But I don't want to waste typing energy on excuses that you and I don't care about anyway.
Most people have habits. Little quirks or strategies or systems that they put into place in order to live the way they want to, or think they should. Some people drive the same way to work every day, some people always draw a line through their 7's, others tie their right shoe before their left. Me, well I clean my room.
Sure, it's about as often as I blog, but I clean it. And when I do, I usually blog about it.
Please don't make any rash judgements about the psychological implications of following cleaning my physical space with cleaning my mental and emotional space.
This time I went deep, I dug through every drawer and box and old container that once held cheap stationary and purged. Purging is hard for me because, let me just admit it right now, I am a hoarder. A 20 year old hoarder. About a dozen five year old magazines, movie tickets from 2001, too many notebooks with only one page of writing in them to count, and just about everything else you could think of.
Literally, everything you could think of.
Napkins from special restaurants, baggage tags from trips, notes, every birthday card I've received in the last 10 years. If I ever babysat you and you colored me a picture, I still had it. Pictures of people I don't know, event flyers, bottle caps, even my wisdom teeth.
I have no shame.
But as I think I've attempted to explain before, I'm a believer in remembering. I believe in the power of memories you can touch. I love the idea of having a physical legacy to leave behind. I love the idea that, someday after grad school when I have children and after they have children, they will have a piece of my life to look at that isn't an iPad or digital photo frame.
I found this red-violet Crayola crayon that I found while I was dancing in the leaves in Drake Park the morning of my last day as a 17 year old. With Kaitlyn.
I also found this little journal with 4 pages that I made with paper and bound with ribbon when I was 8. I wrote about camping and Star Wars and popcicles, which I really spelled like that. I also wrote about the time when my parents were busy playing an intense game of Sequence, and it happened to be during dinnertime, and I happened to be hungry, and they told me to eat marshmallows for dinner. The journal ends with "Life is full of departure, isn't it?"
I had pen pal in the Philippines eleven years ago that I had completely forgotten about. In one letter she said "You asked me if our country is really good. Yes, it's good because God made it" and in the other she said her birthday was coming soon - on January 17. I discovered that letter in my room-cleaning... ON JANUARY 17.
This is the beautiful, weird stuff in life that you just can't make up, you don't even want to make it up. Because really, who wants to find their wisdom teeth in a box of cards?
