Packrat

Having hit the anniversary of my last big move (the most recent incidence of my realization that I have Too Much Shit) I am trying to reduce the amount of junk I have sitting around through a series of simple questions. My flowchart is as follows:

1) Do I need it (or is there a reasonable chance that I will need it in the near future)?
Yes --> Keep Organic Chemistry texts
No --> Go to #2

2) Do I want it?
Yes --> Keep Suikoden action figures
No --> Go to #3

3) Do I unacceptably offend the family member who gave it to me by throwing it out?
Yes --> Keep pretentious Beethoven-bust piano light
No --> Find a new home for Richard Marx CD


In theory, it's a great system. In practice, there are a few stumbling blocks (e.g. my definition of "reasonable chance" and "near future," pretty much the whole of #2, and the sheer number of objects that might potentially fall under #3, requiring me to make precarious judgment calls). But I'm working on it.

Post-apocalyptic dream tiger.

Last night, I dreamed that I had a pet tiger. We talked to each other, but only I understood him. Apparently I'd gotten him through some sort of rescue-fostering program, and even though I was fairly sure we were on good terms and he wouldn't attack me, I was still very respectful of him.

This was all well and good until I had to leave him at a pet boarding house. And I was trying very hard to explain to the caretakers, "No, no. Don't talk down to him. He can understand you, and you don't want him to think you're patronizing him. You... wouldn't like him when he's angry."

Also, there was something really fucking creepy with a vast, haunted post-apocalyptic area near the border between here and... somewhere else... and the Things that lived there did not like us exploring it. But we had no choice: We had to explore it, because the human race had nowhere else to go. So it was our job to find the things that we really did not want to come face-to-face with, and evict them. And people died, snatched by Things that they never saw and tormented by voices that lurked just out of your comprehensible range of hearing.

But we were safe there, my tiger and I.