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remembering, forgetting, and growing up
Jul. 28th, 2003 12:57 amMy goal for today has been to Clean Up The Room. This might sound like a really mundane sort of task, but it's actually been really interesting -- I'm going through all of the accumulated stuff, the junk-drawers of my life, and I'm getting rid of all the crap I don't need or doesn't have any particular memories attached to it. There's a whole lot of that stuff that might accumulate in a bourgeois geek's room during the first 20 years of life, and just because his family's moved houses a few times during that period doesn't mean that most of it hasn't been carted along. This desk hasn't always been mine -- at one point, it was either my grandfather's, or in a building he owned, or something, and before it got moved to my room, it was in the family study. So of course, there's stuff in here with origins completely obscure to me. I found, among other things, manuals for an old daisy-wheel printer (complete with code examples in BASIC!), 5.25" floppies, old insurance documents (now how would anybody have known that those were in there?), old school IDs, and a bunch of old photographs, including one of my dad in his early 20s, looking lean and strong. Earlier during the day, I went through my closet and tossed a healthy fraction of my clothes (the ones taking up space in the closet because I never wore them) in the Goodwill basket.
Within the next coupla days, I'm going to have a whole lot less crap cluttering up my room, and it's going to be much easier to figure out what I'm going to take with me to school. I think maybe next summer will be at Tech anyway, so this needs to be done sometime or another... it's like this time I'm leaving for good. This may well be my last summer Off From School -- no more vestiges of the childhood Summer Vacation. It feels like it would be a strange feeling, but I'm ready to get back. I guess that's a sign of ... something. Maturity? No, it's probably not maturity :)
Man, I was (am) a funny looking kid. Up until like senior year of highschool... goodness. I was not particularly photogenic. I can only hope that in person I wasn't quite as awkward as I was in pictures... *laughs, knows inwardly that he still looks stupid when trying to smile for a camera* There was a stack of pictures from my 16th birthday party, which I remember pretty vividly... ah, and all those group shots from school dances where I was sort of standing in the back, with that "hrum, I should smile" sort of smile coming out... heh. Lotta pictures much older than that, as well...
I wonder what it would be like going through somebody's stuff, post-mortem. It seems like this is a similar experience, really: a lifetime's-worth of crap to sort through, some of which has an emotional significance attached to it, and for the other part, a vague tingly feeling of "I used to remember what that was"...
Unrelated to this, today I worked out at the gym (biceps and back were on tap today, and Garrett was around, and he made some suggestions for exercises to do, and as a result, tomorrow I'm not going to be able to move) in the afternoon, having gone to church in the morning... only at church, the machine that normally shows the words to the songs up on a projector was b0rked, and we (Elizabeth and Mr. Drake and myself) were trying to get it to work during the service, and it didn't end up getting fixed, so it's going to get reinstalled later.
I think... that it's time to get to bed -- going running in the morning, oh yes :)
Within the next coupla days, I'm going to have a whole lot less crap cluttering up my room, and it's going to be much easier to figure out what I'm going to take with me to school. I think maybe next summer will be at Tech anyway, so this needs to be done sometime or another... it's like this time I'm leaving for good. This may well be my last summer Off From School -- no more vestiges of the childhood Summer Vacation. It feels like it would be a strange feeling, but I'm ready to get back. I guess that's a sign of ... something. Maturity? No, it's probably not maturity :)
Man, I was (am) a funny looking kid. Up until like senior year of highschool... goodness. I was not particularly photogenic. I can only hope that in person I wasn't quite as awkward as I was in pictures... *laughs, knows inwardly that he still looks stupid when trying to smile for a camera* There was a stack of pictures from my 16th birthday party, which I remember pretty vividly... ah, and all those group shots from school dances where I was sort of standing in the back, with that "hrum, I should smile" sort of smile coming out... heh. Lotta pictures much older than that, as well...
I wonder what it would be like going through somebody's stuff, post-mortem. It seems like this is a similar experience, really: a lifetime's-worth of crap to sort through, some of which has an emotional significance attached to it, and for the other part, a vague tingly feeling of "I used to remember what that was"...
Unrelated to this, today I worked out at the gym (biceps and back were on tap today, and Garrett was around, and he made some suggestions for exercises to do, and as a result, tomorrow I'm not going to be able to move) in the afternoon, having gone to church in the morning... only at church, the machine that normally shows the words to the songs up on a projector was b0rked, and we (Elizabeth and Mr. Drake and myself) were trying to get it to work during the service, and it didn't end up getting fixed, so it's going to get reinstalled later.
I think... that it's time to get to bed -- going running in the morning, oh yes :)
