I chime in with a "haven't you people ever heard of, cleaning your goddamn room?", pt. 1: unpacking

in which sometimes you have make things messier before you can make things clean again [originally written on Thursday, May 14th, 2020]

As a person, I do not tend to possess the cleanest of rooms. I am generally fairly organized—I know where things are, and I tend not to forget things—but when it comes to actually decreasing the amount of disorder in my physical spaces I have never been particularly effective. My room at home has always been especially messy, in particular because I keep a lot of memorabilia and just general reminders of the past scattered around me, and, based on a cursory search through old blog posts, the last time I successfully cleaned my entire room [more accurately, my floor—my bookshelves have never been cleaned, nor has my windowsill] was November 2018, with a light attempt to do so again in May 2019 which has been held in stasis for essentially a year at this point.

To add to this confusion, I brought home a violin, a backpack, and a slightly-larger-than-carry-on-sized suitcase, which, apart from a few essentials, I have yet to unpack. Fortunately, I have not yet contributed to an increase in entropy in either of these systems, but that does still mean I have a lot of cleaning to do if I want to get everything back into a respectable state. Just sitting down and cleaning for the sake of it, however, is an utterly horrendous task which I despise with all my being, and therefore, I have decided to provide myself with some additional motivation by writing about the stories behind the sets of things I find in this cleaning process.

Step one of this plan, and the subject of this post—finish unpacking. This will add to the entropy of my room as a whole, but decrease the entropy of the suitcase and backpack. From there, I'll slowly sweep through the room as a whole, and start trying to construct places to file things away.

Part 1: Suitcase

• Clothes: So many clothes. I do not quite remember what inspired me to pack this many shirts, but I suppose that having them will be useful given that I'll be at home all summer. Then again, probably not, given that I already unpacked a subset of them and seem to be doing quite fine with just that subset.
• Fragile items: the benefit of filling a compartment with clothes is that one can put items that are likely to break in that compartment. In this case, some screen protectors, and a set of three picture frames given to me by a friend for Christmas which, at the moment, I do not have a place to display. More cleaning necessary before that's possible. This class of items also includes my favorite mug, a gift from my RSI counselees, which reads "today's goal: keep the tiny humans alive."
• Food: I've gotten a lot of assorted chocolate and other snacks from people, and I tend not to consume it, so I brought a lot of it home. The sunflower seeds went in about a day, but everything else was generally kept in the bag until now, when it is being forced to leave.
• Books! In particular, André Aciman's Find Me, which I attended the book talk for at the Boston Public Library, having read Call Me By Your Name the previous summer. I still haven't finished it, even having bought it in November. Also, Tommy Orange's There, There, this semester's MIT Reads book, which I got for free from the MIT Press Bookstore! This one I haven't even started, so maybe I'll finish it in the coming days. Also, the RSI 2018 Summerbook, which is definitely a different kind of book, but still has a lot of sentimental value and which I've been keeping with me for a very long time.
  
• Papers—lots of different papers from classes, most of which probably won't be important to keep, but for the moment hold sentimental value. In particular, the chemistry lecture notes aren't particularly interesting for me in and of themselves, but I found my flu shot sticker and my sticker from the Met, which was pretty cool.
  
  I also have my 101 Things To Do Before You Graduate, of which I haven't done many recently, unfortunately.
• Miscellanea: a first place letter opener/trophy from a Yankton debate tournament in 9th grade (probably in the suitcase to avoid TSA, probably also returning to its rightful place on the trophy desk). Also, four H-mart gift certificate envelopes, some of which contain gift certificates, and others of which contain surprises, like coins and stickers and whatnot.

Part 2: Backpack

I'm actually more concerned about the backpack, since I remember just throwing random things into it, and I suspect there's going to be a lot of disorder unleashed on my room from it.

• Most of the mess is concentrated at the front of the bag, and consists of just a lot of junk. Fortunately, much of what I dug out is probably going to end up staying in the front, such as my now five-year-old TI-NSpire from my Mathcounts days, some emergency/first aid materials, some backup phone wallets, and an assortment of pens and pen refills, including one from lean0nme, an anonymous campus support network I'm part of. Other items get donated to the family, or, more specifically, my sister.
• I have two whole wireless charging platforms, from when my old phone (which I later shattered) refused to charge via its USB port, and therefore needed to be wirelessly charged.
• Some Mexican candy from my friend who went to Mexico in January for IAP. Did I mention I tend not to eat snacks I have? This is kind of bad.
  
• A "State of South Dakota" challenge coin I got for being one of the highest achieving seniors in the state last year. I'm certainly proud of it, but given the recent connotations of our current governor, my feelings are...less than amicable.
• My Asymptones music binder! It's Asymptones purple, and contains most of the paper copies of music that I've picked up in the past two semesters, as well as some Concert Choir music.
• A variety of notebooks, mostly unused, from my trip to China last year. These may end up finding some use in the near future, if I pick up another creative bent which involves itself with physical paper. Until then, back to the backpack they go.
• More books! A play, Yellow Face, by David Henry Hwang, which I borrowed from a friend a while back and never started (also on the reading list), a photobook of pictures of me my parents made before I left which is quite joyous to look have, my RSI 2019 summerbook, again for sentimental reasons, and a physical copy of this very interesting report on the history of Next House, which we found in the supply closet while cleaning it out for a CPW that didn't happen in person.
• A document protector which contains all of my most important sentimental pieces of paper, such as a variety of cards and letters, some printed photographs, some door signs, and plenty of other miscellaneous content.
  
• The program from a concert I attended at Harvard for an orchestra my friend from high school plays in! They were playing Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, a piece I've played an abridged version many times in middle and high school, since it's one of our town's standard pieces of repertoire.
  
• My last copy of The Tech, our school newspaper. I've been picking up a copy of The Tech almost every week since I've been at MIT, and it turns out that this one, along with a variety of other papers (such as an unofficial transcript and some problem sets) did not make it into the normal filing system. Unfortunate. At the very least, however, I'll have some puzzles to do in the next few days if I get really bored.

There! Done! A suitcase and a backpack, leaving their contents all throughout the room. Unfortunate. I suppose that only means that there's more cleaning to be done and written about in the future though. What an exciting and daunting prospect.