notes

I've come to the conclusion that watching just one episode of the t.v. show "Hoarders" is enough to make a person ready to throw out priceless family heirlooms just to make sure that they don't turn into a hoarder. Now, I'm not trying to sound all weird and judgemental, nor do I some how think that this is an idication of "Typical American Culture." What I do seem is people trying to fill the void in their lives with stuff, sooooooo much stuff. At least that is how I thought of it at first. Then there was this one guy who said something about having a profound level of memory attachment to the things he had. That took me aback. I have a high level of memory as well, and I reckognize that it keeps me from tossing out junk at times.

Now, I'm hardly a hoarder, I don't have whole rooms filled with junk piled to the ceiling. However, I definetly have a couple of closets that have various papers and knick knacks sitting about collecting "memorable" layers of dust and dead bugs. Seriously, I don't have a need for horror movies or slasher flicks. I just have to do an hour of cleaning out old stuff and I get the full on heebie-jeebies. Nothing will make a body convulse quite as much as finding out that the oddly shaped, crumbly things were, in fact spider legs. Egads, it makes me shiver just to think of it even now. Anywho, that leads me to my main point.

So, I was cleaning out the second bedroom of out apartment today, and I came across (huh, I like how I just "happened" to find stuff. Gotta keep myself more honest) I finally tackled (ah, that sounds better) the book shelf full of college papers and books. I thought that it would be a fairly easy affair, as I really didn't like a few of those core classes that I had to take, and I am almost certain that at one point I had planned some sort of epic bonfire with my class notes. Oddly enough though, I found myself strangely reluctant to do so, and I have no idea why. I mean, I can't even begin to tell you (if you're out there actualy reading this) how often I was frustrated at my Cross-Cultural Communications class. I have never taken a class that felt like a bigger waste of time. I had to take it because of the requirements of my degree. I know that there were points where I looked forward to trashing the notes the moment that the class was over for good. However, here I sit, nearly three years from my college graduation, and I'm struggling to put them into the trash where they belong.

I think a part of it is that I had hoped to do something more epic with them. I know that when I was in high school, me and several of my friends joked about holding a bonfire with our European A.P. notes as the the kindling. Funny, because I think those are somewhere in storage at my folks place. In any case, here I am now, and I think that part the reluctance to toss those notes, among otherss, is that I feel they represent a history, a documentation of the fact that I sat through that class, learned the material, and scored a decent grade. I almost feel like I would be getting rid of a bit of me to toss it aside, yet the funny thing is that some of those classes never really were me. They never really expanded my thought process, grew me as a person, or added to my overall knowledge in a meaningfull way. I'm not saying this to be arrogant. I had plenty of, "Oh Wow" moments while in several of my Old English and History of Language classes. Just that I never felt like I was learning in the type of class that the "Cultural" class was. It always seemed like a waste of time. It still does.

I guess that the other reason I can't just toss some of those notes is that mingled among the bordem doodles and actual class notes are fragments of my story that I'm writing. Stuff that I had nearly forgotten. And I guess that is what really makes those notes valuable to me. Not what the class covered, but what I spent my time doing in that class.