What have we lost?
Just sorta ranting about a bunch of personal crap, I guess.
Having a baby to take care of, and being back at work, I don't necessarily have a lot of free time. Baby does okay on his own sometimes (with supervision, of course) -- like playing on his play mat, he likes that a lot. But for the most part, I hardly have time to think about anything other than baby. The weekends aren't much different from the week. Weekends anymore for me are basically slogging around the house, alternating baby care with Chelle and mostly being a zombie.
Today, we had to do some laundry for baby, and Chelle was the one who was going to do it. She let me know that somehow the basement had gotten pretty wet. I guess that's not entirely surprising, since we had just had a ton of rain, though I don't know how the rain actually got in. Anyway, a number of old storage boxes were now pretty wet. So we had to go through them to see if anything was damaged.
We'd already been meaning to go through the old boxes that we'd had for a few moves now, but needless to say, the wet boxes made it a bit more urgent. I have this one huge box (I think it's from a TV or something) which had just a bunch of boxed, mostly never opened toys from a few years ago... that was wet. Looks like the hardest hit was the box for a Trendmasters reissue of Voltron. Not something that really has the highest collector's or emotional value for me. My one Japanese G1 Transformers, Overlord, was in a plastic bag and looks fine. Phew.
I chose one other particularly wet box to check... not just for damage, but to actually sort through and throw stuff out, file stuff, shred stuff, etc., as needed. It's something that I dread doing in general. I don't necessarily seem to deal well with old memories, especially ones where I always meant to act on but never got around to it.
When I think about the boxes in the basement, something that weighs heavily on me is what we've (I've) lost. I'm particularly horrible about staying in touch with friends if the friends themselves don't keep in touch with me. I guess that says something about the friendship, if neither party really seems interested in keeping it going. But it's not that I don't want to keep in touch. I seem to get this way where I just sort of drift off and forget about a certain topic... whether that topic be something I need to do, someone I know, or whatever. It moves to the back of my mind and has this really low priority for my subconscious... it's hard to remember what I was supposed to do, and without a reminder, the thought more or less drops from the face of the earth. It's incredibly frustrating.
So as I sorted through the box of wet, molding mish-mash, I felt really bad upon finding some of the things in there. Firstly, the completely random assortment of toy parts left me a bit confused. Exo-Squad, Techno Zoids, Transformers, M.A.S.K. guys, something that came with some color change Hot Wheels cars. All in all it was a pretty interesting assortment of crap. I think I just threw everything from my desk in this here box, when I was going to be moving out of Fred's house. Not just toy parts... let's see... there were a few pens/pencils, nail file, pen knife, computer screws, tons of floppy disks, photos, negatives from photos, bank statements, you name it. For the most part, I leave it to you, the discerning reader, to determine into which pile most of the stuff went.
I found some old letters from a good friend, Eric Holmes, with whom I am still in touch, but I don't get much a chance to talk to. He's originally from Scotland, and I met him way back in the days of the first Transformers MUSH. I don't know what prompted him to send me some of this stuff, but it's pretty neat. A Lady Death picture he drew, and some other pictures he sourced(? Traced? Not even sure what he meant by that). Found a letter from my roommate from my junior year of college. Always meant to reply to him, never got around to doing it. I might actually try writing him back. He was a really cool guy. His letter had been sent not too long after he graduated (he was a year ahead of me) and I figure he might have used his parents' address (and they might still be at that location and able to forward the letter to him). It's a stretch, but it'd help me put some of the ghosts in the back of my mind to rest.
I'm not really looking forward to going through the rest of the boxes.
I feel kinda depressed now.
Posted on Sunday, January 04, 2004, at 04:35 PM