From Years Past

I like to clean my room out periodically.

Not only because for whatever reason I'm the only guy I know who likes having a clean room, but because I always find a lot of old nostalgic stuff. I am kind of a packrat, owing to the fact that I have an enormous closet and a lot of storage space. In my closet right now, besides the basic stuff like clothing and my suitcases, I have a whole bunch of weird shit. Lauren's bike, (hahah), 2 PC cases, several video cards, a few motherboards, processors, a pair of hard drives, a CD-burner, another functional Dell PC (for a total of 4 PCs in my room) a guitar amp, a set of Subaru WRX 2006 stock rims (only 1 of which is in good condition), every video game console I have owned dating back to my original SNES from 1992, etc. I think you get the idea.

Well today I decided I needed to file my health insurance information. I have had a filing box since I was in highschool that my mother gave me. Whenever I have gotten any document of importance since about 11th grade, it has ended up in here. As you can imagine, it being 7 years old now, it had accumulated a TON of junk. Here's a list of some of the stuff I found in there:

- All of my high school report cards since I had the box
- My original SAT and AP test scores
- A bunch of Boca High newsletters
- Every lease / housing contract I have ever signed
- My first ATM card
- A Christmas Card from Lindsay + Rob, of which the front art was me + Rob dressed in santa hats and male bikini briefs. They actually mailed that one to my house. Thankfully my parents don't open my mail, I wouldn't wanted to have to explain that one.
- At least $120 dollars worth of various book store gift cards. My relatives in years past insisted that I get Barnes and Noble or Borders gift cards, even though I never bought books. Seriously I found a gift card from 2001 in there, what the hell? I feel stupid now because there are actually books I want to buy. I think one of them is still active, though.
- Every postcard my mom has ever mailed me (I intentionally keep these. Yes I'm sure that sounds ridiculous. I imagine I will appreciate them someday.)
- All the Spinnakers from college that I had published articles in
- A Valentine's day card from Shelley from 2 years ago
- The schedule Shelley made for me for my last semester of college

I did end up throwing a ton of stuff out, basically all the crap from highschool, and most of the stuff from college, although I did keep all the cards. But it was definitely weird going back through all of that stuff and thinking how far my life has come in the last 7 years.

On an entirely unrelated note, the cost of the rest of the parts for my PC has fallen into the realm of the reasonable. I'm this | | close to pulling the trigger on the rest of my i7 920 build. Mmmm... should I do it? Quadcore, 6GB of RAM.. yeah, I'm a huge nerd.