my name is karel. i'm 26 years old and reside in portland, oregon, although i'm from the east coast - new jersey and new york city, specifically. currently i'm a graduate student in school counseling. i have numerous artistic pursuits, including writing, graphic design, jewelry design, and knitting. (although i'm actually quite bad at knitting.) i have a failproof weakness for chef boyardee beef ravioli.
portland blog - my boyfriend brian and i document our adventures out west
sunshower design jewelry - my handmade jewelry business
scrawl - password-protected site for my writing (email me for access)
pdx hoods - coming soon!
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September 2009
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i love hoarders Labels: pop culture
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Oh dear! Sorry for the lapse in posting. I can't let my long-awaited re-emergence go sour so quickly! It's been sort of a crazy week, full of thoughts and new experiences. I've been so intent on going out and doing stuff that I've kind of let some stuff fall by the wayside... but I think I'm okay with that. I'd rather be more relaxed and less on top of certain things than constantly feeling like I need to manage everything in my life. A lesson that took a long time to learn.
Anyway, I'd meant to write a real post tonight (I even put a reminder on my phone!) but Brian and I got caught up watching a particularly gruesome and shocking episode of Hoarders, featuring a panic-attack prone 21-year-old and a half-blind 71-year-old cat hoarder. It's got to be the most disturbing one yet - animal control pulled over 70 cats out of the woman's home - 35 of which were dead. Some were mere skeletons. And the next day while they were cleaning out the garage, they found more!! (But they did not provide a final count.)
As a counselor-in-training, part of me feels guilty that I'm watching this show with such glee and satisfaction, but I like to think that as I progress through my schooling, I'll come to understand the hoarders, and the therapists who try to help them, more and more. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it - something I've been thinking about ever since I wrote my research paper on compulsive hoarding for my summer psychology class. All I've come up with so far is that I'm convinced that my mother is a hoarder (it's not as bad as people on Hoarders, nor even Clean House... but I maintain that it's because she's Asian and Asians feel compelled to hide their shame), and that she's passed on quite a few hoarding tendencies to her children. In the past few years, though, I've managed to overcome a lot of them.
This is probably a pretty discombobulated post - I'm sleepy, and I'm trying to tune out not only the snoring that's happening in bed next to me, but also the snoring that I can hear through the floorboards from the apartment below. AGH!!!
More to come, hopefully tomorrow.
