I Still Suck At Going Through Crap

Three boxes down. I'm not sure how many more to go.

Recently, my mother has been cleaning out her attic. In the process, she has been unloading boxes of my personal belongings with each visit to my house. Normally, that's not a bad thing, but she does visit quite frequently. As a result, the designated dumping ground known as my garage has accumulated a lot of the boxes that were previously sitting in the attic of my parents' house. Apparently, my brother and I kept a lot of things in the attic.

I have managed to go through some of the crap. Unfortunately, I still suck at going through crap as evident by the number of boxes still sitting in my garage. But, I have managed to go through two boxes already. One box contained my class notes from high school. The other box contained my notes from college.

I still don't know what I was thinking by keeping all of these notes. Well, I do know what I was thinking. I was thinking that these notes would be beneficial later on in life when I had to look back to reference something. Oh how mistaken I was.

Anyway, the third box that I just went through also contained notes from college. The difference between this box and the previous college box is simply the college. The third box contained college notes from the first university I attended after high school: Northeastern University.

I subsequently transferred from that college and graduated elsewhere, but for a good portion of my life I did attend Northeastern. I was actually an electrical engineering major while at Northeastern. The coursework does appear quite the opposite of what I actually ended up graduating with: majors in Psychology and Sociology with minors in Philosophy and Anthropology.

As I was sorting through the papers within the box, I remembered my time at Northeastern. Truth be told, I never felt like I had belonged at Northeastern. Perhaps it was because it was a new start in life after high school. Things were obviously different. The school was large. The people were different. Faces were not familiar.

Nothing probably exemplified my feelings more than my Calculus class during the first semester of college. When I started Northeastern, I was already taking Calculus 3 which was a result of passing the advanced placement exam in high school. I was definitely the only freshman in the class which consisted of all upperclassmen. Subject-wise, I thought it was a great class, but socially it was less desirable.

Even the familiarity of occasionally commuting with my friend (Anna) did not change my feelings of not fitting in. For anyone curious, Anna ended up transferring elsewhere as well, although her reasons were due to the fact that she actually moved out of the state.

I don't know. Perhaps I gave up too quickly on Northeastern and didn't give the school a fair chance. Sure, I was there for over two years. Despite my efforts to get involved with the school, through intramural activities like flag football, things just never clicked. Of course, my girlfriend at the time whom I lovingly refer as the scourge of evil may also have played a role in my feelings toward the school as well. Who knows?

Regardless, it was interesting to see all of the items I had collected in this box. Contained within the box were things like printouts of computer source code that I had created when I was programming. Back then, the main programming language was Turbo Pascal. Programming languages have come a long way since then.

There were CAD designs and drawings I created in the box. There were physics papers. There were chemistry papers. There were Financial Aid papers. I got a kick out of the pamphlet saying how Northeastern was financially achievable. Obviously, the pamphlet wasn't geared toward poor families like mine. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure my parents would have worked themselves to death in order to pay for my college education if I had asked them. As typical Asian parents, my parents value education. I just never felt right in asking them for financial help, especially knowing our meager financial situation.

Regardless, there were also English and sociology papers in the box. One paper sounded so vaguely familiar that I couldn't even remember who I was with or where I was when I wrote the paper. The paper was about my evening with a Swedish person. Now as interesting as that sounds (because even I was envisioning a nice evening with a hot tall blond Swedish woman when I began reading the paper), the paper was about a dinner and interview with some guy. Apparently, one of my friends and I went to have dinner with this Swedish person who served us sil (also known more commonly as pickled herring) and Swedish pancakes.

The only reason why I say the paper was vaguely familiar was because lingonberry was mentioned. For anyone curious, lingonberry jam was used on the pancakes. I remember lingonberry tasting pretty good at the time. And since I don't normally consume lingonberry on a daily basis, I remembered having some while I was attending Northeastern for this interview. Hence, the vague memory.

Speaking of papers, I was surprised to see in the box the paper I wrote for my application to the college that I eventually transferred to and graduated from. That paper was about none other than Karen. I suppose it's poetic that I wrote my college entrance paper about my future wife. I guess the paper was decent because I got accepted.

The box definitely brought back memories. Looking through all the stuff, I realized that my days at Northeastern were probably numbered. As the semesters went on, I became unhappy with my classes. My grades definitely started to slide as I progressed through the box of papers. I think it was evident that I was not happy anymore.

In fact, I was so unhappy that I took the infamous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator report (which was also in the box) through the school's career center. The report indicated that I was INFP at the time. For anyone curious, that meant that I was more skewed toward the choices of Introversion, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving.

And if you are really curious, being an actor as well as being a scientist are popular occupations for INFPs. If I had just stuck to the writing of my fifth grade autobiography, I would have been all set. Darn it!

In addition to my growing unhappiness, my finances were no longer enough to cover the cost of tuition anymore. As a result, I transferred to another university. Perhaps that is how I ended up majoring in Psychology and Sociology and minoring in Anthropology and Philosophy. The subjects were more in line with my INFP personality type. Perhaps that was the change I needed at the time.

Anyway, it definitely was interesting to sort through the box. Unfortunately, my shred pile has increased exponentially.