I'll take a break from my typical pattern of posting to talk about 
stuff and the accumulation thereof.  

Everyone has a junk drawer at home. It is almost a human universal 
in modern life; that box filled with little things that don't fit 
in any other part of your home organization scheme.  As far as I 
can remember back into my childhood, we had one.  And I can 
remember seeing one at just about everyone else's home that I've 
spent much time in.

I thought about this recently and noticed that the junk in these 
drawers, this "stuff", seems to have been accumulating at a faster 
and faster pace.  I'm not sure if it is because society in recent 
years simply produces more random "stuff", or because my kids (8 
and 11 years old) are now at the "stuff" inducing age, or both.  
Whatever it is, we have tons of "stuff".

One thing that really struck me about all this "stuff" was 
realizing that we have purchased none of it.  It has all come for 
free, from local kids events, from behavior or performance rewards 
at school, from conferences or events that my wife or I have 
attended, or from various other places.  Bouncy balls; slinkies; 
plastic figurines; cartoon shaped erasers; squishy stress 
relievers of all shapes; wind-up toys; fidget spinners; no-load 
carabiners; brain teaser puzzles; bottles of bubble liquid; random 
other toys; blinking LED lights; slap-wrap bracelets; and a lot, 
lot, lot more.

One of my common thought patterns in observing modern life is to 
imagine what someone from 10,000+ years ago might have thought.  
Here I am, with junk drawers that seem to produce "stuff" on their 
own, as though they would continuously overflow with widgets and 
doodads if not closed tightly -- these widgets and doodads; each 
remarkably complex engineering feats in the broader picture of 
human evolutionary history; made from diverse synthetic 
substances, many with electro-mechanical parts, all of which 
resulted from complex manufacturing processes. Any one of them 
would have been a fascinating marvel, incredibly valuable, a 
magical object even, to a forager living near Caverna da Pedra 
Pintada in Brazil 10,000 years ago, or to a neolithic farmer from 
Ain Ghazal in Jordan.  Yet I have a problem with them littering my 
house.

One reason these things accumulate is that I feel bad throwing 
things away into a landfill.  I always convince myself that I'll 
scavenge parts from them for some practical use.  But maybe I 
should give that dream up.  Maybe I will get a schwag shovel at my 
next conference, that I can use to scoop all this "stuff" into the 
trash.