My post-birthday cleansing act

I am a fan of clutter, I collect things hoping and thinking one day when I become the Andy Warhol of the Philippines people will scour my stuff and try to have a piece of me, although ironically even when New Yorkers were able to retrieve a bunch of Andy Warhol pieces they still feel left out because the good stuff are either lost or destroyed which in my case on the contrary Filipinos will just have to ogle at my binders and wonder how lovely and exciting my life must have been, I will cut the chase even after my death as I've always lived that way anyway.

Since the onset of blogging, micro-blogging, blog hopping and all these layers of the blogosphere the competition is just unfathomable, followers will just have to Google my name and the search engine will list all the stuff I have touched online and left to rot in the cyberspace, So I will stick to the traditional way of keeping memorabilia.

Yesterday I cleaned them all up with isoprophyl alcohol (OK make that disinfected) wishing it would destroy roach's traces on them and I''m even considering spraying them with insecticide to keep silver fish and the likes away from my precious journals, notebooks, keepsake photos and others. I may need to experiment on that bit though as paper are too precious to be sprayed on with chemicals. I don't want a team from the Unesco heritage preservation unit spending lots of money trying to "restore" them.

Now what were the things I've kept? When I was in college my study room was piled up with test papers, hand outs, small projects, name it you can find it and as I progress through college days they become a little tiresome to manage, I incidentally read a book about getting rid of clutters and it taught me to dispose ten items a day and now I'm regretting the gratitude I felt when I was relieved of seeing things around my room making it look like some international research department of an integrated marketing communications company. I should have never read that book, I have decided that no matter how stressing these things would look and no matter how much dust they accumulate I will keep them and store them and take care of what's left in them.

I've lost so many books I had bought when I was still in college, people borrow things and either they die or had some really serious personal problems that they don't bother to return them. I've had my fair share of not returning things I borrowed, the reason for that being is I either can't find the same exact item so I kept them for a while eventually losing contact (or intentionally losing contact) with these people. Whichever, you only think about these things when you have time to actually look at the things you have accumulated over the years.

It's a lot of fun browsing through all of them, you are brought back to the days when dreams are oh so vivid that you get past the reality of chasing them, I went through some old resumes and I can't believe I actually wanted to be this and that and today I am just another lost soul in the corporate world.

I've looked at some old photographs and you know everybody goes through the same nostalgic moment of looking back, the point is though I haven't really changed that much, some five years ago I still have the same preferences on so many things as of today.

But I know I have changed in a million ways and the ways I look at things, if Andy Warhol is alive today, he can proudly say that what he predicted some decades ago was just a matter of connecting the entire world through a vicious monitor powered by an intelligent box called a CPU and of course the Internet.

Oh! and that fifteen minute fame thing, everyone can get it, even pack rats like the couple who guested on Oprah? the woman shopped non-stop until their posh suburb home became a tragic storage building of consumerism.

It's lot more like my room but mine's not consumed yet with commercial impulses rather it's stagnated with buried dreams and aspirations. They're all piling up and that's scary.