have seen in a life time are stashed in weird nooks and crannies all over my house. I just don't know where to put the stuff!

I learned the hard way not to ask my sister for help. One night when we were chatting on the phone, I asked her what she does with her plastic spiders. Two days later I got this in the mail:



Now I had to find a place to put something even larger than my plastic spider, cause now I had abox and all of her plastic spiders too! I usually end up putting the stuff I don't know what to do with in a bag. These bags then lie around the house, because I don't know what to do with them either. So I stuffed the box of spiders between bags of things that I didn't know what to do with.

Here is the contents of one of those bags:



So tonight I was onthe phone with my sister again, but this time, I thought about the question more carefully. "I've got to get rid of this stuff," I said, "but it's so hard. Like what should I do with this plastic dagger..." "You can't get rid of that!" she said. "How about my ticket stub to the first Harry Potter movie?" "No." she said. I continues, "There's these plastic jumping Lederhosen." Keep 'em!" was her response. And so it went, so I gave up and the stuff all went back in the bag, but of course I cpuldn't figure out what to do with the bag, so I walked around the house carrying it for a while. My spousal unit asked me what I was carrying around and I told him it was stuff I wanted to throw away, "...like this plastic dagger." "You can't throw that away!" he said. "And the plastic jumpy lederhosen, those are too cool." And so it went. (And so all the stuff went back into the study next to the box of spiders and another bag of stuff I don't know what to do with.) What do you do with all that weird stuff that doesn't have a place? I know, I think I'll send my sister a little gift!