Day 40: More Books, and The End

It's interesting to go back and read through the first posts of this series and reflect on what my life looked like just thirty-nine days ago.  At first glance, little has changed, and yet, so much has.  I don't spend five extra minutes every morning rummaging through my dresser drawers, trying to find a pair of socks or a shirt I actually do wear.  I don't feel bad every time I look at my bookcase, taking note of all the books there I'll never read again, or that I've never read and will probably never read.  I don't cringe when look under my bed, or in my closet, or in the stairwell.  These things I once held so tightly to, these tangible memories and regrets and to-do's, they're gone.  And my life is a little less complicated.  The burden is a little lighter.

This forty day experience started as something different to do for Lent.  I had honest intentions, sure, but I don't think I really understood the effect it would have, the change it would bring.  The plan was to give away one thing a day, or even a category of things each day.  But by the end of this forty days, I am practically tossing things out the door.  The ones with a story have made it onto this blog, but the skirts and the sweaters and the papers and the hangers and the CDs (more of them) and the jackets and the old and unused underwear I should have gotten rid of a long time ago, they simply got added to the pile, no fanfare given.  I started this challenge, unsure if I would be able to finish.  I just didn't know if I had enough to give away.  As I looked around my room day after day, though, I began to search less for what I could give away and more for what I'd be better off without.  Some days, it was harder to see than others.  Some days, I could've given it all away.

Reaching out towards this intangible simplicity, I felt it was only right to go back today, to spend my last day reevaluating the place where it all began.  On "Day 1: Books," I got rid of a huge box full: things I'd never read and things I'd never intended to read.  But I wasn't really being honest with myself that first time through.  I was so caught up in what the bookcase of a woman of my education level and literary interest should look like that I couldn't see the bookcase I really wanted to have, full of just the books I use, just the books I love.  But I see now that books aren't things to store on a shelf.  They are living, breathing works, dying to be held, to be bent, to have their pages read.  And this holds true for all things in life.  They are there to be used, to be cherished, to be taken with a grain of salt.  Because, if we're being honest with ourselves, all we really need is water, food, a change clothes, and the memories we hold in the folds of our gray matter.  The memories that remind us that we are loved.  The memories that teach us how to love.  All the rest is lagniappe.

Day 39: Superbowl Papers

I missed it.  I missed what I had been waiting my entire life to see.  I missed the second half on-side kick.  I missed Tracy Porter's victory-sealing interception.  I missed seeing baby Brees being held up as the Saints were handed the once-impossible Lombardi trophy.  I missed running the streets of the French Quarter with every other Who Dat that had spent the season thinking that maybe, just maybe, this was our year.  I missed it all.  And it still hurts.

It all started well.  Hours before the game actually began, we wandered the streets of the French Quarter, pulling colt-colored (blue) beads off passers-by and instigating a "Peyton on the Ground" dance party on Royal St. that drew a significant crowd (it was big enough to make it onto YouTube, anyway).  I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast, but I was only a couple of drinks deep, and I felt fine.  No, I felt great.

I made it through the first half, no problem, but somewhere between the two-minute warning and the end of halftime, it hit me.  I remember feeling sleepy, and a little later, I remember finding myself seated on the bar's bathroom floor, head in hands, trying to get the world to stop spinning for just a second.  I couldn't miss this.  I couldn't miss this.

But the bar wouldn't let me stay there, and I ended up being driven to a friend's house to sleep it off.  A lot of that night is hazy, but I clearly remember my friend shouting, "They won!  They won!" as she helped me into the bed, the small TV in her room blurrily showing me for a second the confetti falling on the field.  And I remember that at that moment, I wanted so badly to go back to that afternoon.  I wanted so badly to wake up from that irreparable nightmare.  Sixty-seven years of losing, and the year we finally make it to the Superbowl, I couldn't manage to stay conscious long enough to enjoy the win.  And now, all I could do to dull the pain was fall asleep again.

When I finally woke up, hours later, I cried.  I cried in the bed.  I cried in the bathroom.  I cried in the living room, in front of relatively new friends I didn't even know that well.  They kept trying to tell me I should be happy; we won, after all.  Plus, they reassured me, it happens to everyone; everyone drinks a little too much at one point or another.  But did it have to be that night? I begged.  Did it have to happen then?  Did it have to keep me from seeing the most important game in Saints history?  I cried when I woke up again the next day, and I cried when I finally watched the second half on DVR at my parents house that afternoon.  These were no tears of joy.  Regret filled every salty drop as it streamed down my face.

The newspaper was filled with Saints stories for weeks before and after that fateful Sunday.  I kept most of them, even though they just made it more painfully obvious that I had lost a once-in-a-lifetime moment and would never get it back.  I have held on to these papers for more than a year now,  I think in the hopes that someday I would be able to show them to my children as proof that it really did happen.  That someday, I would be able to look back on it with joy.  With no regret.

But today is not that day.  Today, I find my tears once again hitting these dusty old pages, wishing that things could have been different.  Going over and over the events of the day, picking out every little thing I could have changed that would have kept me in that bar, kept me in that game, kept me from missing pigs fly and hell freeze over.  No, today is the day I admit to myself that I won't ever get that day back.  Today, I let myself feel for the last time the weight of those inked pages and the memories they hold that I never had.  Today, I start forgiving myself.  Today, I try to move on.

Day 38: The Shedding Snuggie

I was gung-ho about snuggies from the start. When all of you blanket purists were deriding the snuggie and its glorious genius, I was there recounting all the times I've fought a blanket to stay on while I tried to read.  I will admit, they look pretty stupid, but how fashionable do you expect to make what is essentially a backwards robe?  Comfort over beauty, people.  These things were a gift from God, a God who hates it when he's trying to drink hot chocolate and his arms get cold because the damn blanket won't stay up.  Still, with all my verbal support for the snuggie, I never actually bought one.  Much like noise-canceling headphones and tans, I simply resigned myself to envying others who had one.

Then the snuggie went viral, and out came the knock-offs.  My favorite of the knock-offs was the slanket.  I would guess, judging from the byline on their website (supposedly, "The Original Blanket with Sleeves"), that the name is meant to be a clever fusion of the words sleeves and blanket, but to be truthful, it sounds a lot more like the words skank and blanket hooked up after a party.  When I hear the name slanket, I cannot help but envision an at-best mildly-attractive "lady of the night," reading paperback romance novels on the porch of a bordello, her fake nails getting caught in the cheap seam-work of her slanket's sleeves as she imagines herself whisked away by some handsome gentleman, like in Pretty Woman.  In my imagination, every prostitute is Julia Roberts or wants to be Julia Roberts.  Also in my imagination, there is a Colonel Sanders on every chicken farm, surveying the prospects as he puffs on a cigar.  But don't judge me based on my imagination, or on my delusional ideas about how chicken farms are run.

By Christmas that year the Snuggie debuted, the commercials were coming on constantly.  There were people buying them up left and right, and even more people making fun of them.  I was neither, but I ended up with one anyway when a student handed me a large box marked with a knock-off name I can't even remember.  Despite the lack of brand name, and the fact that one of my coworkers got a Saints-themed snuggie (the jealous has not subsided), I was thrilled.  No more tucking edges, no more cold shoulders (the literal kind, anyway), no more contorting my body to keep up a blanket!  Just pure, blissful couch-worthy warmth!

