conversations on clutter with my mom

So recently I've been on an "I must get rid of everything" kick, where I force myself to look through a bunch of old stuff of sentimental value and try to - you've guessed it - get rid of it. Among these are such items of priceless spiritual value like programs and cards from my baptism, and priceless hilarity value like a note one of my best friends in fifth grade slipped me which told me that the boy in the book we were reading in class was able to shoot an animal without leaving any mark because he shot the animal in the butt. Not the most mature thing, I know, but I never promised you guys maturity, now did I?

Also included with all of this stuff are notes from friends throughout my college years, wedding announcements, birthday cards, performance programs, acceptance/rejection letters from grad schools, magazines with ads of me in the eighties, wearing an oh-so-stylish oversized t-shirt*, a magazine from Baltimore listing the company I worked at as the best Landscape Design/Build Firm in the Baltimore area, name tags from conferences which I can't remember but can't bear to part with, and a whole bunch of random dried plants/plant parts, which - apparently - I started collecting as far back as elementary school. What is wrong with me?

Faced with the unbearable notion of sorting through and throwing away all the random sentimental junk of my childhood/adolescence/present life, I, of course, started complaining to my mother. The conversations were somewhat typical of the ones I normally have with her (where I complain and she makes fun of me), so I thought it would share.

me: "I really cannot believe I have so much random crap. How do I have so much random crap?"

my mom: "So? You're so much crap. Do I complain about you?"

or

me: "I just want to get rid of all this junk. Can't I just throw it all away?"

my mom: "So why don't you just throw it all away?"

me: "Because then someday when my kids are trying to decide whether or not they go to college and ask to see my stuff from college I'll have to tell them I threw it all away, and then they'll think I hated college because I didn't keep anything from then, and then they won't want to go to college."

my mom: "But you never asked me that"

me: "But that's because my kids will be little jerks"

my mom: "But aren't you a little jerk?"

Explains a lot about me, right? So yeah. Without further ado, I present yet another shameful secret.

*Shameful secret # 6: In the eighties, my Crazy Uncle (capitalized because that is his official nickname) decided to help out a friend who needed to put an ad for t-shirts together. Instead of getting actual models, they decided that it would be easier/cheaper to just use me and a friend's kids in the ad. The result...

An oh so lovely picture of me as a typical Asian child complete with heavy bangs and empty eyes. Fun. n'est-ce pas? I guess it's not so bad, and I guess this picture was the best in terms of layout, but the other pictures were so much cooler.

Like, the pictures where we were all just jumping around, or grinning really awkwardly, or whacking each other with a wooden sword (ouch, by the way, and that little boy - the one to the far left who's crouching down - totally hogged that sword), or, best of all, the picture where I am very openly venting my frustration by screaming and violently gesturing at the aforementioned little boy. Either that, or I was blowing him a kiss. It's kind of hard to tell from the somewhat dark photocopy of the prints I found with the magazine. Anyway, it would be much cooler if it was the former.

Anyway, there you go, Gar's life, slowly being sifted through and sorted out. It would be therapeutic if it didn't remind me of my oddities. Maybe I should go vent my frustrations on another little kid. That might be nice. The little jerk.