The Past: Overrated

So today I decided to try and make good on one of my goals/resolutions. Chris and I cleaned house yesterday so I figured I'd try to take a bite size chunk out of one of my perma-projects. And actually I nibbled at two.

I mentioned earlier that it's been 'stupid-cold' lately, and it reminded me of a project that's been half finished for, um... two years now. I put insulation up in the ceiling of the basement throughout about 3/4 of the house, and on days like this, when I walk around in socks I can tell exactly where I left off. The worst part is that there are 3 full bundles of insulation unopened and a 4 foot pile of scraps just sitting there, waiting to either be installed or eventually get wet and ruined. There's something extra stupid about being cold and yet literally sitting on a stack of insulation. Anyway, the odd and end pieces are now up and performing as designed and I can at least chalk that off my list.

Another one of my back projects is to sort through the boxes of notes, letters, and cards that I've got stashed in the basement from years gone by. Basking in the glow of successfully warmifying my house (and calculating all the pennies I'll now be saving) I grabbed a shoebox from the storage room and started picking through envelopes and little folded notes. Turns out it was the 1990 through 1993 box, which can pretty much be summed up as "Ugh." See, back in the days before there was text messaging and cameraphones, we would use this thing called a 'pencil' and apply one end gently to a piece of paper, creating a pattern of symbols. It was pretty primitive. It took the full use of your hand, so like, you couldn't send a text, play tetris, and listen to MP3's at the same time unless, of course, you had a typewriter, a Nintendo (there was only one choice...,) a time machine and two friends. And the language we used is what you now call 'Job Interview English' except we used it all the time and not just on term papers. Texting hadn't been invented yet because we still had 10 fingers and we hadn't evolved to the point of only needing our thumbs to communicate with each other. So for an example, the Olde English phrase, "I cannot believe that Susan asked William to TurnAbout" would roughly translate to "SRLY?" As you can see, text messaging is far more efficient and eloquent.


Anyway...
This shoebox was chock full of letters, mostly from girls I had treated badly, and a couple from ones I had treated really badly. There are a few problems with rediscovering old notes from old girlfriends. For starters, they really don't tell you much about you. They're mostly about them. Honestly, now that it's been 15 years, I'm really more interested in how *I* did on my Spanish final than how they did. But not much more. I also think there should be some kind of ritual at the end of a relationship where you give each other back all your correspondence. At least if you got your own sappy letters back then you'd know how your day was and what a dope you were. Can you imagine some relative of said ExSig coming up to you years later asking about what their mother was like in high school? The correct answer is, "I don't know," not "Sure, here's a box with 150 letters of her expressing her unyielding love for me. Woo-Hoo, what a horndog! I've been keeping them just in case someone like you came by." Or maybe a burning ceremony for any notes folded more than once down the middle. That would be acceptable.

Romeo, Juliet, now you listen to me.

On a slightly more serious note, this Sunday I'm singing a song called "I'm Not Who I Was" which pretty much describes how I felt after getting back in touch with some high school folks through MySpace. No really, I'm cooler now. Just ask me. I've been practicing in the mirror for years now...