My mom is coming into town Friday, expecting to stay the night with her husband in our downstairs office. That necessitates some housecleaning, a process that began a year ago under similar circumstances but was thwarted when the room became the overflow for other room cleaning projects.
I’m cheating right now, of course, not just by typing some reflective notes but in processing the contents of the boxes that are cluttering the room instead of just moving them around. As long as it’s in a vacuumable state come morning, I’m sure Amy won’t mind (right, hon?).
It has been an interesting exercise to exercise my past demons through liberal chucking of crap I’ve been storing for years. I used to do this periodically, repackaging the keepers into a box and taping it shut for 4-5 years. That stopped shortly after getting married and acquiring more stuff to repackage. I think watching Carter grow up into school age and accumulating his own stack of art projects has raised the bar for my personal historical library. It is easier to chuck than it used to be.
A lot of my keeper stuff is safely tucked away in plastic containers by Era (grade school, college, married w/out kids, etc). Most of the contents of the boxes currently in the office are a decade old or less, but I also apparently have every physics assignment I ever did at DePauw. No longer.
Among my pre-spring cleaning observations:
- Homework doesn’t keep. The difference of by 8/10 and 10/10 assignments has completely lost its meaning, as has the context since they all come without questions (I just saved the graded answers).
- I wasn’t a good student. The grade point average and highlights aside, the blue book tests and papers are pretty poor. Even the physics stuff wasn’t as successful as I remember it being. It is strange that the worst grades I looked at tonight come from the classes I enjoyed the most, probably because I had to dig myself out of an early hole. Maybe that’s where I learned how to be a good student.
- Quantity is not a substitute for quality. That is lesson I am still learning, verbose as I am. My poor professors. I once handed in a physics assignment with Tries A-C on one problem I couldn’t figure out. All of the answers were wrong. When the product isn’t very good, I think I took comfort in sharing my process.
- Pity my girlfriends and all publication editors. I found a couple mournful, whiny letters – some never sent – to friends, columnists, politicians and assorted folk. I’d like to think my writing is better now, but it is hard to believe I was considered an adult at the time I wrote those early letters.
- No accounting for taste. Glass Tiger concert jersey, with sleeves cut off. I save lots of shirts, with the hope they will be made into pillows and quilts some day. The artists who gave us Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone no longer make the cut.
There are also numerous magazines in my archive. That’s after past pruning trimmed them down, including the entirety of my Sporting News library (1991-2006). This is more a product of technology, though, since the World Wide Web wasn’t the resource it is today.