A Ticketing Nightmare

As part of my New Deal, Lean and Mean, Low Fat, No Clutter lifestyle (and more on this NDLMLFNC strategy in a later post) I decided to give my bedroom a long overdue clean up.

Not that my room is particularly messy anyway, but between my inability to throw anything away and procrastination in filing stuff away, there was enough clutter hidden away in drawers and the like to fill a couple of bin bags. I had chains(!), locks, trophies, yo-yos, key rings, stopwatches, cheap sunglasses and various other useless trinkets built up over the years, just taking up way more space than they deserved. In the bin they went.

Considering that I can't stand collecting things (DVDs, books and even video games just seem like more ways to waste space and attract dust), I also had a worryingly large collection of tickets. That's around 50 flight, 15 theatre, 32 museums and other attractions, five cricket matches and a whopping 420 cinema stubs, all collected over the past ten years.

Originally kept just to remind me that I had actually done all these things, they've all become less important and that partly due to this blog. And since I've never even bothered to look through them at all, it made little sense to keep any of it. Although it was quite hard, in the bin they all also went, bar tickets to the 1999 semi final between Pakistan and New Zealand at Old Trafford, Oasis at Wembley Stadium in 2000 and my graduation from Imperial in the Royal Albert Hall in 2001.

And it was actually pretty liberating, getting over the obsessive (and compulsive) need to collect rubbish like this. Part of the NDLMLFNC is to become more rational in the way I act and think and I hope by doing something as drastic as this helps with that aim. Of course the other half of the plan is to keep everything in order, and only time will tell with whether I succeed with that.

EDIT: Soon after writing this post I spent a good fifteen minutes digging out those theatre, sports and gig tickets. Epic fail then, but hey maybe I should have gone with baby steps in the first place.