on the throwing away of things

in college, i accumulated crap. this is perhaps something of an understatement. to put it in perspective, i drove a minivan. when moving, i frequently needed to remove the seats (this was easier than you might imagine, since at least one bench was always in use as some kind of residential furniture; i could write pages on how comfortable the seats in the 1989 plymouth voyager were), and still filled the entire van to the ceiling. shit you, i do not. i lived in the same place for six years, after that. it was spacious, comfortable, and i was lazy. i accumulated crap. some of it i thought i had a use for. some of it was just due to an innate tendency to hate throwing things away. if it could still be useful to someone, i just hated the thought of it being destroyed. if it could make someone happy, hell, if it had a face on it, i'd have a hard time throwing it away (this is why that sappy song in the middle of 'toy story 2' gets to me every time, and i'm not the least bit ashamed of that). i'm not only the founder of the inanimate objects party, i'm a firm believer in the idea that things can have personality. couple that with the sentiment that can get attached to these same objects, and now you understand why my room is a mess. well, that and i'm both insanely busy and somewhat lazy. so here i am, having to move a second time in a year, an event which punishes the pack rat in me. and i find i've become hardened to it. i've filled three trash bags and a recycle bag with things that were once important to me, things that, for whatever reason, thought were worth time and effort to preserve, things that were worthwhile. and now they aren't. t-shirts that were once in heavy rotation are now just bloating my clothes-pile, no longer part of the statement of 'me'. toys, trinkets, random pieces of paper that once recalled things that were important to me are no longer compelling enough to warrant an extra crap-box. have i finally grown up, grown old, grown tired? hardened or jaded? am i no fun anymore? did some important part of me die while i was working 12-hour days and no one told me? it troubles me that some goofy piece of crap that i picked up out of the toys r us clearance bin no longer is amusing enough to not be landfill-bound. did my efforts towards making my room more spartan make my life more austere instead?