After raving to my roommate about it and calling my mother to tell her the good news (you'd thought I'd won twenty bucks in the lottery), I settled into my old hand-me-down couch to watch a television show or two and quickly found out two things they don't tell you on the box.  First, this blanket with sleeves is like North Face's best arctic-weather sleeping bag.  The thing traps in every ounce of heat your body puts out.  Before the first show was over, I was crawling out of it, gasping for cold air on my poor, overheated skin.  Second, this blanket--a knock-off's knock-off--sheds worse than a cat lady's feline fan club.  After pulling the thing off me, I stood up to find chunks of the tan fabric clinging to my clothes.  It took half a lint roller to get it all off, and the rest had to be swept up off the floor.  I tried washing and drying the thing, hoping that would get the rest of the excess "fur" off, but instead, I ended up with a full lint trap and my clothes once again coated with the stuff.

Eventually, I had to retire this blanket with sleeves, and yet somehow, it did not end up in the trash.  When I found it today in the stairwell we use for storage, I accidentally held it up to me and came away with a few more lint balls.  Now more than ever, it's clear to me, I am destined to a lifetime of delicately handled hot chocolate and awkward reading positions, all to get that perfect balance of comfort and warmth.  Sorry, snuggie, it just wasn't meant to be.

Day 37: College Comforter

There is nothing better on a cold night than the weight and warmth of a familiar comforter.  It may be the only thing I like about winter.

Like so many other things, my bedspreads have changed as I've changed.  They are yet another reminder that I am not a kid anymore.  For most of us, childhood is a time of hand-me-downs and parental choices, and through most of my years at home, I just used whatever blanket my parents bought me or whatever I could dig out of the linen closet.  There was a brief episode in high school when I had a bedspread of my own choosing (a thick, blue comforter), but after year or two of having it, my parents let me bring it to the dry cleaners and that was that.  Despite days of airing it out on the fence (and drying it out, after I forgot to bring it in and it got rained on), the chemical smell never came out.  Finally, when the summer before college rolled around, my mom brought me to Linen N Things, and I picked out something new: a red, purple, and blue plaid comforter.  I was so excited about it, that I got a set of purple sheets to go with it.  (Needless to say, no guy accidentally picked up my comforter instead of his on move-in day.)  My roommate and I tried to go the route of dorm room coordination when we talked on the phone that July, but after sharing the details of our two very different color schemes, I think we mutually agreed, though not in so many words, that we really didn't care.  The end result was a room full of color, contrasting nicely with the black-and-white Bob Dylan poster (the musician, not to be confused with Bob Dylan, my roommate's fish) and the simple color scheme in her poster of The Who.

Somehow, though, when you "grow up," a colorful room does not connote the same medley of posters, bedspreads, rugs, and hand-me-down furniture assembled to distract from white walls and hours of reading and studying.  It is a deliberate selection of complementary hues.  It radiates class and style, and more money than work study will ever get you.

I guess that puts me somewhere in limbo.  Sure, my desk matches my bedside tables, and my rug complements my more adult comforter, the headboard, and my drapes.  I have a diploma and a painting from France hanging on the wall.  But there are still four different shades of wood amongst my furniture.  There are still flags affixed to the wall, really bad family photos on display, and a floor lamp being used as a towel rack.  Transition.  One day all my things will match.  One day...such is the life of a young adult.

Day 36: Manuals, Locks, and a Few Floppy Disks

I keep everything.  And the manual to everything.  And the Spanish manual to everything.

This untamed pile of papers, disks, locks, cords, bags, and used batteries reeks of amateur hoarding.  Here on my floor is the assembly information for a desk and chair I had in college, the booklet that came with a TV I gave away last spring, the receipt for those speakers that broke, a mouse pad I haven't used in four years, random wires that go to nothing, the packaging material for my smoke alarm, and six floppy disks from middle and high school marked "Do Not Discard"...that I will now be discarding.  (Sorry, teenage self, but without a floppy disk reader, it is worthless to keep your 10th grade science fair project papers. Plus, if I wanted to know that RoundUp weed killer wasn't harmful to humans, I could just check the label.  Or the website.)

Day 35: Two Jeans and a Corduroy

Finally, the day comes when I stop and realize that it's pointless to keep pants that are a size too large, and not at all flattering.  Recently, I have found myself spending inordinate amounts of time digging through this section of my closet, trying to find one of the two pairs of jeans that actually fits decently.  No more.  If there's only one pair of blue medium-wash GAP jeans in there, it shouldn't be too hard to find the Perfect Boot Cut version with the safety-pinned right belt loop.  I won't have to analyze all the pockets and re-read all the labels twice.  I won't have to bring in a flashlight to check for wash variations.  I might actually have time to dig beyond the top of the clean clothes hamper for a shirt.

Day 34: Hieroglyphics Set

Fun With Hieroglyphs, A Poem

This is the hieroglyphics set
I bought in third grade
From a Scholastic catalog
With twenty dollars I took
From my mother's wallet
Without her permission.

This is the hieroglyphics set
That came in the mail
To my teacher at school
That I snuck back home
And opened in the living room
When my mother wasn't home.

This is the hieroglyphics set
That my mother caught me with
In the living room
When she came home early.

This is the hieroglyphics set
That got me into a world of trouble
And taught me never to steal
And taught me never to lie
And taught me never to incur
The wrath of a mother
If I could help it.

This is the hieroglyphics set
That my mother let me keep.

I have no idea why.

Day 33: Notes and Papers

From the look of it, you would think that keeping notes from high school and college in boxes in a closet would be a guaranteed way to avoid forgetting all the information they contain.  Unfortunately, sifting through all these notes today, it becomes clear that there is no guarantee besides frequent use, and I clearly don't use chemistry, US and European history, or German enough to remember anything beyond the basics.  All these papers have done is weigh down the closet floor and make getting to fallen clothing incredibly difficult.

There were a few memories mixed in with them, though, that I had to keep.  The postcard we bought in Gibraltar to commemorate the nice bite-marks a Barbary ape left in my arm while we were there ("Thinking of You," it reads, above a picture of an ape).  Yearbooks from high school.  A diploma or two.  And an autobiography I started in middle school, called "My (Boring) Life."  This one is my favorite of the lot.  It begins with a very serious introduction, explaining the motivation behind such an autobiography: "As a child, I had always had a keen imagination, but could never get anything down on paper. I decided I could only write a biography of some sort and I have decided to try it."  There are lists of friends (subdivided into bestest, best, great, good, and okay), lists of careers I'd considered, lists of places I'd been, not so nice commentary about a few siblings, and some real gems of insight into my slightly arrogant twelve-year-old self.  Reading over it again almost fifteen years later, I can only laugh...and hope that, should I ever write a real autobiography, it reads better than this one and gives my brothers and sisters a little more credit.

Day 32: Cameras

I use these so rarely, I can't even find the third one I need to give away.

