It’s amazing, the amount of crap you can find while doing a little reorganizing. My closet was annoying me. It has been an area of frustration. My clothes have been smooshed, confined to only one side of the closet, due to my poor stacking skills. My shirts finally have a chance to breathe. It’s easy [...]
It’s amazing, the amount of crap you can find while doing a little reorganizing. My closet was annoying me. It has been an area of frustration. My clothes have been smooshed, confined to only one side of the closet, due to my poor stacking skills. My shirts finally have a chance to breathe.
It’s easy to get distracted while cleaning…you just start going through stuff and you find things that take you back to times you can vividly remember, but you have tucked them away in the back of your mind. And so of course, your mission of cleanliness is delayed…you start rummaging through boxes of memories, flipping through pictures, reading old papers. For instance, I went through a crate of music, chord charts, and miscellaneous other items…and the first thing I did was climb over the mountain of crap I had created, grab my guitar, and started strumming through the pages I had discovered. Songs that I had forgotten I downloaded, choir music that I forgot to turn in (sorry Prof Guy), random Chopin preludes and wedding music that I knew how to play at one point in my life. After a few verses, I put the guitar back in my bag and continued the journey…
The registration packet from my junior year in college. It was from Fall ’99…all my classes that semester were music classes. I had forgotten I took Choral Techniques with Dr. Tweed…perhaps it’s because I slept through most of the semester.
I found a bag. A brown paper bag. A folded, brown paper bag at the very bottom of a box. It was from the Olive Garden. Take out. It had a phone number on it written in blue ink. The handwriting belonged to a girl I once fancied (had to use that word for my pal, Rebecca). It was my first official “asking a girl for her number” kind of situations. I had known this girl, but had never hung out with her before…and I really wanted to ask her out, but of course the nice thing always got in the way. Well, she worked at the Olive Garden and after a few weeks passing without seeing her, I heard she was working one night, so I drove over with the intention of asking her out. But you just can’t walk in to a restaurant and ask the hostess out without ordering something…so I got some Zuppa Toscana to go. It gave us a chance to catch up and talk a bit before my soup was ready. Before I left, I asked her out and got her digits…but since neither of us had paper, she wrote her number on the bag. I made use of that number a day or two later…we went out…and then subsequent phone calls were never returned. It was a sad story, but alas…she’s dating a guy named after a major U.S. city…and I got to keep the paper bag with her phone number on it…and the Andes mint she chucked at me one night. So I guess all stories have a good ending.
The journey down the lane continued tonight, as I was looking for the elementary school yearbook I had left at my grandparents’ house. When I moved out, I left a bunch of crap in boxes…and it seems that the crap has multiplied since my departure. But I managed to get through to my boxes, which were at the very bottom. Along the way, I found some interesting tidbits…
My box of lies. It’s basically this huge box of letters, notes, pictures and assorted crap given to my by an ex-girlfriend. As I read through a letter or two, it was painfully clear why I once liked her…but, of course, a lot of her words are no longer applicable or even believable anymore. Sad, really. Not just stuff about me, but stuff she said to maybe make me think of her in a certain way. I also found these notebooks…back in high school, I had this friend. We had these spiral notebooks…and instead of writing letters to each other, we just wrote in the notebook and then passed it back and forth to each other; after school, between classes, etc. And when the whole book was filled, one of us would keep it. I annoyed myself reading these “notes”…first of all, my grammar and overall writing style is similar to that of a two-year old… and it’s pathetic to read about the trivial things I once thought were important. And wow…if I knew then what I know now, would I really have said some of the things I said? Or did I say them in the moment, actually believing the words I was saying?? Who knows. Who cares. I’ve done and said a lot of stupid things without thinking, most of which were just last week.
I found a paper I wrote in AP English. But, why is it that I can never remember writing any of these papers? A while back, I read through some college papers and I honestly cannot remember writing them. They are so good. I probably don’t remember writing them because I wrote most of them the night before and I was too tired and hopped up on caffeine. But this particular paper, which I wrote my senior year of high school on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which I don’t even remember reading) was just exquisite. I do remember that my AP English teacher made us cram so much crap in our heads by reading so much that a lot of the words are now just useless brain cells bouncing around in my head. But I got an “A” on this paper…and I can see why. Spelling and grammar where perfect…it was structurally flawless. I could have written a standard “5-paragraph essay” in my sleep. It’s just hilarious, and scary how the details were followed to textbook perfection: introduction, use of quotations, conclusion, arguments. Well-written and humorous all at the same time. I amaze even myself.
Well, as fun as the trip was, all Fact Finding Missions must come to an end. It’s a good thing, too…revisiting the past is like a vacation…a great place to visit, but a place you would never want to live. Ironic, because for the last few months, I have been thinking about how cool it would be to not have to grow up. As much as I would want to be a kid again, some things are only good the first time around. Like a kick-ass rollercoaster…if you go on it too many times, it may make you throw up.