We're moving out of our house in a couple of months, and the other night I thought I should start sorting through some old stuff to see what I could throw out. I started with the storage box I used to keep letters and documents from the time I came to Austin in 1993 until I filled it up sometime in 1996, when I shoved it to the back of my closet and forgot about it.
I thought going through it would be fun and nostalgic, but it wasn't at all.
Background: I went off to school when I was 18, promptly failed out within months, ran through my savings, either quit or got fired from a series of crappy jobs, and generally fouled up my finances and familial relationships so badly it took about eight years to get everything back to where it should be. Since it could have been a whole lot worse and everything more or less worked out, none of that bothers me much now. Still, I don't think I was ready to be confronted with the paper trail.
I have no idea why I saved all the shit that I did. The box is a mess and is stuffed with past-due bills, a report card with a 0.0 grade point average, and lots of increasingly baffled and angry letters from my parents, ex-boyfriend, creditors, and friends.
I found humiliating job evaluations ("Joolie is doing a good job overall but needs to be sure and spot-mop during slow periods.") and a bunch of Sandman comics I borrowed from a girl and had never returned even though she asked me to about 800 times before we lost touch (Beth: I'm sorry). Also many, many notebooks filled with longhand whining. Good god, I could whine, and in this precocious, pompous tone that now makes me writhe and immediately made me realize why: 1) I eventually stopped keeping a journal, and 2) I despised Prozac Nation as much as I did when I read it years later.
Not everything in the box was bad. There were some funny postcards and letters, some cartoons and paintings by my brilliant high school (but, alas, gay) crush, and some family photos I'd forgotten I had.
Mostly, though, it's just this ugly, discolored, disorganized, misshapen 16x12x8 testament to my late-adolescent flakiness and self-absorption.
As I was going through it, I started to wonder if maybe the box itself is evil. For sure I'm allergic to something in it; I started itching and sneezing uncontrollably about 10 minutes into the ordeal.
It's just a really bad box, on every possible level. My first impulse was to carry it out to the carport and dump the whole thing in the trash. Then I reconsidered. I thought I should wait a day or so and sort through it, keep the good stuff, and get rid of all the NSF notices and painfully budgeted grocery lists and pissy correspondence.
So it's been sitting in the middle of my bedroom floor all weekend, right in the way where I keep tripping over it, and I haven't gotten around to opening it again yet.
I don't know. Maybe the box is just a embarrassing drag and a waste of space. But maybe it's good to have a time capsule of the shitty and the mundane, just to remind me every once in a while of things I wouldn't remember otherwise. I really can't decide, but probably I'll just seal it up tight with packing tape, drag it to the next house, and figure out what to do with it later.