Rating garbage i found in my room
How did I end up with two different pairs of counterfeit designer sunglasses?
Spring cleaning season is here and I’ve been forced to confront myself about how much genuine junk has been lingering in my space for years and years and years.
Thirty T-shirts. Fifty ChapSticks. Colored pencils I didn’t even know I owned. A small army of pens, all of which I tested this morning, none of which had any ink in them. Jewelry that I can’t bring myself to get rid of because I can’t remember if it came from my great-grandmother or not.
This all could’ve been avoided if I was just a little more discerning about my spending habits to begin with— so here I’ll be holding myself accountable about all the junk in my room that I kiiinda (or, in some cases, extremely) regret buying.
#1. SUUKSESS Women Off Shoulder Double Lined Long Sleeve Shirts Basic Going Out Tops
A couple months ago I caved and bought a going-out top from Amazon because I needed to hit the $35 minimum for free shipping. I don’t normally shop for clothes on Amazon; I like to think I’m above that. (Don’t call me pretentious. This is something it’s legal to be pretentious about.)
Now I squeeze into this little thing once per week and feel like a sausage in a casing and try not to think about how it’s made of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately for my uppity attitude and ill-defined politics, I get about eight thousand compliments per night when I wear this top. Is it because I’m now conforming to the Lincoln Park nighttime uniform of black top and jeans? Well, of course! Everyone knows there’s nothing more attractive to a drunk guy in a striped Big Ten polo than a SUUKSESS Women Off Shoulder Double Lined Long Sleeve Shirts Basic Going Out Tops.
Rating: 8/10. In terms of garbage in my room, this one’s a signifier of the worst of the worst. Fast fashion. Conformity. Heternormativity, even. The weird material it’s made of will likely net me a couple bucks ten years down the line in a class-action suit. But… it kind of slays…
#2. Every size of crochet hook. I do not know how to crochet
I bought these, plus some yarn, in what could only be described as a fugue state two years ago and never learned to crochet. They (referring to the yarn crafts community, of course) say that at some point in your life, you choose either knitting or crocheting, and I’d already learned to knit during Covid lockdowns so doing both was just too big of a pipe dream.
Rating: 4/10 for the innocence of my starry-eyed plans that I was not eventually able to live up to. Goodbye, dreams of crocheting a weird little shirt that will end up being impossible to wear anyway due to the bra situation.
#3. Counterfeit Prada sunglasses from DHGate
I wanted the real ones, but settled for a fraud* because I have an oddly-shaped face and wanted to make sure they looked good on me before purchasing.
Not only did they make me look like an extra in a straight-to-VHS Matrix sequel, I quickly learned these weren’t for casual wear. I tipped $1 at Dairy Queen and the worker scowled at me, probably because it seemed as if I had $490 on my face and was cheaping out when it came to tipping. “They were $26.49!” I wanted to scream.
On the other hand, I wore them to a party where I didn’t know anyone and for some reason it seemed like everyone wanted to be my friend. I thought I was just killing it that day, but then I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw the Prada sunglasses and learned that all my new buddies might be vultures.
Knockoff fashion might be the most unethical purchase on this list, but thank God I did not spend $500 on sunglasses. Am I making a pro-DHGate argument here? Maybe. I actually think this might have been, personally, a pretty responsible decision.
Rating: 5/10. Unfortunately I can’t resell these because it’s a literal crime to do that. I don’t know what to do with them.
*It’s not a crime to buy counterfeit fashion! Just illegal to sell it! This was all legally above board!
#4. Aqua Globes™
I bought these before Googling how to care for my plants and it turns out they’re desert plants that need to be watered every two weeks or so. I think I was just so taken with, so charmed by, the idea of being a glamorous Aqua Globes™ owner that the health of my plants wasn’t top of mind.
Do you remember the women in those commercials? The middle-aged housewives in their Tuscan kitchens effortlessly putting a gorgeous hand-blown glass globe into their healthy houseplants? It was a lifestyle that Aqua Globes™ was selling, and in the year 2025 I was finally ready to buy in.
Rating: 2/10. Decent product, no use for it. Does anyone need Aqua Globes™ or should I travel back to 2007 and see if there’s more demand then?
#5. Demonic kindle stand (holder?) and remote
Have you ever watched the movie WALL-E and seen those people getting carted around in their screen-attached chairs and said okay that looks awesome?
I would like to bet that you never thought that because WALL-E is a movie for children that makes it very clear that this is a bad thing that no human would ultimately want for themselves.
I guess I lack the same critical thinking skills. I bought a stand that would dangle my Kindle from my headboard right in front of my face so I wouldn’t have to hold it, along with a remote-controlled button to automatically flip the page for me so I could stay cozy under the covers.
I hit my head on this evil device three out of seven mornings of the week. When you start the day by immediately smacking your head on a piece of hard plastic you ordered from Amazon, your day is not going to get better from there because this is the life you karmically deserve.
And it doesn’t even work well. The page-turning part is a little clip that clips onto the edge of my Kindle, but it ends up covering a couple words when it does. There’s no way I can configure it so that it correctly flips the page without also blocking a couple words. Not enough that I can’t figure out what’s underneath it, but just enough to be insanely irritating.
This is the dumbest garbage I’ve ever bought. Not only does it suck that I paid money for this, it sucks that the purchase was completely driven from my own deadly sin of laziness.
Rating: 1/10. If it was a good product that improved my life in any way, I wouldn’t even be talking about it. However, this thing came from Hell and I want to banish it back there.
#6. Tom Ford perfume sample that makes me smell like a chainsmoking uncle
A few years ago, I bought an $80 fragrance sampler in hopes of finding my “signature scent.” If Sephora is to be believed, a woman finding her signature scent is a rite of passage akin to getting one’s first period, so imagine my shock when I was 20 and a TikTok let me know that I still hadn’t figured out that crucial piece of my identity.
When I got around to trying the tiny spritzer of Tom Ford Ombre Leather, I was walking (outside! In open air!) to go get a coffee and started coughing on my own scent like I was in a cartoon. It paralyzed me.
I turned around and went back home to shower in fear that the barista would be able to smell me from across the counter, or other people in the shop would think I had just been pumping gas and spilled a little on my coat.
I know there’s a contingent of people on here that really enjoy scents that smell like shit. I know some of you perverts saw that this smells like a dairy farm and then went to go hit Add To Cart. I don’t know if you could tell by my earlier praise of a “waist-snatching” Amazon top that gives me chest acne, but I’m not one of them.
This sample is going in the garbage and I’m a bit shaken that I held onto it for this long. It’s a biohazard.
Rating: 3/10 because I minimized the damage and showered before carpetbombing a coffee shop with my odor.
I don’t want to bore your inboxes with more tales of charging cords for long-obsolete devices and grungey ripped shirts I kept around, so I’ll end the list here. But it does beg a bigger question: what are we supposed to do with this stuff?
Doesn’t Goodwill send most of its stock to landfills? Isn’t the Buy Nothing Project trolled by hoarders who will just let the junk sitting in my house sit in their house instead? Isn’t Depop full of antisocial brats lowballing me for a shirt that I already listed at $5?
I do my best to use these tools anyway. I want to know my stuff won’t just go to a landfill. But this is work. It’s taken up my whole weekend.
I’m tired. I have a lot more cleaning to do. Does anyone want my garbage?