A recent adventure: Sorting through the Hoard.

This blog is dedicated to Tracy Zhu, who unwisely desired me to resume writing these nonsensical bits of gibberish. To compensate for having left her so long undernourished, I offer a more than usually hearty helping of Stephanie’s Life, as told by she who lives it, which is to say, Stephanie herself.

As the summer draws to a close, I am packing to head back to Mount Holyoke for one more year of college. After that, who knows? Upon graduation, I may be going directly to a job, preparing to go to grad or law school, or (as my parents dread) coming home to live with them. But faced with the prospect of never living with Mom and Pop ever again, I am doing my best to clean out my room and take everything essential with me. This, of course, requires going through every single thing I own and deciding if it’s worth keeping, donating, junking, or re-gifting.

In the sorting process, I’ve uncovered many a lost treasure I’d completely forgotten. For example, I found my collection of worn out slippers that have been accumulating since I was fifteen. Though they were no longer of use, I could never quite bear to banish them to the trash because I’d formed too strong an emotional bond with each pair of filthy, fuzzy, holey, and, in the case of one pair, moldy fluffballs. I found a particularly impressive button collection, acquired mainly due to a certain friend who long believed that the addition of a button gave any ordinary birthday gift that little something extra.

But my favorite discoveries were made when going through my files. There I found unequivocal proof that a sixteen year old girl has no idea which documents are worth storing for posterity and which deserve the wastebin. I found an excess of AP prompts carefully organized into categories such as “Old Stuff,” “Kinda Feminist,” and “Prompts I don’t like.” Trying to remember why I would have set these aside, I finally recalled my younger self’s imagined vision of college life, in which I incorporated extracts from these prompts in future papers. I still haven’t quite worked out how I planned to cite any quotes used from these in the bibliography. “Author Unknown. Prompt One. AP English Lang: College Board, 2002.” Somehow I doubt many professors would accept such a source…

I was equally unrealistic in deciding which of my financial documents should be kept. Wary of the TaxMan, I somewhat overzealously determined upon receipt of my first paycheck that I would keep every single paycheck summary I ever earned for the rest of eternity. Four years worth of paychecks (and that’s not a few, since I’ve continually worked since I was sixteen and often held multiple jobs at once) bulged out of a large plastic file box, threatening to split the container-store purchase that once promised to “clear up the clutter and set me free!” A multi-million dollar corporation with a professional accounting department could not have kept better track of its documents than I did of my $50.00 paycheck stubs. After all, you never know when an auditor might show up on your doorstep demanding proof of the $27.84 you made in November of 2003.

But enough of the rambling and inadequate justifications of a compulsive packrat; I’m off to shred the last three years of saved credit card applications and bank statements of long-closed accounts.