Shirts

I have a problem that I own too many shirts, and it is a problem that has been growing since 2001. The issue is that I gain shirts at a much greater rate than I get rid of them. The real problem is that over the past two decades I have garnered a great collection of shirts that I really don't want to part with, but I really can't handle any more shirts. Luckily some shirts naturally fade away, get destroyed and lost. But the problem is that every year I get a few shirts that I want to keep for a long time, and will probably never get rid of.

It is this reason that I have shirts from when I was in 1st grade. That shirt is the immortal Square Lake Indoor Soccer shirt that I have worn to bed for 16 years and amazingly still fits well. I would guess that shirt has seen every significant event in my adolescent life. There are others, my TWO "Russell Reunion" shirts are from 1999 which puts them at 9 years old this July. I still have all of my high school class shirts (although I threw away my graduation shirt). My problem is that I can't keep these shirts forever, and I don't wear most of them.

So I developed a plan to systematically remove shirts that I don't wear. I started hanging all the shirts that I washed on the right side of my closet. So every time a shirt got worn and subsequently washed, it would get put on the right. My plan was that after a few months all the shirts on the left side of my closet would be the ones that I never wear and thus should get rid of. Unfortunately my plan failed for two reasons.
a) I found that there were shirts that were on the left side of my closet that I liked, but didn't get to wear often, like my Jim Davidson Tree & Lawn Service shirt which I inherited from my father who is cousins with Jim Davidson. Also, I don't get to wear my 1992 Ross Perot campaign shirt a whole bunch except on special occasion. Also in the winter all of my T-Shirts would end up on the left side, and in the Spring all of my sweaters would filter down to the left, but I still need them.
b) I unconsciously started to wear things from the right side of my closet. I realized that when I went to pick out a shirt I would start looking at the right side, because I knew that was where the good shirts were. So if somehow a bad shirt got placed on the right side of my closet, it would continue to be worn, and remain on the right side of the closet, while perhaps potentially better shirts were making their way down to the left side of the hanger rack.

But this did have the advantage of making my shirt seek time decrease dramatically. Also during the summer I wouldn't have to look through warm clothes to find T-Shirts, because they had all ended up on the other side of the rack. It also gave me an idea of which shirts I hadn't worn in awhile, so I could be able wear a good variety of shirts. So while it failed in its original goal of being a benchmark of unwanted shirts, it ended up being a good system for organizing my shirts.

So there you have it 600 words on my shirt situation.