Halfway Through, I Hope :: Roscoe Village, Chicago
I have been going through our closets upstairs and ditching a lot of stuff that I don’t use and doesn’t have any sentimental value. There’s a lot of it that I just moved from place to place for no reason. I have this huge chest (33 gallon - stuffed full) of stuff that my dad brought down when I moved to Chicago. I’ve been going through it for two days. So much stuff. Like every report card that I had from kindergarten through high school graduation. And photos. And grade school art projects. In junior high and high school you could not see a speck of my bedroom walls because I had posters up. They’re all in here. I went out with the same high school boyfriend for 7 years. There are reams of paper where I just wrote our names together different ways.
Also? I was obsessed with song lyrics. Back then you couldn’t just look up the words to a song. I’d sit and play songs over and over, line by line on my cassette player trying to write down all the song lyrics. They fill notebooks. And not only that, but at some point I decided it was a good idea to then type them out. So not only are there notebooks full of 90’s heavy metal songs but also typed out pages. Like… from a typewriter. OMG.
You know what makes up the bulk of this box? Notes! I have every note that was written to me all through high school. Pre-email and pre-texting. .. can you imagine? And they’re all folded elaborately. I don’t know why we thought origami was weird and then spent hours thinking of cool ways to fold notes. I’ve read a bunch of them and it’s anything from “what did you get on that test?” to “so-and-so said such-and-such about you” to “here’s a list of boys, rank them from 1-10 and put notes about what you think of them.”
There are a some things in here that I will keep. Photographs, art projects. Some letters of significance. I might photograph a few things and share them. .. but the bulk of this.. I just need to separate myself from. All these notes are sentimental, but imagine.. it’s like if you saved every email for 6 years just so you could read them later. No thanks. I need an old fashioned Operation Inbox Zero.
7 responses so far ↓
1 RachelleB // Oct 19, 2008 at 9:26 am
and candy wrappers. why did i save candy and combos wrappers? why couldnt i have just had a camera and a blog back then? at least that doesn’t take up all the space in a 33-gallon container! actually, as i read over these notes, the thought of teens having blogs these days frightens me!
2 RachelleB // Oct 19, 2008 at 9:29 am
also, i found a whole slew of confirmation cards that were unopened. i opened them all.. either my friends and family are cheapskates because there was no money inside, or somehow they’d been previously opened and then 2 decades of moisture resealed them. or maybe people dont give gifts for confirmation? i dont know.
3 Mr. Smith // Oct 19, 2008 at 9:59 am
I hear Axl Rose loves rainbows, too.
4 RachelleB // Oct 19, 2008 at 10:35 am
Heh. It’s kind of jarring how everything is all mixed together - from a stuffed animal given to me when I was born to a picture I drew of myself on my first day of kindergarten to notes on how I want to beat a girl up “because she’s a REAL slut” and high school prom corsages.
I did really like the heavy metal bands, though. I found a letter a friend sent me when I was away at camp (it might have been church camp!) and it had photos of Brett Michaels glued to it to “hold me over” til I got back.
5 Megan // Oct 19, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Ha! I used to try to write down song lyrics too! Back in the good ole’ days before high speed Internet…
6 Richard // Oct 19, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I still like heavy metal bands…
7 Dad Bowden // Oct 20, 2008 at 5:50 am
Why to go,thats why I haven been give you all the school articles and other things from your childhood.You only keep it so long.And look at it once every10to 15 yrs.I found box with vases in them wraped in papper from 1974 Donated them to Goodwell.Still have a few things of yours.
Maybe I will look at what they are trash them if they dont hold any value.
Dad
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