Just call me "The Shred-Meister!"

I really hate those people who (usually with eyes closed, head tilted back, as though they are smelling something distasteful) say "My New Year's resolution is to not make any resolutions...because I never keep them." How clever.

I'm very big into goal-setting and making big mammoth projects for me and chopping them up into little pieces and tackling the pieces one at a time. It works for me, anyway.

Here I come to a little sticky part--I may have lied in my blog somewhere back where I mentioned a box in the attic that has random things in it--when I went up to fetch Fran's ridiculous quantity of Christmas boxes this year, I set aside at least seven or eight boxes which have in them:

1) Every greeting card ever received into my hands
2) Every receipt I've ever had (not sorted, just lumped in toghether in no order)
3) Every check I have ever written, stacked in the old checkbook boxes
4) Notes from Parisitology class in 1994
5) Twenty-three leftover copies from a speech I gave ten years ago
6) Every tax form I have ever filed
7) Warranties to things I don't own anymore
8) Shirts and hats and collector soda cans and an empty coke bottle, three baseball cards, and 12 postcards
9) A wooden crucifix I stole from my great-grandmother's estate when I was 7
10) Every letter and ticket stub from when Fran and I dated (Yep, even the ticket stubs from the first movie we went to see togther: Field of Dreams, September 2, 1989)

It became clear to me that I needed a shredder--I mean, come on, we can't have someone stealing those twenty-three copies of my speech and delivering my thoughts across the earth, right?

No, I guess more like all the stuff with my credit card info, identity, etc. I'm super-paranoid about that stuff, so occasionally I'll just burn it in the backyard (it smells terrible). My goal is to condense my mementos into one or two reasonable-sized boxes and shove them back into the attic for all time.

I went out and got the Shred-Master 7000--a great leap forward in itself, but a mental change needs to take place as well. I've been doing better and better at losing the annoying pack-rat personality, but I tend to get this gloomy, panicky feeling whenever I'm disposing of something that I may possibly be called to recover.

Yeah right "Ahem, Mr. Mike, could you plesae present that check you wrote back in 1992 proving that you had the oil changed in your car?" Me, sheepishly sorting through tubs of boxes with check carbons flying everywhere, rifling through bank statements..."No." Getting very disapproving glares.

The truth is that I rarely have to dig something out of a file--why am I keeping all this crap?

So yesterday I fired up the shredder and went nuts, shredding unsolicited credit card applications, receipts for meals that were eaten during the Clinton administration, and phone bills from three addresses ago. I stopped for a minute, reminiscing about the fishing license I fed into it from 1993, then watched it get sucked into the blade and spit out as confetti.

Ahhhh. Like a weight off my shoulders.