Maybe you were one of the people who appeared in one of my multiple Facebook photo albums over the weekend– I'm in the process of creating a digital archive of all my old photos, some of which are literally so old, they are stuck together, still in those old packages from the drug store. I'm also working on transferring all the stuff that we currently have in storage from the beat-down cardboard boxes like the one above into plastic bins that will hopefully withstand the test of time. These boxes and photos are so old that when I went to Staples to get some Sharpies and labels to further organize them, the cashier said "big project?" and I was all "yeah, I'm archiving photos," and she said "Oh, yeah– I always forget to ask for the CD too," and I was like "um….no. This is BEFORE the cd, when photos came with TwinPix from Thrifty, and had little strips of negatives in them that you had to hold up to the light to see which ones they were." Then she stared at me blankly for awhile, and I decided that she was probably born in 1990 and had no real concept of what I meant.
But, here's the sad (and not so funny) part– I'm really just doing this archive / repacking project to distract myself, because every year I have to go to that storage unit and clean out a little more of my mom's old stuff, because if I try to do it all at once, the "emotional quicksand" effect takes over, and I dissolve into a puddle of tears and nostalgia, sitting in the storage unit going "Life's so unfair!", and I think we'll all agree, no one wants that. This is the result of being an only child and having your mother die suddenly when she's 59 – all of the stuff in your childhood home (which you have to empty out and sell), all the teddy bears and baby blankets and adorable Curious George books that your mom saved– all of them go into boxes, where they end up living in a lonely and dusty storage unit in West L.A. Sad, right? Too sad. So sad that I have to deal with it a little at a time, while combining it with a "let's archive photos" project, so that when I open up a box and it's full of sympathy cards from when my mom was sick, I don't burst into tears. I know I have to clean everything out eventually– every year I just do as much as I can, hopefully with the combination of something else that actually makes me laugh. This year, that thing was photos on Facebook. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg of this issue, but since I'm supposed to be sticking to things that will make you laugh, let me just say that I think there should be a rule that you should have to throw some stuff away as you get older every year and leave it at that. Unfortunately (or fortunately), all of Stephan's old photos from childhood were innocently sitting in a box next to mine, and so we pulled them all out and had a scanning party. This essentially means that because I needed to distract myself, some people (ok, alot of people) who went to grade school, junior high, high school, college, and after college with Stephan ALSO got their photos on Facebook. I'm sure you can see how fun this was for us.
Bottom line– if you're one of the 30 or so people who ended up getting tagged and are now bracing yourselves for what I might pull out of the box next, you can unclench, because it's going to probably be another year before I go back there, AND you can feel good because by being cool about the photos, you were actually giving me moral support! On the bright side, I did manage to throw away about three Hefty bags worth of old photos of people I don't even know anymore, and get rid of three or four of those beat-down looking boxes. By the way, I have a new rule– it's probably ok to throw away photos of people who are no longer together (I'm talking about gay couples, straight couples, married couples who are now not) and of people's babies that they send you in Christmas cards, right? I mean, for the first category, even the people in the old relationships have thrown away all those photos, so why am I keeping them? And for the second, those people for sure have digital images of their babies that they can send me if I want to see them, right? I'm just checking to make sure that I'm not some heartless, throwing away photos person if there's some rule that says I should be keeping these.
If someone has an official "Rules of Storage" brochure or manual, I really would like to see it. Maybe it would make my annual storage unit trip that much easier.