Unlike most of my teacher friends, I didn't know I wanted to be a teacher until high school.  Instead, I bounced around idea after idea, year to year: primatologist, architect, zookeeper, writer, artist,...  For my sixth grade yearbook, we submitted a sentence or two on where we thought we'd be in twenty years.  By the time I got the yearbook in May, I had to scratch out my original answer (scientist) to correct it to my most recent plan for the future (archaeologist).  Among the careers on my long list of maybe-to-dos-when-I-grow-up was photographer.  In high school, my parents bought me a Wildlife Photography book by National Geographic, and I bought a refurbished manual film camera (this was back when the "manual" part of that description told you I meant business, not the "film" part).  I had a blast playing with it, but after the excitement died down and digital cameras became more affordable, the old manual Pentax took up the job of collecting dust beneath the bed.

Since then, I've bought four different cameras.  There was the 3 megapixel Olympus I bought the summer between high school and college (It was my first digital camera, and I was enthralled: No more trips to the Walgreens photo booth!  No more paying for terrible photos!  No more buying film!).   A few years later, came the upgraded 6 megapixel Olympus (so thin!), and then a few years after that, a 10 megapixel Canon and the Nikon D40 DSLR I thought would be my segue into hard-core photography (wrong).

The problem was, I got tired of standing behind the camera.  As a kid, I loved taking pictures.  But I was a different person back then.  I was painfully shy, and being behind the camera meant less attention, less eyes focusing on me.  I got better with age, but it was a long, drawn out process.  It started with denial.  I somehow convinced myself by high school that I was just a quiet person, and that it didn't mean anything bad; I wasn't anxious or fearful, I told myself.  But I was lying.  In a freshman geography presentation on South Africa, I was so nervous, I was literally shaking and caused the music stand the teacher had set up as a podium to shake, too.  It didn't help that the "ethnic" food I had brought to appease my hungry classmates was more like play-dough than something edible, and while the guy I had a huge crush on was really nice about it, he didn't seem particularly impressed.  Of course, I wouldn't know because I almost never talked to him.  Even in my junior year physics class, three years deep into a crush completely unfounded in reality, I couldn't overcome the shyness.  When he walked up to me one day and made a comment about a stick figure gangster he had drawn earlier on the piece of styrofoam I was holding, I didn't say anything.  I think (hope, pray, beg) that I nodded, but I can't be sure.  If you've ever seen Sixteen Candles, that moment at the dance when Jake says hi to her and she just stares at him, yeah, I'm pretty sure that was me.  (To make matters worse, my sister and her friend called him a few months after that and left a voicemail on his home answering machine telling him that I liked him.  Luckily it was the beginning of summer, so I had plenty of time to hide.  I thought surely my life as I knew it was over, but I never heard about it.  Not even in the fall, when we returned to school, which reinforces my belief that there is a God kind enough to save a poor girl's dignity by having his parents delete the message before he hears it.  But I can't be sure.  To this day, I am still mortified that the message made it through.)

Senior year wasn't much better.  I was beginning to break out of my shell, one tiny crack at a time, but I was still convinced that I was meant to stay behind the scenes.  As I applied for a scholarship centered around leadership skills, my mom had me read an article about "super-followers."  I don't remember anything that article said, but I would guess it made the following point: someone has to be a follower for there to be a leader.  I was convinced that was me.  Needless to say, I did not get that scholarship.

In college, I learned that I didn't much like doing just whatever others told me to do, and I found myself speaking up for myself and for my ideas more often.  By the time I graduated, this was my new status quo.  I no longer sat behind the scenes.  I no longer followed where I could lead.  And I gave up my penchant for picture-taking in favor of actually doing things worth having a picture of.

Day 31: iPod Speakers

I recognize that there is probably a moral in here somewhere about investing in quality products, but my bank account doesn't want to hear it.

One thing you should know about me is that, when it comes down to it, I like my music loud.  It tends not to happen in the presence of others (in fact, now that I think about it, I'm usually the one asking people to turn down the sound, for ear health), but little gives me more joy than cranking up the volume to a good tune and singing/dancing my heart out.  I'd worry more that my roommates and neighbors hated me for it, except that I have serious trouble finding speakers or music-related machines that can actually get loud.  My laptop speakers are straight up weak (fail, Apple), and all the speakers I've found for my iPod are barely audible above my window unit's complaints of old age and poor upkeep.  You'd think the manufacturers of these things were hoping they'd be used for nursery and elevator soundtracks.  It is thoroughly disappointing.  But don't you worry, I will find loud speakers one day, and there will be a mighty dance party in my room.  I would invite you, but it's like imaginary friends.  Some things are better kept to yourself.

These speakers broke a year ago, and when they did, I wasn't even surprised.  You see, in addition to having terrible luck with finding loud speakers, I also have terrible luck with electronics in general.  A few years ago, I bought some speakers to use in my car for the long drives between home and school to spare me from hearing Beyonce tell her man to get out the house (and to the left, to the left) even one more time on the radio.  They worked great, until thirty-three or so days later, when they just up and broke (story of my life.), and then sat in my car for a few weeks, as if to commemorate my utter inability to keep electronics alive.

 The fall of my last year at UVA, I bought a DVD player at Target, replacing the one that had graduated with a roommate the year before.  Again, it worked great at first, but sure enough, a few weeks in, the thing just stopped responding.  It would turn on, and then go into screensaver mode as I jabbed my finger at every imaginable button, unplugged and replugged every imaginable cord, and occasionally beat it with my fist (it works sometimes).  Once I got past the obvious frustrations, I found myself relieved: at least this one managed break before the first thirty days were up.  Well, I drove the twenty minutes out into the boonies to return it and traded it out for a new one.  As soon as I got home, I plugged it in, pressed play, and watched as the brand-new machine haltingly skipped through a particularly suspenseful episode of The Office (damn these electronics and their skipping!).  I quickly threw a hissy fit, unplugged the thing, shoved it back into the box, and sped back out to Target.   Fed up with their crappy DVD players (and hoping to cut down on any time not spent obsessively watching episode after episode of the show we had just discovered), I got a refund and bought a DVD player at the closer-to-home Best Buy.  Not too long after, I ran into the house, put in the DVD again, and took a deep, relieved breath as the first previews began.  But it didn't last.  Wanting to just get on with it already, I hit the "next" button on the remote, only to get no response.  I hit it again.  No response.  I pushed every button on that Best Buy remote, and nothing worked.  I couldn't do it; I couldn't drive out there again that day.  I just didn't like Best Buy or my car or the traffic on Highway 29 that much.  So instead, we sat and watched every episode and deleted scene and anything else that came up when you couldn't choose "next" or "select."  The next day, I brought the thing back to Best Buy, pretty much resigned to a fate of frequent interactions with Customer Service, but with the fourth, slightly more expensive DVD player, things finally worked.  It turns out that as soon as I break down and pay the ten dollars for insurance, the thing stops malfunctioning.  That would be great if it were a preventive feature, but since it's not, it most feels like the electronics gods are spitting on me.  It's like finally paying up for flood insurance after getting three feet of water, only to find yourself in a drought.  You think to yourself, this can't possibly be necessary, but you know as soon as you stop making the payments, that sky will open up and you'll be swimming to that front door.  (Alanis Morissette, I believe, would call this a little bit ironic.)

Nonetheless, I am an eternal optimist when it benefits my pockets to do so, and so I have held on to this portable iPod player that only plays when plugged and with terrible quality, in the hopes that one day it will get its act together and do what it's supposed to do.  But no more.  Time to stand up and say sayonara to this useless assembly of plastic and wiring.  So long, farewell.  May I learn to resist cheap price tags, and may Altec Lansing stop making crappy products.

