Cassette Tapes

There are two clear markers of exceptional music taste; early 90's soundtracks and being in middle school. I was quite the sophisticated connoisseur.

I recently acquired a "new to me" car that comes fully equipped  with a cassette player. What a wonderful coincidence that I just rediscovered all my old tapes! I grabbed a couple out of the box from yesterday's post and threw them in the car; specifically the soundtracks to Empire Records and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. I own both of these movies on VHS (somewhere), and almost warped the tapes from constantly rewinding and replaying the closing sequences to listen to the music that accompanied them. Once I bought the albums themselves, I was freed from the confines of listening in our family living room. I could jam out anywhere. I had a Walkman, after all.

Here's a little taste of what I have been listening to in my car this week:

 

(I would have put the album version up, but some of the altered lyrics are not fit for general consumption- or probably for me when I was an 8th grader....)

 

I can only imagine how much head scratching occurs when one has never seen any of the Bill and Ted saga.

Not just any box

I didn't have time to do any real cleaning this week, so I figured I'd waltz into my room, grab an item or two, do a write up and then chuck 'em. That was the plan at least....

I decided I would take aim at this cardboard box

When we were in high school, my friends started this beautiful yet quirky club which celebrated, among other things, our perceived social awkwardness (as one of my buddies once put it, "We may have thought we were towards the bottom of the social ladder, but there were definitely some lame wildebeests behind us"). The saga of the Geek Squadron (we had the name first, this was WAY before Best Buys' tech crew and its various knock offs) is far too long and tantalizing to cram into a single post, so here's the deal with the box, which may give you an idea of the overall picture.

I had this giant teddy bear, which somehow became the Geek Squadron mascot. During our formative years, I took her with us to parties,  the beach, bowling, on road trips, an so on. She started cropping up in all kinds of photos from these various events. When we started going to college, I decide it would be a shame to keep her all to myself. I began a project called "Rosie's College Tour". The idea was to snap a few photos of her around campus and send her off to the next person; think Flat Stanley, only not so flat.  As the intro to this section of her scrapbook notes, "10 GS Members, 8 Schools, 5 States, 3 (disposable) Cameras, 1 Box...."

This was the box.

(By the way, yes, you did read that right. "this section of her scrapbook". She did have multiple adventures)

So, now that I've given this box its due time and reflection, it is time to toss it, right? Not this time... When I pulled it down, I found what it has been housing up there on the shelf:

... a veritable treasure trove of music from my youth, predating my first CD player.

We'll touch upon these another day.

Eye Spy

 I figured this would be easier with these pictures side by side, similar to one of those "Spot the difference" photo spreads.

The hardest part? Getting it to line up right. Special thanks to the Gallagher brothers on the left and the artist who did the series of abstract post cards on the right for the reference points.

Sublte Changes

I spent two hours sorting and organizing yesterday (or, two This American Life episodes). Here is the final result:

See that patch of brown between the stripped bag and the gray totes? Yup. That's genuine floor space. If you look closely, you may also notice that the pile on the bed now consists mostly of stuffed animals, as opposed to last week's Stuffed animal/ cardboard boxes/ photo albums/ plastic bags/ piles of paper/ power tool collection (Yup. There's a Skil drill case in that first picture from last week. See if you can find it. It will be like Where's Waldo).

While I will openly admit that most of this is just rearranging/ organizing. I did meet my weekly goal of one trash bag thrown out. Here is what came out of the room:

As of this afternoon, everything in this picture has been either burned, recycled, or compacted.


My intent with this blog was to snap a photo of the stuff I was feeling sentimental over, dash out a few quick memories, and then chuck it.  I was surprised to find, however, that it was not the sentimental stuff that was tripping me up, but more the things I could use again later.  Take these string lights for example;

Half the plastic gummy bears are missing or broken, same with the bedazzled flowers. The lights themselves are still perfectly functional, however. I thought about their possible future as Christmas lights, and then I reminded myself I was standing amidst a sea of half finished (or never-started) projects, things that "someone else could use"   and other possibilities. So long, super-cool reading lights from high school and college.

Other highlights from the pile of crap on the bed:

My first grade book from the ALL School/ Claremont Academy.  Lots of As and Bs. My kids were pretty awesome, but not that awesome. This is where my bad habits as an easy grader began. 

I got this pink and purple boa on a band trip to Virginia my freshman year of high school. I now understand the love affair between feathers and dust that makes the feather duster so efficient. I spent a significant amount of time sneezing after removing it. (The string lights and boa used to be intertwined around the headboard. It did make for a pretty cool effect, if I do say so myself).

I will answer your two most obvious questions: 1) Of course a bed is a logical storage space for a bulletin board filled with  tacks that could get loose and become lost in a menagerie of fluffy stuffed animals and pillows. 2) A "Gotcha" is the Camp Takodah version of a Thank You note. This particular collection was from last summer, 2010.

BONUS FIND! That mattress has a memory foam pad on it! I had totally forgotten until I sifted through about 5 layers of stuff. There was a muffin tin at the bottom of the pile (yes, you read right). It made a super cool indentation that, sadly, did not photograph well.

Here we go

Pack Rat. Hoarder. Slob. Probably all applicable.

I held on to a plethora of possessions from childhood into adolescence, then from adolescence into college. After college I moved into my first apartment. When I moved in with my boyfriend, I had to bring a lot of stuff back to my parents house. When I moved back to my parents house, all my "grown up" stuff got literally stacked on top of my old stuff.  Pair this pile of treasure with a generally disheveled lifestyle,  many quick trips in to rummage through and grab something or toss something else in for storage, throw in an avalanche every now and then, and the end result is as follows:

Yup.  That's 28 years of stuff. Soon to be 29.

The truth is, it's got to go. Not just be neatened up and stored. Much of it serves no purpose.  Do I need the bottles from the non-alcoholic champagne I had at my New Years Eve 2000 party? A tub of ripped jeans that were put aside for a craft project sometime in college? Every notebook from every class I ever took?

The answer here is clear.

So here we go. The odyssey to get to the bottom of my floor. Join me as I say good bye to some crap that I don't need but haven't had the heart to throw out. Ever.