All through the changes the soul never dies

I have a lot of bad habits, but the most visible one (since I keep the judgment and the snickering in my head) is my inability to throw ANYTHING AWAY. I love sentimentality and I love stories and so my mind is CONVINCED that I just need to save ONE MORE THING to have both.

Unfortunately, saving everything means I save stuff that hardly even has sentimental value. My friend Kay and I used to play this game in college called "Why?" She would grab a tchotchke from a shelf and look and me pleadingly saying, "Why? Whyyyyyyyy?" and I would explain to her the round about reason why I kept it. "See, my mom really thought I'd like a kissy bear. And they were on sale... so she got four."

I save a lot of stuff people give me because I feel guilty if I get rid of it. I save a lot of stuff that reminds me of something else in my life despite the convenience of photography. And I save a lot of stuff that I used to like, but don't any more. For example, when cleaning out my garage recently, I found TEN pairs of jeans that had holes in them. Why? Because I had once loved those jeans and loved jeans shouldn't be thrown away. They should be kept. Forever. Moved from garage to garage to garage for years and years and years.

I threw them away finally. But I saved one pair. I've taken these photos now, so maybe I'll get rid of them, but I haven't made up my mind:

These are my summer camp working jeans from my high school summers. They're covered in paint and tar and those rips on are the ass. I shingled a building in these jeans. Let's all remember that time I was bad ass.

I found a lot of other stuff in the garage too. Want to see it? That's what I thought.


Turns out I save a lot of boxes? I totally forgot these were all in there. And by these, I mean four times as much as what you see in the picture. What was I planning on keeping them for? I don't know.


It's small because it's gross: one of my teeth. I had this weird obsession with my teeth; I wouldn't put them out for the tooth fairy because I wanted to keeeeep them.


A "business card" for my business where I was a "party" "server."


I don't even throw away love/hate letters. Here lies a folder I am forbidden to ever read. Everything is awful. It's emails about the names of our brothers and our favorite colors and chat logs and the notes I took during each break up. It's our highest highs and our lowest lows. It's in chronological order--the most painful order--and I know better than to ever open it. But I can't seem to throw it away either. It's my record. My record that I wasn't wrong. So it will keep moving from garage to garage.


Some sort of quiz assessment of the men in my life circa 2000 (age 16). My pseudo-boyfriend, his best friend, my brother, and my dad are represented. I have absolutely no recollection of what this is or what it means.


Oh, Little Schilbo. My high school ID card, freshmen year. I was 14. The year was 1998. Three weeks later my mom shrunk that sweater by accident and I was livid.

I have a whole tub full of t-shirts, sweatshirts, and one particularly meaningful pair of pajama pants. I narrowed that down from two tubs full. And my mom tells me I have "dozens" of boxes of equally debateble important stuff in storage in Chicago.

My problem is hardly ever moving on. But I like to keep a memento of where I've been.