Day 30: Jewelry

Most of this jewelry I never wear.  Some of it was a poor purchase choice on my part, but a good bit of it was given to me without me actually in mind.  One of my grandmothers in particular is a repeated offender in this.  Each Christmas, she sends five things: one thing for each Olinde grandson and three of the same thing--in different colors--for the granddaughters.  The selection is hit or miss.  I love the watch she sent one year, and the purse from another year, but most of the necklaces she sends just aren't my style.  Let's be honest, anything from HSN probably isn't so much my style.  So, I have two choices: hold on to everything I get, in the spirit of being a good and grateful granddaughter, or let the unused pieces go, still grateful for the love but not necessarily the necklaces themselves.

Choice made.

Day 29: Writing Utensils

I am a sucker for office supplies and power tools.  And while a female of my age and profession (and incapacity to even assemble Kmart furniture) has a hard time justifying the purchase of a good circle saw, I can come up with several good reasons for why I might need a new set of sharpies or another box of pencils.  They are deceptively useful.

In my desk, there are three doors, three cabinets, and four shelves.  Of those storage spaces, at least six hold some type of office supply.  In most cases, they are filled with them: pencils, pens, scissors, sharpeners, colored paper, loose-leaf paper, black sharpies, colored sharpies, silver sharpies (okay, only one of those), mailing tape, envelopes,...the list goes on.  If I count them up, I have a total of 172 writing utensils, of which I probably consistently use five or six.  I have collected all the rubber bands from my delivered newspapers over the course of the last year, though I've only used probably three.  I still have the pencil pouch I used in sixth grade and another from middle school.  I am knee-deep in office supplies, and I can only imagine how many dollar bills I could be wading in instead if I'd never bought all this stuff in the first place.

The problem with office supplies is that they're specifically made to be useful.  That's what they do; they get used.  Sure, the pens can be in pretty colors and the pencil sharpeners might be glittery from time to time, but let's be clear here, people don't buy pencils to decorate their homes or to accentuate a neckline; they buy them to write.  Which begs the question, if I'm not using it, what's the point of having it in the first place?  So I send along two gift bags worth of pens and pencils.  Who knows, maybe they'll end up in the hands of the next poet laureate or the next president or the next Charlie Sheen.  For better or for worse, office supplies aren't known for their discriminating taste.

Day 28: A Day

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror.  It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.  ~Martin Amis, Money

For weeks, people plugged this retreat: at meetings, before talks, in emails.  As the facilitator of a young adult group in the city, you'd think I'd have been gung-ho to be part of a retreat specifically directed at people in their 20s and 30s.  But I found myself constantly forgetting, constantly putting it off as I thought through all the things I wouldn't be able to get done if I was stuck listening to holy talks on the northshore.

But I guess God has a way of getting you where He knows you need to be.  Last week was a rough one.  Pressure about upcoming state testing left my mind muddled at work and my students antsy.  Events in the evening kept me away from home more nights than not.  I was days behind in my postings, and the mess I had spent hours righting last weekend was going back to all wrong.  The week, with all bullying, just would not end.

Until finally, it did.  I left work a little early than on a usual Friday and got home in time to get a few things in before a friend came over.  It was supposed to just be a walk, but it turned into more of a hike, without any of the negative connotations that word can carry.  The almost five miles we ended up covering was interrupted only by a quick dinner out on the sidewalk and an even quicker stop at a frozen yogurt shop.  The rest of the time we kept moving, clearing the air of all the dust stirred up over the week: the fears, the laughs, the frustrations, the stress, the hope.  We said hello to people we knew along the way and side-stepped the ones we weren't so sure about.  Those five miles were a blessing, but they weren't enough.  There were still streets to be crossed where old, sometimes unpleasant memories lived.  That bar where I had a first date with one guy.  That place where things fizzled with another.  For rents signs reminding me it was high time to make a decision about where I'd be in June.  School banners taunting me: was all I'd done for my students this year enough?  I had to get out.  I had to get away from all this.  Serenity, now, I begged.

Back home, we said goodbye, only to reconvene early the next morning to cross the lake.  The Causeway's 24 mile expanse may not be the most interesting of drives, but the steady thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump of the road was already slowing my heart rate.   An hour and only one missed turn later, we turned onto St. Joseph Way to find ourselves surrounded by green grass, a chapel, a pond, a conference room, and a blue beautiful sky spotted with clouds like strewn cotton balls.

Check-in was easy, and there were plenty of hugs to give: friends from this place and that group had shown up, some expected and some not.  I was glad to be there, but I wanted to be outside, to lay in the grass, to play a game of something in the open field, not sit quietly and listen in a chapel.  My mind, despite the relaxing drive, had not slowed down enough.  The "go, go, go" attitude I've developed after years of trying not to fall into boredom would not succumb to my gentle plea to pause.  But I suppose I just needed to push a little harder.  I walked into the chapel, made myself stop and be serious for once, and pretty soon, I found the day melting away around me.  I never took off my watch, but I barely looked at it, either.  And when I did, I didn't really care.  Between the gentle breeze as I reflected in the shade, and the pointed insights and comforting community of my small group, the day slipped away.  But unlike most Saturdays, I didn't want it back.  It was perfect and exactly what I needed.  At mass, one woman stood up and told us that the retreat's name, Charis, meant gift or grace.  What was your grace? she asked.  Huddled with the people that had made that day special, I whispered, peace.  Today gave me peace.  For just a few hours as payment, I found even just a taste of what I was looking for.

Day 27: CDs

In 2006, I gave up on hauling around CDs wherever I went and finally broke down and bought an iPod.  If I wanted any kind of musical selection on my flights to and from Virginia, my power walks to and from class, or when I exercised, a supposedly-skip-free portable cd player and an accompanying three-pound disc case just wasn't going to cut it anymore.  It was time to enter the modern age.  So I stuck all of my CDs in a closet somewhere, just in case the iPod broke, or my computer broke, or I was feeling nostalgic for a time when music was held in something bigger than a matchbox.

That same year, I bought a car.  Now, if you remember 2006, you'll remember that this was just around the time that tape decks were being phased out.  CD players were the norm, and mp3 jacks were just an option on a custom features list somewhere.  As a poor college student with a twice-a-year roadtrip to and from home, I was not thinking about music options.  I was mostly interested in making sure that my Civic LX had cruise control and worrying about how I was going to learn stick shift in two weeks before I had to drive back to school.  Plus, who needs to listen to their mp3 player in the car?  I had CDs.

Well, need is a strong word, but it's amazing how when something becomes as common place as an mp3 jack is now, you realize how much more convenient it would be to have one than to not.  Like texting, choosing and/or changing CDs while driving is not the safest thing.  That's not to say that scrolling through song lists on an iPod is, but hey, those shuffle and skip buttons were made for a reason.  So, I've resigned myself to the radio and a select few CDs to choose from at stoplights or before the car starts (that means that when all three radio presets are on commercial, it's Beyonce time, baby).  Buying a new car is out of the question and installing a new car radio is a hassle and costly, so for now, CDs it will be.  But that doesn't mean I need a music library under my armrest.  I mean, come on, do I really think I'll be listening to that 98 degrees CD anytime soon?

