so i'm moving soon. (yay, go me) and so it's time to play America's second favorite game "Keep or Throw." (the most favorite game being "where's my underwear?"). The point of "Keep or Throw" is to go through all your stuff and figure out what needs to come with you and what needs to go to Goodwill or the city dump. Travel light, move fast.
when i moved to Springfield i had very little time to pick what needed to come with, let alone throw away, so there were about 12 or thirteen boxes of stuff saved up since... god knows how freakin far back. since i had time to sort now i figured there was no time like the present.
i put some Jimmy Eat World on the stereo and rolled up my sleeves and started unpacking crates. at first it was easy, being mostly books and comics. i spent a happy hoiur or so going "oh wow, i remember this one" or "so that's where that went!" and even a few "oh man, why do i still have THIS one?" i also found a bunch of notebooks from High School with some poetry and writings in them. Tyler suggested i save some of them to sell on E-Bay someday when i'm famous. after reading them i think not. i'd have to pay the E-Bay people to take them.
so then i started looking through some other boxes and came across some pictures. some of these pictures were taken of me and my friends in High School, which was kind of amusing to see how we had changed. (remember Rob with no beard and purple hair?). I also came across some old journals from college. i made notes on some entries with chryptic entries that said "wow, that's going to confuse the fuck out of me when i read this in four years" i was right. i also wrote a lot about music. apparently i wrote two pieces of guitar music called Drop D Sonata and DS2 (Drop D Sonata 2) which aparently sounded pretty good. of course i didn't write the tabs down so i have no idea what they sounded like.. oh well.
then i came across some envelopes. most were old birthday cards or congratulations for one thing or another, but there were also some in there from a couple of old girlfriends. one or two of the letters had some inside jokes that i had forgotten about and others had the "love you forever" post script tht seems kind of silly now, but there were also some pictures included in some of the envelopes. pictures i thought i had thrown out years ago.
It's strange to come across them like that. I wrote a piece in the Charlotte novel where Ethan is talking about how you mean to do a sweep and clear in your life and get rid of everything that reminds you of them, but then you miss that one thing and it sneaks out at the strangest times. art imitating life imitating life... or TV i guess.
at any rate, i kept three boxes of stuff out of the 12 i went through. the library book sale is getting a nice big donation from the Graham house this year.