I’m moving. Me and my family are uprooting ourselves from where we’ve been for a long while and heading to what we hope will be greener pastures and even greater successes. We’ve spent a great deal of time working through two graduate degrees. There is only one thing left for me to do: write a dissertation. That’s no small task, but it is one that we can do away from professors and nearer to family. We’re doing exactly that. As we started going through the boxes we had hiding in closets, the garage, and other not often touched places, I was startled to find some of the things I’d been carrying around all of these years.
For one thing, we’re in Texas now. I did my undergraduate work in Minnesota. Guess what I brought to Texas? Did you guess yet? I brought a huge plastic tote full of work in did in undergrad: notebooks, notes, handouts, syllabi, and other paper products from those four snowy years. It’s a wonder they didn’t melt down here in Texas. Why, I began to wonder, did I bring this down here?
Now, if you’ve read this blog at all you know that I’m both a slight pack-rat as well as a generally disorganized (but organized in his own way) sort of guy. These two things, in combination, create a situation where I bring notebook upon notebook 1000+ miles southward to sit in a crate and gather dust while I work through two more degrees. Should I pack this up again, I wondered? I decided to do something unthinkable, unimaginable, unbelievable and non-returnable: I decided to open it up and have a look at what was inside. What would I find? Would I relive happy memories, find it useful, or want to flog myself for dragging it so far and then set fire to its contents? Time will tell.