Day 26: Duplicates

(Not my school filing cabinet, but a similar mess of papers)

I realized today, bored to tears as my students silently trudged through their practice LEAP tests, that this lenten purging doesn't have to be limited to home.  According to the graphing calculator I did keep, I spend about 42% of my waking hours each week at work.  While I don't expect to spend 42% of Lent giving away things from work (the school might not like that), it seems only fair to dedicate at least one day to clearing out my classroom's main offender: the filing cabinet.

When I started teaching at Lusher, I took the position and classroom of a man that had just retired.  For those of you who are not teachers, what that means is that I inherited all of his crap.  Now, it could have been a lot worse--I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers and administrators give it a first go-through before I got there.  Nonetheless, it was overwhelming.  I came in to find the room in disarray with piles of worksheets, lesson plans, and random notes about things like circumference (which I don't even teach) on every available surface.  I somehow managed to get things in a decent enough order that I didn't go into some kind of claustrophobic shock, but I do not lie when I say that I was still throwing out the man's papers at the end of the year.

That being said, three years later, I find my desk and filing cabinets in a position of similar disarray: papers and binders covering the available surfaces, files so atrociously full that I can't get to the ones in the back without the taking out the ones in the front first.  So, as my students prepared for state testing today, I opened up a drawer and started weeding.  Two hours later, I had only managed to successfully rid myself of duplicates and outdated copies of tests and quizzes from most of my fourth grade math files.  While that is one large step for Olinde-kind, it's a real small step in the scheme of things and means that next week, when I am not sitting for hours on end watching students bubble in answer sheets, I'll have to tackle the rest of those papers.  Recycling group, get ready for a workout.

Day 25: Exercise Ball

I had every intention of giving away the paper-mache gargoyle I made in art camp the summer after fourth grade.  I took a picture.  I wrote "Gargoyle" in my lenten calendar.  I posted it to facebook.  But when I actually took it down from its bookshelf perch, I knew I couldn't give it away.  This gargoyle had been with me through so much: the awkward middle school years, the stressful high school years; it was there every time I visited home during college, and it moved in with me when I came back to New Orleans.  It is a testament to perseverance and, like a small clay dinosaur I made around the same time, evidence of my poor sculpture skills.  These things I cannot give away anymore than I can give away my dad's rock collection.  They took time and a little more work than we bargained for, and they will stick around a little longer than we originally planned.

Instead, something else must go...

This is what I get for buying something I saw on an infomercial.  All these years, I managed to convince myself I didn't need a BoFlex, or one of those glass tubes that automatically gives plants the perfect amount of water, but this seemed so practical, so useful...

Exercising in college was a lot harder than I anticipated.  As kids, my siblings and I were constantly being thrown out the door, I think in the hopes of moving the chaos outside and giving my mom a chance to breathe.  I played a sport for at least one season each year up until my junior year of high school, too.  But when I gave up volleyball to go back for a second year of writing at NOCCA, and had no PE or extra time for anything but schoolwork, it was easy to fall into a sedentary life style.  College didn't help much, but for different reasons.  I had time--much more than I expected--but instead of spending it exercising, I tended to spend it talking with friends, drinking smoothies in gardens, watching chick flicks in the living room, and hanging around the dining hall, hoping to accidentally collide with a really cute guy who would then have to pick up my tray and, of course, get my phone number (never happened).  I may have spent a few hours reading and writing papers somewhere in there, too.

That's not to say that I didn't try to exercise.  My first year of college, I have a distinct memory of trying to run.  I'd seen people do it around campus all the time.  So, I got my headphones and my Discman (a special jogging discman I had bought just for the occasion), popped in some uptempo Jesus music, stuck the cd player in my Discman-compatible waist belt (read: fanny pack), and started jogging along a path through the dorms.  About three steps later, my Discman starting skipping.  So I stopped, adjusted it, and tried to run again.  Again, three steps later, it skipped.  I tried to shuffle my feet to lessen the impact.  I tried to hold the cd player out away from me.  I tried shaking the thing.  No matter what I tried, it skipped.  Needless to say, I gave up and walked back to my room.

There was a gym near my dorm, so I tried that, too.  Somewhere I had heard that it was good to do a little cardio before you work out, and jogging on a treadmill seemed like a fair option.  There was a place to rest any cd players, though I was plenty content with the gym's loudspeakers (anything to avoid further conflicts with mine and its supposed "anti-skip" feature).  But this gym was one of those gyms, you know, the kind where you go to see and be seen, so the treadmills were set up on the second floor in a rectangle above an opening to the first floor.  That means that your only options were to look at the girls on the stairmasters across from you (who were in painfully better shape), look at the girls jogging on either side of you (awkward), read a magazine (how? the words don't stop moving), or watch the televisions set up above the rectangle (not coordinated enough).  And when I say not coordinated enough, I mean that there was no possible way.  I have serious issues with running when I am looking anywhere but straight or down, and I swear I almost ate it multiple times trying to read the subtitles.

Weights were no good, either.  Beyond the fact that pulling a bar up and down twenty-five times provides me with little to no mental stimulation, I felt constantly belittled every time I followed up a guy on machine (...oh, wow, you just bench-pressed 150 pounds? I'll be moving that little pin there up to the 5-pound weight, thanks).  Surprisingly, I worked out on and off for a good part of college.  Also surprisingly, it had little to no effect on my muscle mass.

Then, in my last year at UVA, I was watching television one day and an infomercial came on.  Generally speaking, my reaction to all infomercials is: "That's cool, but what idiot would actually buy that?"  That day, I was the idiot.  But I justified it to myself: this mini-exercise ball was more effective than on-the-floor crunches and it'd put less strain on my neck.  It was the answer to my exercise prayers, I was sure.

But this ball was clearly meant for someone with more common sense about exercise equipment than I have.  I read the book, I followed the directions, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to make the thing work.  If you want to understand how it was, imagine me hand-pumping a ball about twice the size of a softball, and then placing it under the small of my back.  Then, imagine me leaning back to do a crunch and rolling off the ball.  Now, I'm pretty persistent, so imagine that scenario a dozen more times.  I kept trying, I think hoping that if I could figure it out, I would feel like less of an idiot for buying it in the first place, but that moment never came.  It ended up deflated in a drawer with other little-used items like Mardi Gras frisbees and an old Karate white belt, and I learned my lesson.  Just say no to infomercials.

Day 24: Decorative Stuff

I SPY...
1 Muses Bracelet (2010)
1 Old frame and drawing of a little girl baking
2 Saints flags
1 "Make Levees Not War" button
1 YLC mini orange cone
1 BFHS alumni sticker
1 Bottle of bubbles
1 Poster from a trip out west

It's Day 25, and it's taking more time now to choose what to get rid of. Yesterday, I was itching to add more to my lenten pile, but it seems that that feeling comes and goes. If I don't think about it for a while, my stuff becomes comfortable again.

