it occurred to me today that i have quite an obsession with boxes. i was clearing my room - something that i hate doing and yet is immensely satisfying at the end, but unfortunately my room being the ungodly mess that it is, i haven't quite reached the end thus far. anyway, i was clearing my room and i realised what an awful lot of boxes i have.

i just seem to.. collect boxes. i have a godiva box which is extremely convenient for earrings, and in fact i have my eye on a mezza9 box which is currently in the fridge and which i will snatch as soon as my family gets done with the chocolates (i would help with the finishing of the chocolates if not for the fact that all of them seem to be nutty and i hate nutty chocolate.) every girl should keep her earrings in a nice big box which used to contain chocolate, because the little chocolate squares are really convenient to organise earrings in, and chocolates and earrings are every girl's best friend. of course, if they're diamond earrings - and diamonds are a girl's best friend - you should let your mother keep them locked up in a safe instead of in a chocolate box.

i also have a famous amos heart-shaped red box which used to contain famous amos cookies, what else, and an old wooden box my mom gave me, for more jewellery. and then there's an oval-shaped dark pink straw box i bought in india, which i'm using for make-up. i have a larger dark pink straw basket similar to the box, filled with nailpolish bottles which i used to collect pretty avidly as well at one point.

and then i have another godiva box, and a ralph lauren cologne box, and another velvet box from some chocolaterie, all three full of greeting cards: birthdays, good lucks, thank yous, diwalis, christmases.

another ralph lauren box, this time one that contained a shirt, which has pictures. printed pictures, newspaper pictures, magazine pictures of my favourite people. an ikea box with bright polka dots in primary colours, for a lot of junk like Tube and Subway ticket stubs, entrance passes to Disney World, the White House, maps of Vegas, some cards from the Great Wall of China, brochures from various events. The tickets etc from travel, my mom and I alternately keep saying that we'll organise and put in albums with the pictures, but considering that the photo albums themselves aren't exactly in order, the tickets etc might as well just be dumped in a pretty box for... posterity, maybe.

then there's a whole bunch of shoeboxes, one with stationery (there's also a red ikea box with lots of those little notebooks that seven-year-olds around the time that i was seven years old, seemed to cherish), another with other junk like my mp3 player and a bunch of power cords or something all of which i never touch, and a nike box with a lot of little things from england-june2004. there's a bunch of empty boxes under my bed because the respective shoes are in various other parts of the room/house, and i think there's a teva box in a drawer containing a bunch of empty audio cassettes which were useful while i was still going for music lessons at fine arts, but i quit in october so i suppose when i get round to clearing my chest of drawers that will find a more useful use.

then there's a really nice reddish-pink box which was the box in which a desk-stationery set came for my dad from his company. you know, those things with a letter opener, a card-holder, stuff like that. anyway the box is large and pretty and i put all my performance memories in there. like tickets, brochures, scripts etc.

what else. on my dressing table i've got a yellow box for scrungies, a blue box for cotton swabs, a green box for odds and ends like nail-clipper, nail file, random stuff i'd never find if i didn't put them in a box. and the other day at jelita i was coveting a little transparent box that's like a suitcase except it's small. only problem was, it was a box with nailpolish bottles inside and i have more than enough nailpolish which i never use so i figured it was a bit useless to spend 30 bucks on. my mom says watson's has nice boxes like that anyway so hopefully she'll buy me one. i think chloe had a box like that, which in fact i think she bought from watson's. chloe has the cutest boxes. i think she's got a box fetish like i do, in fact!

ooh there's a coffin-shaped box under my bed which my guitar came in. all that's in it is dust, though, because the guitar's outside looking cool next to my bookshelf, with half the strings gone. when i get the energy to remember how to play the guitar again, or in fact relearn because i never did learn much, i will maybe go get the strings fixed.

also, there are about 15 million fileboxes containing all kinds of junk except... files. because the only files i seem to use nowadays are fat ring files which don't fit in, or need, fileboxes. the only useful thing i probably have in fileboxes is my sentimental collection of all the nice 'projects' i did since primary school. you know... overzealous primary school kid with a 100-page report about land transport? that was me. i did get a full score for that, so i was proud and i still have it. along with some useless geography map which was actually really pretty but the teacher didn't appreciate the prettiness and instead picked on the lack of contours or something silly like that. i always hated geography. *ducks from the geoggers' flying tomatoes* i also have an extremely fat report about the taj mahal, which i did in primary 5 for irs. that was fun.

eek i just sighted more boxes! under my dressing-table. there's a black box full of unknown objects. tomorrow for part two of operation cleanup, i will open it and investigate. there's also the box in which i received the hamburger at my birthday this year. haha i almost said "the box in which ________ gave me the hamburger for my birthday" but i realised that that secret is still supposed to be a secret. how fun :)

haha i had fun writing this post. although it probably wins the grand prize in the 'most inane post of the year' contest. still, my obsession with boxes will go down in history. and if i ever write an autobiography this post will definitely be included. (if i write an autobiography and this chapter isn't in it please... scold me or something.) i just read a magazine article today that the passage of time is the best thing to make the smartest men look like idiots. because thomas edison said before he invented electricity that the alternating current was a waste of time, albert einstein in 1932 said that nuclear arms would never be invented by the human race, and coco chanel called the miniskirt a joke.