People Underestimate the Value of a Good Ramble

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

My Life As a Teenage Geek

So we moved, right? Well, I'm still sorting out boxes and stuff, naturally, and the other day the shelf in our closet, which I had clearly overloaded, tilted and this box I hadn't looked at yet - or actually hadn't looked at in about 30 years and which had been sitting on the top of our other closet since we built that addition in 1996 - tumbled down, spilling several large expansion folders.  You know the kind, like lawyers use.

I had to be sure to tell my husband that those should not have been in the bedroom closet in the first place, since they belonged in the office. I wasn't exactly sure what was in them, but it looked like papers and stuff, which obviously should go in an office. So it was clearly his fault. Clearly. Am I right?

Anyway, he dumped them all on the long table in the office and I decided to go through them before putting them away in that closet. This may or may not have been a mistake.

They contained my life.  Seriously, my entire life was in there. At least the teenage part of it.

There were notebooks full of my scribbles, stories, plays, and notes; random news clippings; construction paper pages with pics of hot guys of the times pasted to them (these were in my locker and I'm not naming any names, but Tim Hutton just may have been in there); song lyrics; my high school diploma; poems; term papers; and just so many memories.

There were even pages in which I had clipped out and pasted parts from the TV Guide about movies I watched. Everything was all neatly cataloged and dated.  So I was clearly an organized insane person. My husband was amazed cause he was a high school jock and apparently I was always a geek girl.

I can't even imagine having the time to do stuff like that now, and then I remember that I have a spreadsheet to keep track of what shows I watch and I realize that I haven't changed all that much over the years.

I had to just shove it all back into the folders and stick them up on the shelf in the office closet, or I would have spent the rest of the day and probably several days afterwards just going through it all and re-living my glory days of being a geeky teen-aged freak.

At some point, I definitely plan to go back through all that stuff and maybe even read over some of those stories to see if they are worth re-working and finishing.  Maybe my great american novel is in there somewhere.

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