As I take down the things I've used to decorate my room with all these years, it begins to look more bare, but a kind of bare that feels right for this time in my life. Perhaps as a child, you accumulate clutter because the big stuff--the bed, the desk, the chair, the dresser, the room itself--none of it really belongs to you, but the stuff, oh the stuff is all yours! What parent would ever want to claim that old bottle of bubbles you kept from a wedding, or a sticker for a school they never went to, or a partially torn poster that you begged them for years ago? As a child, you claim possession of whatever you can get your hands on. This is my wallet. This is my stuffed animal. This is my mini orange cone, however useless it may be. (It can't really even be considered a paperweight; it's foam.) As an adult, though, that possessiveness shifts. Now it's my house, my piano, my table, my computer,...the things that I cling to now are bigger, more expensive, and they actually serve a purpose, but I also become more dependent on them. It's easy to take these things for granted; it's easy to find yourself unable to function without internet or a saucepan or a new graphing calculator. When have you ever heard a child say they can't live without their teddy bear and mean that they can't get in touch with their boss or heat up some red beans without it? Kids appreciate things for what they are. Not so much as objects necessary to the workings of life, but as treasures, to be treasured.

The pieces that adorn my walls are more adult now: city flags, paintings, and diplomas. My desk is littered with bills, letters, calendars, and Save the Dates. My art is more refined; no longer homemade sculptures and magazine clippings. My bedspread is gold and green instead of the old purple and pink plaid print I used to have. All of it smells of growing up. And as I take notice of all these signs of burgeoning adulthood, the Toys'R'Us song keeps popping into my head. Oddly, though, I'm okay with growing up. Sure, there are things I could without--rent, for example--but it's worth it. It's a fair trade-off: dependence and obedience for freedom and responsibility. Problems are bigger now, but I can handle them better now. Decisions are harder to take now, but they're decisions I have more control over. As I give up these childhood-inspired trinkets, I say goodbye to an era of clutter and hello to a new period of simplicity. But I hope never to lose the ability to treasure, to really appreciate the things I keep.

Day 23: Nail Polish

After filing with the IRS, and giving the U.S. government permission to shake down my checking account, I briefly considered making today's entry: "Day 23: More Taxes Than I Thought I Was Going to Have to Pay." But it seems dishonest to count something, when the alternative to giving it away is going to jail. Newest rule in this exercise: lenten guilt is the only acceptable form of duress under which things shall be given away.

On my way to church yesterday, I drove past a parked car with a bumper sticker that caught my attention. It read, in simple two-tone lettering: "The best things in life aren't things." How apt, I thought. Several lighter drawers and cleaner closets later, I'm beginning to need less and less convincing of this fact. For example, yesterday afternoon, hungry though I was, I made a deal with myself: you will not eat lunch until you clean up your room. After at least a month of watching piles of clothes, shoes, papers, and other miscellaneous items pile up along the edges of my room, it was time to finally deal with the mess. Originally, it was just that simple: time to wash some clothes and put things away. But somehow, it turned into more than just tidying. Over the course of three hours, I got rid of at least a dozen old prescription pamphlets, plus jackets, socks, underwear, hangers, Mardi Gras beads, old makeup, expired medicine, and t-shirts I couldn't bring myself to give away on day 7 but finally admitted I didn't need. All of a sudden, I was ready to get rid of everything. Opening drawers and doors and sifting through shelves, it became clearer how much stuff I have, and how little of it I really need. Of course, I had to stop myself after a large shopping bag started to overflow. If I give away everything all at once, what will I do for the remaining days of lent? Even as I write this, I am picking things up and forcing myself to put them back down.



When they say "Man, that was a nail-biter," I realize that as a kid, that described pretty much every situation. The nail-biting seemed constant. I was like a teenager addicted to cigarettes, except that no one mistakes nail-biting for something cool, not even people who do it regularly. It is at best a nervous mannerism, and at worse, an unattractive, unhygienic habit. It leaves your nails short, your nail beds sore, and your mouth constantly vulnerable to whatever bacteria was on the last thing you last touched. Thinking about it now, I'm amazed I didn't die of the flu as a child.

I don't remember when I started biting my nails. In my imagination, though, it started when I was three, on the very day that my parents weaned me off my pacifier by throwing the last one I had into a tree in our front yard. I, of course, don't remember that incident, but just hearing the story makes me want to bite off a nail. I mean, imagine a three-year-old me with no pacifier to comfort her, wondering what other beloved item will end up doomed to that very same leafy fate? This is probably also when I stopped climbing trees and gained an overly-active fear of heights, a likely result of vicariously living out that pacifier's last day.

However the nail-biting really came to be, it was the beginning of a habit that could not be broken. My parents, not being nail-biters themselves, were ill-equipped to help me stop, so I had to resign myself to creative problem-solving and painful consequences when it didn't work. I remember those days vividly, those first fifteen-plus years to be exact, when I would wrap band-aids around my too-short nails as tight as I could to distract from the pain (an exposed nail bed is not something to play around with). I tried quite a few things: nail polish, sitting on my hands, ipecac, hair twirling...but nothing really helped until I set my chocolate sacrifice aside and gave my nails the lenten treatment instead.

While probably not adhering closely to the actual purpose of Lent, as a habit-forming or -breaking exercise, lent is amazing effective. If I made it a New Year's resolution to stop biting my nails, I might have made it a few days. But when nail-biting took a sinful turn, all of a sudden there were faint traces of white at the end of my nails. Like the top of a baby's head after 9 months of pregnancy and 12 hours of labor, those slivers of white at the end of my nail were a testament to a new beginning...and less frequent trips to K&B for bandaids.

Even with all the progress that I've made, I still never paint my fingernails. Sure, toenails, that's fine (As the less attractive digits, they could use a little glamming-up), but not fingernails. I don't know exactly the reason. Maybe the juxtaposition of dainty fingernail polish and large, bearish hands is just too much. Or maybe I like seeing the sliver of white at the end of my nail; it reminds me of a bad habit overcome. Either way, all this nail polish is a waste of space.

**
While searching for information about fingernails (apparently the white part I was talking about called the distal edge), I came across this little gem... People are so weird.


(Modern Mechanix, 1932)

Day 22: Water Bottles

I'm pretty sure that I would qualify as at least a beginning tree hugger. Between the over-full recycling containers in my kitchen, my (amateurly-managed) compost bins, and the Planet Earth class I run at school, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when people give me presents made specifically for those of us who see the world through jade-colored glasses. What does surprise me, though, is how many water bottles I receive.

Within the past three years, I've bought or received upwards of six water bottles, of which I consistently use two: one at home and one at work. The one at home stays mostly at my bedside table, but the one at school I carry around with me everywhere. Everyone knows the red water bottle with the green koozie. Three years into teaching, it is my mark, and it's an odd mark for a teacher to have.

What makes this so odd is that to be a teacher means to be in a perpetual state of dehydration. Bathroom breaks are reserved for the fleeting moments when you aren't solely responsible for the welfare of twenty plus children, namely before and after school and during lunch and planning. So, I have become incredibly adept at controlling when I do and don't need to relieve myself. Granted, I already had some practice from all the road trips we would take as kids (a result of my older brother's penchant for talking about rain and waterfalls when you really had to go, and my dad's refusal to stop for bathroom breaks), but doing it every day takes it to a whole nother level. They say that you shouldn't wait until you're thirsty to drink water, but when you can't just get up and go whenever you feel like it, water intake is something you limit. And what other choice do we have? Leave our students for five minutes and hope to God that they behave better without you than they do with you? Stay hydrated and try to distract yourself until lunch? It won't work; inevitably, the day you drink too much water is the day you're teaching the water cycle, or watching a video on tsunamis.

