Cleaning Out My Closet

I spent the last week cleaning out the storage room and my closet in my small, dinky family apartment. One thing that struck me was how much stuff I actually still had from my childhood. Whoever's been to my home, or seen pictures of it, it really is quite tiny. Yet when I started cleaning out my stuff, throwing old junk out, and figuring out what to do with things I wanted to keep, boxes and boxes just kept appearing. A 1 day job ended up taking me 4 days, and causing me a lot of back pain. Great~ Who knew a box stuffed with paper could be THAT heavy?!

It was definitely amazing seeing projects I had worked on in elementary school, and essays that I wrote in highschool, and so on and so forth. One thing I noticed was that I was a pretty hyper kid, in that I used A LOT of exclamation marks in the stories that I wrote. Haha. A bit over-intense in my writing. But I do remember being a pretty quiet guy in school - I guess I put all my energy into my writing. Another thing I realized was that I was a pretty lucky kid - I found at least four boxes of Legos and Transformer toys - wow. I remember being a Lego and Transformers-obsessed kid when I was younger, but I had no idea just how much I had. After working with children for the last five years and chatting with their parents, I think I have a better idea of just how much I had. I guess I have to think twice next time I say my family's from a lower income bracket than most Canadians. Haha. Jokes aside, we may have had barely enough money to get by at times, but my parents didn't hesitate in showing their love. That's definitely something I'm thankful for~

A lot of people say I'm a sentimental guy - at least they used to. Now people usually say I'm strange or crazy or something weird like that. Usually these comments come from people my own age... At the same time, I get a lot crazy comments from my kids. Boy..children can be mean sometimes, even if they're just making jokes just to be "funny", (and this is about 110% of the time~haha). But, looking at the boxes of things I kept since I was a first grader, I think my sentimental side's having a resurgence.

It took me from Tuesday morning to Thursday night to finish the job, but all my things are "neatly" packed into no less than 10 boxes, and stuffed into the back of my closet. The amount of "trash" I threw out to be able to fit everything into 10 boxes is undecipherable. At one point, the entire garbage room was full of my things - old university notes, ruined shoes, a humungous fido cellphone (that's almost the same size as the cordless phone my family now uses), and old ruined clothes. Even after that, 10 boxes remained. Pretty much, everything I have from my life from when I was a first-grader to now are packed into those boxes. Funny how that works.

Speaking to fellow JETs, it seems that a lot of people want to pack their entire lives and take it with them to Japan. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to take a suitcase of clothes, and some bare essentials, and pick up whatever I need after I get to Japan. It was great reminiscing for the past week about the last fifteen or so years of my life. Now it's time to move on, and get ready for a new life in Japan.