if dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts

I'm in the midst of a huge search-and-destroy mission, ranging across vast swathes of previously-unsorted territory in my bedroom, closets, living room, kitchen, and storage room. It's painfully difficult to part with some of the things that I'm discarding, but it has to happen--after all, when will I use 120 cocktail parasols? They've been sitting in a box (along with five grass skirts and about 40 plastic leis) since Mirlo in-house draw my junior year. For perspective, Terry was finishing her freshman year when she participated in that in-house draw, and she's now been out of school for a year and a half. I've moved this box four times, and now I'm getting rid of all of it. It should be a complete relief, but I keep thinking, 'what if I want to have a Hawaiian theme party? what if I need a grass skirt for something and have to spend $20 on a new one?' But, this is the kind of thinking that has gotten me into my current disaster. I explained to Claudia and Terry last night while we were driving to In-n-Out that my whole family consists of a bunch of packrats and collectors, and then I described the 'Room of Doom' in our house--a room so filled with stuff that hasn't been touched in a decade that we now pile boxes in front of the door to the Room of Doom, which prevents us from ever exploring the forgotten treasures (and, unfortunately, probably some dead bats) within. It was then that I realized that the storage space below our apartment is my own little embryonic Room of Doom--while I only have a few boxes down there, it's stuff that I could quite happily never see again but simultaneously refuse to give up. I shudder to think what my Room of Doom will look like in twenty years, so I'm trying to purge some stuff now.

So, tonight I threw out all of my notes from my college classes, as well as my year planners for sophomore, junior, and senior year. That really hurt--what if future biographers want to reconstruct my college experience? I also threw out the flowers that I wore at my college graduation, since they were getting pretty dusty, even though they have survived five or six moves extraordinarily well. I'm getting rid of a dozen red candles that I got for a dollar at Ikea, since I later discovered that the red was too bright for my color schemes and never bothered to open them. I'm tossing the fake-gold elephant keychain/money clip that I picked up at Krung Siam about six years ago and never used. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll never need a whistle, even though the fluorescent pink cord that it's attached to is pretty hot. I collected every cable that doesn't explicitly belong to one of my currently-working electronic gadgets, dumped the whole snarl in a box with an ancient subwoofer, an old cellphone, and a questionably-capable external CD burner, and I will eventually send the box to my brother as a gift to him (and his warehouse). Now I feel like I need to sell my ox and kiss it on the nose before heading home with some peppermint candies. Ten points (and a grass skirt) to you if you know what I'm talking about.

Okay, I have work to do tomorrow and it's getting much too late to continue rambling about all of the things that I'm supposedly freeing myself from. Goodbye, memories, I'll miss you!