Item Number 39: Mini Filing Cabinet (and contents!)

Time in possession: 2 or 3 years

Description: Grey plastic "filing cabinet", designed to hold business cards. Top cabinet contains a small digital clock. Current contents are several dozen Nintendo Game Boy e-reader cards, several pieces of expired or seldom used ID, misc client cards, a padlock, some extra keys and other useful crap to have nearby and at hand.

Cost: The Cabinet itself reminds me of the kind of thing you'd buy for Regal for $7, so let's put it there. We'll also add in the e-reader cards (the complete set of all the NES classics plus a few extras from magazines and the like), $.99 a pop x13 sets (yay for failed media!) and the cost of the lock and other various crap that lives in there ($2.99! No real reason!) and we've got ourselves a grand total of $22.86

Story: This little guy sits on my actual filing cabinet (which doubles as an end-table) right beside the head of my bed and next to my ancient alarm clock (a future entry for later). Having a fake filing cabinet on top of a real one fulfills some sort of divine aesthetic in my mind. Yeah, I'm probably a little crazy.

I got this filing cabinet for Christmas one year, probably as a stocking stuffer the year I asked for a real filing cabinet and actually got it. My parents like playing jokes like that. In my extended family once you're 18 you join a pool and buy one gift for one family member. One year I asked my uncle for something off a list of games. When I opened his gift I found a ratty red sweater. After my folks got a good chuckle out of it, they revealed his actual gift. I guess my parents can be jerks some times.

There's something nice about having this cabinet. It holds all the cards that would otherwise get tossed into random drawers and mason jars and plastic tubs. It is the perfect balance of order along with the ability to just toss something in there and forget about it. You know, this post will one day be used to disassemble my fractured psyche and determine the exact point I went off the deep end. On that not, I think I'll leave you all. Have a good one.

Item Number 23: Belt Watch

Time in possession: About a year

Description: A battery powered classic-style pocket watch with a chain attached to a leather carrying case. The case has a loop which can be used to attach it to a belt.

Cost: A present from my folks, so free, but I can't imagine that it was more than $10. In fact, I would bet money that it was one of those $10 watches from a mall kiosk. $10 even. Okay, I've now officially used "$10" too much.

Story: I suck at owning watches. Actually, I suck at owning many things: Perhaps that is part of the reason the idea for this project appealed to me: I lose things so easily, so at least this way I can have a record of them, before they slip away into the ether.

But watches: I am particularly bad at holding onto watches. Ever since I bought my first watch when I was 12, I've been unable to hold on to one for more then a year. Well, that's not exactly true: I do still have some of my older watches, but only because they broke early on and have since been thrown into tupperware containers of broken things, each of them tossed in with the faint hope of one day repairing them, that hope becoming more and more ridiculous as additional broken items are added, until the box is essentially a garbage that has never been emptied.

Which is why this watch is kind of funny: I've had belt watches before, although usually the ones that clip into a belt loop. They tend to get smashed between my hip and a wall (sadly, I only have one occasion where I can blame this on being drunk, the rest simply my clumsiness) but got used frequently because of how easy it was to just clip them on my pants and go. This one, I never really used because it was a little more of a production to wear. Then, along comes my trip to Texas a couple of months ago: While I'm packing for the trip, I see my watch hanging next to my various wristbands, bracers and pendants. "Hey! I'll need a watch in Texas!" and so I toss it in my bag and think nothing more of it until we arrive and I'm changing.

The watch doesn't work.

I don't even know if it EVER worked (I assume it did, I probably checked it out when I got it although I have no memory confirming that) but it certainly doesn't work now.

So, off it goes, into my tupperware box, until the day that I (ha!) fix it, or decide that I don't need a tupperware box filled with broken shit.

Item Number 6: Clock, Wind-Up

Time in possession: Something like 3 years

Description: White plastic wind-up clock with gold metal (not real gold) details. Has wind up alarm, which is decently noisy. Makes ticking noises.

Cost: Stolen from my mother, so free. I'll call it 15$.

Story: To understand this clock, I think you have understand a phenomenon that I experience called "Morning Me". Some time in high school a friend told me that for your first 15 minutes of being awake you are legally insane. I don't know if that's true or not, but it would certainly explain Morning Me. You see, Morning Me is a person who takes over my body every morning and does crazy, inexplicable and downright inconvenient things. He has conversations with people who wake him up, assuring them that he's getting up, giving them false answers to their various questions and promptly goes back to sleep. He turns off alarms and promptly goes back to sleep. He continues sleeping despite many well placed mental notes or otherwise excellent reasons to be awake and then, most devious of all, HE ERASES MY MEMORY of any of these events. I cannot even begin to describe the amount of messes I've had to clean up caused by this guy, but let me tell you, he's a grade A jerk.

Sadly however, there's not a lot I can do about him. I mean, we seem to inhabit the same body and any fitting punishment to him would carry over onto me after he's departed and frankly I can't think of anything that would be sufficient motivation to get him to obey my wishes. So, I have to trick him.

Yes, it's a messy business, but the only way I can ensure that Morning Me doesn't get his way is to come up with ways of rousing him from his slumber. The best way to do this is by setting multiple alarms and having them all go off staggered, so as to force him out of bed where he generally quickly leaves my body, leaving me back in full control and capable of making my morning appointments on time. This clock was stolen/borrowed from my mother (depending on who you ask- When she saw that I had taken a picture of it when she asked to look over the project she quickly claimed that it was her clock. I think if I've had it for that long however, it belongs to me!) for such a purpose.

Sadly, it didn't actually work- Morning Me quickly discovered that since the alarm was wind up, it was a small thing to simply lie in bed and wait it out. Worse still, the ticking noises it makes make it harder for me to get to sleep in the first place. Also, I don't think I have the tenacity for a wind up clock. I'm a lazy bastard, one of the few things that Morning Me and I share.

You win this round jerk-face, but I'll win the war!