Rose-colored glasses, in pictures

Here's a quick photographic look at the memorabilia sorting project. Just to give you a sense of the scope of the thing, this is a corner of the room where I was spreading everything out:

The stuffed frog is from my childhood best friend's bat-mitzvah. The blue t-shirt is my staff shirt from my senior year in college. There's a photo of me when I was about 6, obscuring a Gore/Liberman button. The two tassels in the center are from my high school and college graduations, and the little wooden plaque at the back is an award for second place in a piano competition when I was around 10. And that's not even the half of it.

Luckily for my organizing project, most of the stuff falls into easily-recognizable categories: things from my family, things from my friends, memorabilia of ex-boyfriends, school stuff neatly sorted into high school or college or grad school, wedding things. Here's a collection of things from camp:

The picture is of my bunk, my last year at summer camp, on top of a stack of bus notes and play programs, with some art projects I've haven't been able to bring myself to get rid of. I wore that necklace constantly when I was there, and never since, as far as I can remember.

Random observation: There's an inordinate amount of Star Wars-related stuff. A stranger looking through these boxes might conclude that I was well-nigh obsessed, which I guess I was a little --- until those shockingly awful prequels came out.

What makes this both easier and harder is that I'm terribly organized. I used to save every little scrap of paper (ticket stubs, stickers, business cards) and paper-clip it to my calendar, like so:

What I've ended up with is an almost-perfectly preserved, mildly obsessive record of all of my activities, no matter how mundane. The tradeoff for having such a complete collection of daily detritus is that I simply cannot bring myself to get rid of the least scrap of it. Well, at least it stores flat --- unlike the stuffed frog.

Finally, I have the leftovers from this phase I went through of decorating stuff with paper clippings. It's a little hard to see from the photo, but this shoebox is decorated on every surface, inside and out, with words and pictures that I cut from whatever old magazine I could get my hands on:

It used to be filled to the brim with random memorabilia, which I've since pared down, but the box itself remains. I'm sure I will have occasion to fill it up in the coming years, and then will have to go through this exercise all over again. But I don't mind one bit. As the text in pink on the lower right-hand corner says, "La vie est plus belle quand on l'écrit soi-même." Life is more beautiful when one writes it oneself. Amen!