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.
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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.
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