I’m up at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving and so spent a few days going through boxes of junk from grade school, high school, college.
I don’t have the “just throw it out gene” so I have to kind of force myself to get rid of papers. The good news is that I’m better than I used to be.
I found a few cool things, e.g. the report on carnivorous plants, a funny cartoon I drew, etc, and I feel relieved now that the bags of old math notes, etc., are gone.
But it’s also weird in all the–I guess–typical ways. It brings back memories of those days in school. I went through the gaming stuff and realized again what a geek I was in high school. I was hoping that my 1981 Dungeon Masters Guide would really be worth something, but guess what, just $9.00 on ebay.
I thought about how many things I worried about then. How I wish I hadn’t worried so much about them. For some reason I wish I’d pushed myself to do sports, even run cross country or something. I wish I’d been less anxious around girls. More ready to make mistakes. I wish I’d written more, but then I look at some of the unbelievably pretentious stuff that I wrote and I am mortified.
It’s weird to be 38.