The Packrat vs The Archivist

My mother in-law is a Pack Rat. She goes to yard sales, swap meets, closeouts and random stores and just buys stuff - everything: dishes, books, gadgets, containers, furniture, doo-dads, whatever - everything.

Sometimes she convinces herself that she needs it for her home or life, sometimes she convinces herself she will give it as a gift. But more than likely it will end up in her closet or shed in a box and never look at it or use it. Or she might ask David and I if we need it, even if it's something totally inappropriate, like lace curtains or a 20-year-old deep fryer.

This is the pack rat. I am often accused of having pack rat tendencies. David is too. This is because we both enjoy accumulating things. We exhibit what most psychologists call the 'antisocial behavior' of collecting stuff. Stuff we don't tend to 'use'.

For example - I collect Siouxsie and Cure stuff. I want to possess one of everything associated with Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Cure. T-shirts, records, magazines, badges, concert tickets, bootleg tapes. I collect Cure t-shirts not to wear but to possess. I collect Siouxsie records not to listen to but to own. There are other things: David has all his TV guides from the past 40 years or so, I have coins. There's much more. Between the two of us, we should have no problem outgrowing the huge house we recently procured.

But I think there is a very big difference between the pack rat and, as I classify David and myself, the Archivist.

Pack rats accumulate a cosmopolitan pile of various things which tend to be unrelated except that they are usually cheap and not intended for repeated or prolonged use. Most pack rats never use, nor even particularly like the things they accumulate. Rather, they have some deluded sense of potential utility with every thing they gather around them, and they tend to accumulate things as impulse purchase rather than as a conscious, premeditated desire. Pack rats are far less likely to use Ebay or Amazon to search for specific things they want, and they could never tell you exactly what they have, as they keep no track of it, and forget about it as soon as it leaves their sight.

The archivist is a genuine collector. His behavior may be just as antisocial and pathological as that of the pack rat, but the distinct difference between the two boils down to two things: storage and retrieval.

Archivists are so obsessed with that which they collect that they need to handle it and look at it often. They need to remind themselves that it is theirs, that they have this item they so sought, even if it has absolutely no utility to them other than being a possession which fills a space in their collection. Archivists and collectors will thus always have a systematic and (to them) logical method of storage and retrieval for all their collected possessions. They will seek to obtain a degree of expertise in the subject of their desire: pack rats often have huge collections of kitchen appliances but are horrible cooks who always eat out; archivists are total nerds who will pull facts and trivia out of the air, and will quickly bore others to tears if the subject of their desire becomes an active topic of conversation.

Pack rats make me very tired. They are always disorganized and hard to communicate with. Their thoughts are as scattered and poorly planned as their last trip to Wal-Mart. They are horrible to shop with because they want to buy everything but end up buying nothing half the time. They never make shopping lists, and never know why they want something when they express a need for it.

Archivists aren't much easier to get along with. They tend to like their stuff more than other people. They would rather caress a shiny coin in an airtight case than a boob or a cock. They can point out your life's disorganization and inefficiency, and if you keep them in your home too long they'll start reordering the books on your shelf to conform with their own eccentric methods. They shop efficiently and prefer buying things online, where they can punch in a search term and get exactly what they want without the clutter of superfluous items. They always shop from a list, they hardly ever make impulse purchases (not to say that they are good with money - generally archivists are always broke because their shopping lists are always so long and comprehensive, and because they tend to be addicted to Ebay).

But I am one of those archivist types. I know what I enjoy possessing, and I treat everything in my life as a possession to be properly stored and catalogued for future retrieval. Call me a sociopath if you want - I'll probably agree. Call me a pack rat if you really can't tell the difference; just don't try to convince me there is no difference, since I probably have several case studies I'm just dying to lecture you about...