iRefuse to be a HOARDER......

"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter."

John Muir

I sometimes watch that show "Hoarders" in complete and utter disgust, but what makes me any different than any one of these people? Is it the fact that i don't keep old McDonald's Happy Meal toys stacked up to the ceiling? Nah, is it the idea that i like to straighten up the house every now and again for my own sanity? Nope, well it must be the fact that I am a fan of the power of "Pine-Sol", right? No, the only difference between the people depicted on this show is the fact that every now and again, I find it necessary to purge various things from my life. They can be inanimate, abstract, or even people. Be they new additions that aren't pulling their weight or old mainstays that have overstayed their welcome, I pride myself on not harboring a spirit of fear when it comes to ridding myself of these obstacles.

I rejoice when it's time to get a new cellphone for several reasons. I mean, it's amazing to have a functioning trackball, a clean screen, and unstuck keys, but my joy comes from the fact that I have to start over from scratch with phone numbers. It gives me the freedom to restart with only the numbers I have committed to memory and regather phone numbers as people call me. Thus allowing my BlackBURRRRRy to not be cluttered with crap. I digress.....

Today, I took the time out to clean up the list of people that I follow on twitter (follow me here). It seems as if twitter is sort of a microcosm of actual life. You have the lames that are trying to do whatever they can to get noticed, you have the people that joined it because it was trendy, you have those that use it to have a good time and don't take it too seriously, and you have the people that have yet to understand how to use it. This lead me to go ahead and thin the herd in cyberspace much like i did in the real world. On Twitter, you are said to "follow" the people that you pay attention to within the larger conversation that the site provides. I feel that the term follow is really strong and thus felt compelled to really decide who was worthy of having me as a "follower". Needless to say, I went from 600 down to 413. It was kinda parallel with the way that life sometimes works. I put people in several different categories to decide how we were going to proceed with them as a member of my twamily. This yielded 2 two large groups that were named were people that I will continue to follow and people that can kick rocks. These groups were comprised as follows:

Continue to follow people who:

*I actually know

*Are entertaining

*Are thought provoking

*Are any combination of the above

Discontinue following people that:

*don't have names that are readily recognizable (don't tweet often enough)

*Never say anything that I care to comment on

*RT-aholics (not everything that Lil Duval says is thought provoking SMDH)

*non-celebs with unreal amounts of followers

I feel that with these I was off to a good start, the next step is to unplug from the situation so that I may actually re-engage in real life. There are people that I haven't seen in years that I don't really miss since their every thought is broadcast daily on my blackberry.

And finally (yes I started a sentence with the word AND), I've started the painstakingly slow trek down memory lane that occurs when one attempts to delete content from their facebook account. I'm actually taking a much more reactionary approach to this one though. I've created a list of things that can have someones friendship status with me rescended. This list includes, but is definitely not limited to:

*Engaging me in a Pillow Fight

*Engaging me in a Food Fight

*Using numbers instead of letters (e.g. M3 instead of ME)

*Having profane language involved in your facebook name

*Anything that annoys me (up to my discretion)

So there you have it, ways to clean up your cyber life, next the real world.....