So as useful as these water bottles are, what good are they to me, someone who rations water when there's no shortage? I'll stick with the two I have and save my water binging for home.

Day 21: Rings

April Fool's! (An SAT analogy for you... diamond: real as I: engaged)

In addition to big heads, my family also has large hands. My mom also said they were great for playing piano, and I did play piano for a long time, but that doesn't help the fact that every time a friend and I compare hand sizes, my fingers could eat theirs for dinner. Perhaps one day I'll embrace my large mitts and be proud that I can grip a basketball with one hand (I can't, but it'll be a while before this happens, so I've got time to practice). For now, I think I'd rather wallow in hand envy.

Over the course of the past ten or so years, I've managed to rack up a total of six rings. That doesn't seem like a lot, but when it's six more than your indelicate hands ever actually wear, it is. So out goes the Mignon Faget bow ring I got in high school, the fake diamond ring my friend Danika gave me for no apparent reason, my high school class ring, a flashing jelly ring I caught a Mardi Gras, a cheap heart ring I didn't even know I had, and a beaded ring I think I got out west one year.

Day 20: Straightener

I have always had naturally straight hair.

So why I ever went out and bought a hair straightener is beyond me. Did I hallucinate waves in my hair? Did I mistake it for a curling iron? It's like me buying a hard top for my non-convertible or getting a product that would make my skin whiter. Have you seen my skin? It's already plenty white.

Here's to the redundancy of this straightener, and to finally getting rid of it.

Day 19: Bags

It turns out that you don't need to be old, wear monochromatic clothing, or even have a shopping cart to be a bag lady. All you need is to receive presents or buy a few things, and after a while, the bags begin to pile up: inside of closets, inside of umbrella stands, inside of empty ceramic pots...even inside of other bags.

The problem with bags is that they're so useful. Depending on their size and durability, they can hold a variety of items and serve multiple functions. They're not like scented candles or bookends. They are infinitely practical. Last week, for example, my class cut up plastic bags to build parachutes. While outside, some of the students ran around using their bags as kites, and others tied bags under their chins like bonnets (both were told to stop). I used a bag to hold the parachutes and another to hold trash. By the end of the day, we actually ran out of bags, and I wished that I had hoarded them better. (I know, a low point for me.)

But this bag of bags on the floor, this Russian doll of practicality, has sat in a side closet for ten months now, untouched, and so it seems that too many bags is possible, that bags are not infinitely useful if they are not used at all. That it's high time that the closets, and the umbrella stands, and the ceramic pots be emptied, and the bags be brought out to the light. They may not have limitless usefulness, but they just might be able to hold my next delivery to Goodwill.

Day 18: Candles

You know it's bad when you find a scented candle hidden among the flour, oil, and breadcrumbs in your pantry. Can you see it?


I don't think I agree with the long-held theory that children believe their teachers live at school. If their idea of me is anything like my idea of the dentist (and I like the dentist), then it's not so much that I live at school as that I do not exist outside of school. That is to say, the only place that I have ever seen my dentist is at his office. I have gone to the same dentist for at least twenty years, and I've never seen him in anything but scrubs. I know he has children, but I've never seen them or even seen pictures of them. I imagine he lives in a nice house. I imagine he has hobbies. But I don't actually know anything besides that he is a nice man, a dentist, and that he has a lot of fillings for someone who spends the day talking about how to keep your teeth healthy. Sure, you would think that the fact that I've usually got some tool stuck in my mouth would mean that the conversation would center more on him, but not so. To me, he is simply a dentist. End of matter, case closed.

Children must look at their teachers in much the same way. Sure, they know a little about me. They know my full name, they know my favorite color (green), they know that my age falls somewhere in the 20 to 40 year-old range (because that's as specific as I'll be). They know my favorite word is defenestration (the act of throwing someone or something out of a window), and that I know a little something about football. A few of them have seen a member of my family at one point; a few others have seen me around town. But pretty much everyone has family members, shops at a grocery store, and goes to Mardi Gras parades. Really, all they know about me comes from our interactions at school. I don't like whining or tattling. I don't give out candy, I can draw pretty good circles but not so straight lines, and I know a lot about math and science. There is usually at least one typo on every assessment I give, and I'm willing to hear them out as long as they're willing to respect my decisions. But none of that gives a clear picture of what I like to do. It's nothing like seeing me play kickball in gold tights, or run a meeting, or shoot the breeze with friends. It's nothing like seeing my messy room, or hearing me scream at a Saints game, or even reading this blog. It gives kids little idea of what a teacher is really like outside of school.

Then the end of the year rolls around, and it's present time. Despite the fact that they spend almost as much time with me each day as they spend awake at home, the kids are just as clueless as their parents when they choose teacher gifts. And what's the go-to gift for people you don't know? Candles. And not just any candles. Not the kind of candles you could decorate a table with or actually use on a birthday cake. No, scented candles. Like they assume that every teacher wants their (non-existent) kitchen to smell like green apples and pralines. As much as I don't, I hold on to them anyway. Sure, I've managed to re-gift a few along the way, generally to people whose extra-professional lives I find similarly mysterious, but mostly they find their way to a table, a stove top, a ledge, or a pantry (don't ask, because I don't know how it got there). I don't know who actually uses scented candles on a regular basis, but I hope they exist. I imagine they would be the same sort of people who buy cucumber melon body mist at Bath and Body Works and debate the merits of Linen Fresh versus Outdoor Fresh fabric softener. Like hunting dogs, they have extra powerful noses, and like carpentry shops, great fire insurance. Occasionally, I hope, they shop at Goodwill.

Day 17: Bookends

The summer after sixth grade, my parents drove me up to Natchitoches, Louisiana to drop me off at a one-week gifted camp. Natchitoches, also known as the City of Lights, is not known for much else. It has a small college called Northwestern State (not to be confused, mind you, with the Northwestern University) and Louisiana's School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a boarding school of sorts. Outside of their joint campus, but before you meet the seeming vastness of Walmarts and strip malls that overtake the town, there is a quaint little downtown area. There, in a small brick-front store, I found this set of matching Noah's Ark bookends. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering why I thought I needed to buy them in the first place, much less for the thirty dollars the price tag on the box states I spent on them (a lot when you're eleven and your only income source is washing dishes or sheets, or worse, venturing out into the shed at night to feed the dog, where you know you saw a rat run along one of the shelves). The bookends are cute, I suppose, but more the kind of thing a woman buys when she's pregnant with her first child, before she realizes that babies really only care about things they can eat or play with. It's harder still for me to understand why I held on to them for as long as I have. Sixth grade was a long time ago, and they have no particular sentimental attachment. The time I spent in Natchitoches that summer was fun, but I really only remember designing a basketball gym and a golf course. Oh, and that I was one of only two girls in the basketball group (please, did you really think I'd be part of the sorority that was the swimming pool group?) and that our golf course included little golfers with names like "Leopard Forest." Oh, and I remember listening to my roommate sing opera, which now seems like a weird thing for an eleven year old to do. I remember her being pretty well-endowed, too (to my non-existent chest), and that she would tie up a towel between the bed and desk to change behind. I think she was from Alexandria. I remember a boy asking me to dance with him the final night. He was really cute and nice and listened to the same kind of music I did. He tried to drag me out onto the dance floor, but I refused, instead clinging desperately to the chair I was sitting in. No lie, that chair made it halfway onto the dance floor before he gave up. And to top it all off, I woke up the next morning with a crick in my neck after head-banging with friends at said dance. Serves me right. Poor boy.

