I Still Suck At Going Through Stuff

I had the pleasure of listening to Katy Perry's latest album: Teenage Dream. And as much as I hate to say it, I love the album. All the songs are just so catchy. Naturally, as I am apt to do, I have been listening to "Teenage Dream" over and over again. In fact, I think I may have listened to the song way too many times because my baby daughter (Briana) seems to crack a smile every time the chorus comes on now.

(The video below is "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry.)


Needless to say, I'm hooked on the album which is not surprising. And interestingly enough, while I was listening to the song on the continuous loop on Friday, I decided to go through box number 5 of junk that my mother has brought over while she cleans out her attic. It's interesting because the box of junk contained items I had kept from high school. And yes, I still suck at going through stuff.

On a side note, my mother cracks me up. Among the items that my mother brought over while she was cleaning out her attic was my old high school graduation gown. Knowing that I would most likely discard the garment (because what am I going to do with an old red graduation gown?), my mother asked to use it.

And no, my mother is not graduating from anything. My mother, who likes to sew, wants to create a bag, much like the ones used for grocery shopping, out of the graduation gown. I think she just wanted to see if she could create one. Personally, I thought that was a brilliant idea. And what cracked me up even more was that she asked to use my old high school varsity letter so that she could sew that onto the bag. Of course, I obliged. I am actually quite curious now to see if my mother can pull off this idea of hers.

Anyway, going through the box of old high school junk was a nice trip down memory lane. There were so many things that I had forgotten about. Heck, I even had old copies of our high school newspaper known as the North Star. Much like Jason Priestley's character from Beverly Hills 90210, I too used to write for the school newspaper. In fact, the school newspaper is where I first met the person whom I would eventually refer to as the Scourge of Evil.

Besides old copies of the school newspapers, I had some other random things like the student handbook, the school lunch menu, report cards, certificates, SAT and PSAT results, book covers, and of course some class notes which contained a lot of doodles. Apparently I doodled a lot in high school... especially in class.

As well, there were actually quite a lot of foreign language assignments in the box. If I knew French, which is an interesting statement since I was in the Foreign Language Honor Society, I probably could decipher those assignments.

This particular box also contained a lot of computer programming assignments, which I thought was interesting because the assignments were printed on those old dot matrix printers where there were perforations at the edges of the printed paper. I got a chuckle from seeing those simple programs, seeing as how it apparently laid the foundation to what I currently do today for a profession.

There were even some things in the box that I totally forgot that I did, like partake in the judging of Central Middle School's Science Fair. That was random. Although the most random of things may have been a mysterious locker number (4479) with the combination written on one of my book covers.

In fact, I thought the locker number was so random that I had to contact my friend (Aimee) about it to see if she remembered what it was for. Funny thing is... Aimee's memory is just about as bad as mine is these days. It turns out that the high school locker number belonged to my friend (Cass). And in case anyone is curious as to the combination, it was 15-5-44 at the time. As to how I came to acquire the locker combination, I have no idea.

And of course, the best part about the contents of this particular box were the notes that my friends and I used to pass to each other. I wonder if kids these days still fold their notes into tiny triangles. Truth be told, I'm not sure I could fold a note now into one of these triangles.

The notes cracked me up. The one note that actually had me chuckling the most of course was one that was not even written to me. The note was from Karen to my BFF (Kerry). Back in the day, Karen and Kerry were pretty inseparable. In the note, Karen was telling Kerry how cute I looked. And in typical high school fashion, Karen told Kerry not to tell anyone. Yet somehow, I ended up with the note. Classic.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the notes again. It made me happy to know that I had such great friends growing up.