Tuesday 28 July 2009

All through the changes the soul never dies

AbsI 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:
jeans - frontjeans - back
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.

empty boxes
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.

tooth
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.

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

love letters that should be thrown away
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.

an assessment of the men in my life
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.

high school ID card - RDHS - 1998/1999
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.

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