I guess there are a few memories hidden in these old bookends yet. May they grace the home of a new mother-to-be, or the room of some other strange pre-teen who has no idea how to relate to the male species or, for that matter, how to properly head-bang.

Day 16: Purses

Wallets and purses and handbags, oh my!

A few of these were used quite often back in the day, but most were gifts from people who didn't realize that I'm a one purse and one wallet kind of girl (even if it doesn't match what I'm wearing). So, it's time to admit that will never use these wallets, purses, and handbags again, if I ever used them in the first place, and add them to the outgoing pile.

Day 15: Graphing Calculator

Most people don't have two graphing calculators. In fact, I would venture to say that most people don't have even one.

I got my first graphing calculator my freshman year of high school. It was a hand-me-down from my older brother, who somehow managed to convince my mom that he needed a whole new calculator (a year later) and that I should be stuck with the old one. Not only is it demeaning to still have second-hand items forced on you past elementary school, but I found out later that the connection feature was broken. The metallic tip on the transfer cord had gotten stuck inside of the calculator sometime before it came to me. So not only was I stuck with a hand-me-down, I was stuck copying the quadratic formula program manually into my calculator instead of playing Tetris during study hall like everyone else.

Then, sometime during my senior year of high school, one cheap, red lollipop and I managed to screw it up worse. As I was leaning forward to type something into the calculator for homework one day, lollipop in mouth, gravity took hold and a nice stream of sucker-infused spit ran down right onto the keypad. I don't remember if anyone else saw it happen, but it was disgusting. Like, really gross. Worse, I was pretty sure I had just broken my calculator. Then again, that would mean I'd need a new one, right?

Wrong. Some hand-me-downs just won't die. They are the cockroaches in the world of sibling possessions. The calculator graphed and calculated just as well as before. All I got out of the lolli-spit incident was sticky keys and the occasional ant.

When I left for college, I tried to pawn off the calculator on my younger sister, pulling the same trick my brother had pulled on me four years prior. Only this time, it didn't work. She got a fancy new one, and I continued to be stuck with crap. Yet more proof that I would make a terrible lawyer.

Finally, a few years ago, I resorted to simply asking for a new graphing calculator for Christmas. I recognize that that is an incredibly nerdy thing to ask for, but you have to understand that I am incredibly nerdy person. Plus, it's easier to balance my checkbook when I can see everything I've typed in before I press enter. So when the time came, and I was handed a "number-related" present, I was a little more giddy than is appropriate for a non-math major. I pulled off the wrapping, ready to stare through hard plastic packaging at the subtle curves of my new, state of the art TI-83. But instead of plastic and shine, the calculator just lay there in a recycled shipping box. I turned it over in my hand, dingy gray, scuffed plastic and crevices filled with glue residue, to find someone else's initials scratched into the back. Usually, I try really hard to look excited about a present, even if I don't like it, but I couldn't. Fate (and ebay) had screwed me once again. I'm all about reduce, reuse, recycle, but that cycle has to start somewhere, and for once, I wanted it to start with me.

Now stuck with two crappy calculators, it seemed only logical to keep both of them and use them equally often. Clearly, though, that logic was faulty. It's like keeping two dead-beat boyfriends because they're equally dead-beat. I guess I could just get rid of both of them and buy a new one myself...but where's the fun in that?

Day 14: Microphone

Readers, meet my childhood doll, Mary. Mary, readers. No, I know what some of you may be thinking, but you've read the title of this post. You know it's not her. No, this is not Mary's final hurrah. Simply by virtue of having made it through my brother's toy-decapitation phase early in life (poor Barbie), she has earned total immunity from all future purgings. Instead, Mary is playing Vanna today. Sure, the dress is not so glamorous, perhaps, but you must admit her face has a certain Elizabeth Taylor quality to it (as does her slow aging).

Too soon for Elizabeth Taylor jokes? Probably.

In my last semester of graduate school (there were only two, but it makes me sound smarter when I say it that way), I bought a laptop. It was my second computer and a huge relief to have something portable to work on my thesis with. Before the laptop was the iMac. It was my first computer, and I loved it. To this day, it chugs away at snail's pace in my parent's entrance room, its once spacious 40 gig memory now burdened with my younger brother's countless video games and music. While quite the new thing in its day, one of the features it nonetheless lacked (in addition to a floppy disk drive) was a strong internal microphone. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but one of the projects in a college class I took was to create a digital story. Think, slide-show with voice over. So I decided to invest in something that could capture my voice at a higher quality. Unfortunately, this microphone did not do the trick. There were compatibility issues, or maybe just cheapness issues. Either way, I ended up recording the voice-over for "A Weekend Alone in Paris" on my iMac's wimpy microphone. The sound quality isn't great, but I often wonder if maybe my voice just sounds like that. To avoid any definite answer (I'm pretty sure I don't want to know), that digital story will just have to stay hidden in the folds of my overly-complex computer filing system for now. Perhaps for a later viewing. Perhaps for a later purging.
Since that project, the microphone has sat in a drawer, its existence justified by the thought that I'll be ready, should I ever need an external microphone. It didn't work the first time, though, so I'm not sure how I've managed to convince myself of its necessity for this many years. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think this microphone might be proof that this label suits me a little too well.

Day 13: Floppy Disk Drive

And you thought the VHS tapes were old school...


This afternoon at lunch, a friend asked what I was giving up today. I honestly hadn't thought about it yet. Some days, I have a backlog of items ready for the purging. Other days, it's harder: what can I give away that's substantial without giving away something I really DO need? Some days, I consider giving everything away. But then I'd end up broke from buying it all back.

***

If you're wondering why I've kept an external floppy disk drive all these years, it's not because I have a secret fetish for items with contradictory names (seriously, floppy disks are not floppy). No, I kept it...just in case.

In addition to competitive natures, large heads, and the desire to be even vaguely related to someone famous (or infamous), a "just in case" attitude runs strong in the Olinde family. Case in point, a few years ago, one of my aunts was visiting my grandparents at the same time I was. I walked out with her at one point to get something from her car, and when she opened her trunk, I was in poor-packer's awe. The trunk was full to the gills with various outfits, boots, shirts... Anything she might need, she explained, for whatever situation came up. She was only there for the weekend, but she could've been there for months, if she needed to be.

What I choose to keep among my worldly possessions follows something along those lines. Pretty soon, I will probably get the courage to get rid of the German notes I've kept from high school (just in case I ever started learning German again) and the various necklaces and bracelets I've kept hidden in a drawer (for when I find something they go perfectly with). But these moments rarely come. In reality, German is probably tot to me, and those necklaces will never be my style, no matter how much love my grandmother spent on HSN buying them. Likewise, I don't expect there will be a day when I find that long lost copy of Oregon Trail from the 90s and think to myself, "Where is a floppy disk drive when you need one?" And if that day ever does come, well, it wouldn't do me any good anyway. I can't remember how to enter a command in MS-DOS to save my life. And I don't think my computer can either.