The buildup to this post (part 1, if you will) can be read here. And lest you think I’m sending you to something unimportant: the buildup is all. In fact, the buildup is so important that I really suggest you read it first. Have you ever exerted a great amount of effort moving something or keeping something that you never looked at or used? Yeah? The buildup is important. At any rate, last time we left off I was opening a box from my college years in Minnesota (at least that is what I thought at the time). When I opened the box I found, right at the top, that I’d stuffed it with study materials from my qualifying exams. Keeping those would be a no-brainer. “I really opened this box earlier?” I couldn’t remember doing that. At any rate, I kept digging. I found a play I wrote five years ago (and subsequently rewrote as a graduate student), I found accounting notes (to the trash bin!), and I also found something wonderful: theatre history notes from Minnesota.
Now, you may be wondering, why would theatre history notes be important? Well, it turns out that history doesn’t change all that much, at least not much in the generally accepted facts. (Special note: This does not mean that history isn’t interesting or worthy of study: we learn new things about the past all of the time and it is always valuable to us in the present.) At any rate, I had a wonderful professor in Minnesota who told the class that these notes would be valuable for graduate school if any of us ended up going. Well, I did go to graduate school. Guess what? I did use them. Remember when I didn’t remember opening the box earlier? I had opened the box — specifically for these notes — to prepare myself for my qualifying exams. They were helpful! Even after all of that time and all of those miles those notes helped me get through my testing. Bottom line: If you truly believe the notes are important (and have a valid reason for thinking so) it’s worth keeping them around. (Though you might save your back by scanning them and saving them to a hard drive). Happy pack-ratting!