I voted that Mary should do whatever she likes. However, I just can’t shake the feeling that both Mary and Walter should take some of their obscene hoard of cash and spend it on something more worthwhile than material goods.
And I’m glad someone besides me remembers “Kathy’s Song.” I memorized it when I was an adolescent, so I knew the right answer, but the poll made me dig out “Sounds of Silence,” and that’s really good.
Do you think that anyone who ever collected anything is “hoarding”? And if so, did you think hoarding is always unhealthy? I feel like gathering a collection of stamps you will never use, or shoes you will never wear, can be done in a way that brings the collector joy, and doesn’t hurt anyone else.
We have a huge basement, mostly finished. My bathroom and man-cave are in the basement. I get dressed down there 95% of the time.
I’m sad for anyone who never got to experience unconditional “Go play!”
So many of my friend’s kids literally have something scheduled for them almost every minute of every day. It’s crazy. Most of them have both working parents so they have to have someone else shuttle these kids around to all their stuff. Even as an adult now I don’t have that much stuff to do. I don’t even see them play in their own yards it’s sad.
I had a friend of a friend who collected vintage metal miniature buildings. He lived alone, so his entire second bedroom was full of display cases jammed full of these buildings. It was actually kind of neat, because it was like a tiny museum with cases in the middle of the room with aisles to walk around them in. Then, you could close the door, and you’d never know they were there.
I loved Kathy’s Song! I clearly remember a day when friends and I went to the Topanga Plaza Mall and took the route home through Topanga Canyon. We stopped and splashed in the creek a little, too, even though it was drizzly. Then, we came home to my house and played Sounds of Silence over and over again. Extremely happy memory.
I occasionally had structured activities, but usually I just went out and played; though I was supposed to stay within a given area, which got larger as I got older. So as ‘go play within a given area’ happened a lot more often than a structured activity, I picked that one.
Mostly I was playing on my own; neighbor kids were far enough that visits had to be set up, at least in the form of telling parents who was going where and when they were expected home, and usually with somebody being delivered in a car. I liked playing on my own, though; no mysterious social tripwires to fall over.
I was a free range kid, but I was a Baby Boomer in a newly built neighborhood with a ton of kids. We walked everywhere until we got bikes, then, we biked everywhere until we had access to a car. But I guess by then we weren’t really kids anymore.
We made our own lunches, so we didn’t have to be home for hours. I’d say my range when I was under 10 was a couple of miles.
I was extremely free range in the 90s. I lived in a rural community. I think there were certain busy roads I was required to avoid but I regularly wandered 1-2 miles from my house, on foot and by bike, including going to the lake with my friends. At one point we rode our bikes down the dirt hills at a construction site. I would kill to give my son a childhood like that. I feel that kind of unsupervised time in nature is essential for children’s development and the current lack of unsupervised play is probably one reason why we have so many young people struggling to cope with everyday life.
Actually, no, especially since I know from personal experience that even if a friend calls it hoarding, there are many reasons why one gathers things in quantities they can’t possibly use. For instance, for my dad, it was called early Alzheimers. Or, in my own case with not sorting boxes of papers, trash and trinkets, it was called bad back, can’t lift.
But if you have more stuff than you can possibly keep track of you might want to consider that you are either a hoarder or a compulsive shopper and you should determine if you want to develop a different hobby.
Regarding a free-range childhood: Beyond, early childhood, I was lucky enough to be a free-ranger, but in the early years (pre-school and until I learned to ride a bike, I was fairly home-bound. Mom wanted me where she could quickly deal with my allergies and asthma attacks.
All summer we would all eat breakfast at home, then leave for the day on our bikes. We’d play kickball in the streets, street hockey in an unused parking lot, and softball in Beth Shalom’s lot.
We rode bikes into Oakland, go to the Carnegie museum and Phipp’s Conservatory (free admission for kids). Ate fast food, drank Isaly’s milkshakes.
I know 15 digits of pi. I figure that’s more than I’ll ever need for practical purposes, and the 89-79 pattern in the last four digits is easy for me to remember. If you calculated the circumference of a sphere the size of the Earth using my value instead of the true value, you’d be off by about 40 nm, about one percent of the diameter of a bacterium. I’m impressed by whoever knows more than 50, if that’s really true!
I think I understand why the basement being finished might make a difference, but I might be wrong. A “finished basement”, to me, implies one with walls, floors, and furnishings similar to what’s in upstairs rooms; so probably has a chair or sofa or suitable table to put clean clothes onto, and a reasonably comfortable place to sit if you like to sit to put your shoes on, or whatever. And an “unfinished basement” is likely to have a dirt floor and little or nothing in the way of furnishings; so unless you’re changing from one set of grubby work clothes into another (and why? one set got contaminated with something really nasty, maybe, and you’re changing in the basement because you don’t want to even bring those clothes inside? but if so, don’t just change clothes, get in the shower quick!) – anyway, it’s likely to be harder to keep the clean clothes clean, and yourself clean while you’re getting in and out of clothes.
I thought I knew four digits of pi, but when I checked I only know 3. I can’t remember the last time I actually had to calculate using pi, and if I needed to do anything other than a rough calculation of that sort I’d look it up.
I think some people memorize pi for the fun of it, or for a contest.
I was mostly free range but I did play Little League and organized soccer so I voted for some organized activity.
I’m a scientist and I only know pi to 5 places and only because of the “Engineers Cheer” most engineering students learn:
e to the x, dy-dx. e to the x, dx. Secant, tangent, cosine, sine. 3.14159. Cube root, square root, BTU. Compass, slide rule! Go [school name]
I think that human beings (some more than others) are hard-wired to enjoy acquiring and collecting things. And that, like many things we are hard-wired to enjoy, it can get out of control or become a compulsion.
It can. Acquiring a new stamp or a new pair of shoes can certainly provide a dopamine hit, which I would argue is not the same as genuine joy.
Whether it’s a problem depends on various factors, such as what—if anything—else you’re doing with your life, and whether that collecting is interfering with what you are or should be or want to be doing with your life.
I agree with you. And i don’t think we know enough in the poll to know whether the wife has a problem. I wouldn’t call it “hoarding” if it’s not a problem, personally.
The mailbox poll left out “mail slot in the door”, although that’s not what I have.
My grandparents’ house had a setup I haven’t seen anywhere else: there was a slot in the WALL which led to a chute that deposited the mail in a receptacle inside the wall. You’d open a little door in the wall to retrieve it.
I grew up in an urban neighborhood on the outer edge of the city. It was a pretty safe neighborhood. We walked to school every day (for a few years in te upper grades, I had crossing-guard duty) and roamed about the area rather freely.
These days, the way the suburbs tend to be laid out, kids walking much of anywhere is pretty risky, so “free rein” has rather fallen by the wayside, unless they are in a really upscale nieghborhood. Which seems unfortunate.
Until a few weeks ago, the only place to buy frozen corn was in the restaurant supply store, a place where I do not have membership, nor can I get one. But I recently found frozen corn online, and the site claims I can buy some in the nearest big town (Luzern). You have no idea how excited I am about this. I love corn. And the corn from Spain is not the same. And canned corn doesn’t cut it. Probably the frozen corn here will not be as good as American canned corn, but at least I can buy. And then I will look for a tomalito recipe which uses frozen corn.
I had to play Kathy’s Song to be able to place it. Sound of Silence is one of my all time favorites, also the version by Disturbed.
I know pi to 5 digits, hubby knows 9. We’re both engineers.
Technically our mail box is building mounted apartment mailboxes. Very typical in Switzerland.
