We are a generation of collectors.

Nearly every fad that coursed through our elementary schools was steeped in hoarding and avarice, from Beanie Babies to Crazy Bones, pogs to Pokemon. The seeds were sewn early in packs of baseball cards, and they've blossomed fully into four-digit Facebook friend lists.

I'm hardly an exception.

Suffice to say, I like to save things. I have a closet full of baseball and hockey cards and once owned more than 130 Tyler Green rookie cards, sure, but in that same closet, I have a box of bits of childhood Halloween costumes and books I wrote in kindergarten. I still regularly wear T-shirts I've had since fourth and fifth grade.

Saving things, of course, is only worthwhile as a vestige of the thrill of acquiring things. Building up that stockpile is where all the fun is, even if you don't have any physical reminder to keep after the fact.

And if there are two things I like more than "not throwing away crap," they are "free stuff" and "sugary junk food." So the first day of spring, when Rita's gives out free water ice, is a very good day for me.

I also like to take things to their logical extremes. So, on Friday, I drove from State College, which has one Rita's location in a 30-mile radius, to my home in Holland, which has about a thousand, and I tried to get free water ice from as many places as I could. A different location each time, and a different flavor at each one.

Even if I didn't eat all of the water ice from most of the locations (though I ate some from all of them), what mattered was the process of collecting them: touring suburban and northern Philadelphia, spending the day in a cramped car with some friends, remembering summers past.

Gas, tolls and the work I skipped cost about as much as the water ice I picked up, and the $200 speeding ticket I got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike made the trip rather inefficient financially. But that's not the point.

That's never the point.

None of these things have any inherent value. Maybe a Honus Wagner card or a Princess the Bear Beanie Baby is especially rare, but it has no real use to anybody, and it doesn't cost more than a few pennies to make.

And really, there's no such thing as "inherent value." We ascribe value to things almost arbitrarily. Look at the prices on eBay for things like unopened bottles of undrinkable Crystal Pepsi and tell me there's any reason for it.

So we assign values to things. Most of the time, this is done broadly and societally, and often with some connection to money.

But sometimes it's a personal thing. Everyone has stuff way more valuable to them than to anyone else. This is slightly disruptive to our economy but absolutely crucial to our actualization as individuals.

Imagine what your life would be if nothing around you were any more than a thing, had no deeper meaning whatsoever. In short, it would suck.

Every one of the thousands of hockey cards I have has a different story of how it ended up in my possession, whether it was from convincing a babysitter to drive me to the mall, bartering with an eccentric old man at a card show, or just swindling my little brother. Their monetary value is entirely unrelated to their sentimental value.

You can buy a wall plate for an electrical outlet for about $3; the one I keep in my drawer, which still has the original wallpaper from my old house on it, is immeasurably more valuable to me.

Ultimately, it's about memories. Not avoiding the past, but tying the past to the present. Last Friday, every spoonful of water ice, every purple and green stain on my shirt, every brain freeze transported me to other times and places, even to the summers before Rita's drove out of business the other two water ice stores I liked better.

The collection is valuable only if there is value in the collecting process. This is at least part of the reason that so many possessions seem completely inane to every but their possessors.

They say one man's trash is another man's treasure. I'm not interested in anyone else's trash or treasure, though. I only care about my own.

Adam Clair is a senior majoring in journalism and is The Daily Collegian's Tuesday columnist. His e-mail address is asc5014@psu.edu.