I recently left my job in Advertising to move back to Atlanta and build a fantasy sports company. The guy I was going to room with had a month left on his lease. So, I decided to stay with my parents for a until his lease ended.
It had been several years since I had lived at home—well, for any significant period of time. My room was filled with old toys, clothes, books and an assortment of oddities. When I got home, I knew it was time to do some spring cleaning.
As a kid I hated giving toys away. It had been a month or two since I had played with a toy fire truck. My mother decided to give it away. I gave her a hard time about it, and she refrained from giving away any of my stuff since. As a result, piles of stuff slowly amassed over 15 years.
Sometime after graduating from college, I adopted a minimalist philosophy. I make purchases with an emphasis on utility. If an object doesn’t serve a purpose, don’t buy it. If something I purchase breaks or can no longer be used, I sell it or give it to charity.
I discovered that the mental overhead of owning physical things was too great, and that I was better off without them. It’s the same type of minimalist mentality that Kelly Sutton has, although he may be more extreme than I am. With that said, the stuff littering my room was driving me nuts.
Sorting through the piles of stuff on my dresser and in my desk I came across a few gems, that I thought I’d share:
- Select comics from a Dilbert calendar.
- A Maxwell Recordable Mini Disc, which the MP3 player completely wiped out.
- Floppy Discs containing the original Doom.
- An original Fulton County Library card.
- A letter my father wrote years ago waiting for the day I turned 21.
- My original business plan for FRUGGL.
- An Xbox Live Diamond Card with my name on it. It expired in December of 2008.
- An old Xbox Magazine containing a demo disc of Dead or Alive 3.
- A build tree for Warcraft III.
- A disc for Norton Anti-virus 2002
- An old remote for a tv that was old a decade ago. I was given that TV when I first got an N64.
- Little metal vietcong soldiers.
- The game box for Command & Conquer.
- A seashell turtle with glasses.
- Red Alert with Counterstrike and Aftermath expansions.
- Unreal Tournament Gold Edition, which I needed to play Tac Ops. It was the unsuccessful opponent of the Half-Life-based Counterstrike.
- Total Annihilation
- Sim Tower, Sim Isle, Streets of SimCity
- Battlefield 1942
- Diablo II
- A letter from JP, a long-time friend, when he was in bootcamp. Last Saturday he and his wife had a little girl.
- Some business and organizational management books I never learned from nor respected.
- A Guide for The Learning Company’s Reader Rabbit 3. Available for Windows, DOS and Macintosh.
- A Maxis Software Catalog dated 1994. Remember when EA didn’t own the Sim franchise?
- A polly pocket figure I had stolen and hidden from my sister.
- My Dad’s old coin collection, which came from his mother’s basement.
- The biography of WWF superstars Kurt Angle and Mick Foley.
- Several old hard drives. When I built new computers I always saved them, but never added them as a storage option. How long ago did computers stop using IDE cables?
- A paper I wrote titled “Poverty and Prosperity in Respect to the Blackwell, Dahlia and Gray Mountain Communities.” I wrote it for a senior level-class as a freshman. There’s a story here.
- Football tickets to from Auburn’s 2011 BCS National Championship game.
Although now I’m in the new apartment, I’ve still got a closet of stuff to go through. I’m certain that will add to this list of oddities.
