Oh, me. The contents from the back of my old bedroom closet are scary. I'd excavated some specimens of early fannishness last time (attempts to translate parts of The Dark Is Rising into Spanish, a scene from Florida I compared to the Lost Land, etc.), as well as dried-up corsages and other horrors, but that was merely a start. There are heaps of letters and postcards from people I haven't heard from since 1988, old lab reports (with one teacher commenting that "oodles" was not an appropriate term of measurement), cryptograms across the back of b/w photographs, a form rejection from Poetry (10/14/87), and many other things that don't pass the "is this worth hauling to my own basement?" test. (Although I'm keeping the lab reports for the moment -- I might cannibalize the prose for a high-school-aged character, and I can use the actual pages as backgrounds for a series of science-themed notecards...)

*riffs through some poems and essays...*

Oh, my God, was I pretentious. And self-centered. And fervent. Here's the start of an op-ed I wrote for my high school paper:

Most of my enemies and some of my friends agree that I'm somewhat mentally unbalanced. In their opinion, no normal individual would read British mystery novels on a Friday night....

[...which eventually meanders into an anti-censorship polemic, having to do with a teacher at another school who'd been fired for showing her students Pink Floyd's The Wall].

*looks at remaining heap of old columns*
*looks at insufficient supply of alcohol*
*dumps papers into archive-tub without rereading*

That said, the kid wasn't totally gormless. I saw this quote inside the cover of one of my journals...

"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."

...and it turns out I used to it to start my response to "write a brief essay on a significant intellectual or cultural experience you have had," which was one of the essay options on the University of Chicago's application. I wasn't cool enough to attempt the one about which kitchen utensil I most identified with, so I looked back at a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to do right by Pachelbel:

Canon, arr. Lin was never performed -- the student concert fell apart from lack of interest, and my classmates didn't like it. I admit that it hurt -- I tossed the score in the closet and tried to forget about all the time I had "wasted" (my feeling at the time).

On the other hand, I can't think of any experience which has taught me so much. I have a much greater appreciation for composers now, even the ones that make me want to drop-kick the radio. ... In a way, the self-confidence I lost right after closing the door on my arrangement has come back -- I know my skill in and enjoyment of music has improved, and it doesn't all come from practice. "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want," but sometimes it's just as well, or even better.

Plus ça change... And my brother has just yelled from the other room, "What the hell is THIS?", so it's time to move on.